Content marketing is amazingly successful over all these years and is giving excellent digital marketing outcomes. As its name suggests, content marketing is all about creating, distributing and promoting content in the form of articles, videos, infographics and much more.
MarketingProfs reports that the most successful B2B marketers dedicate at least 39% of their marketing budgets to content.
Continuous creation and promotion of high quality content is essential for successful content marketing. But you cannot just start with content marketing all of a sudden.
In a recent survey conducted by Content Marketing Institute, only 65% businesses have a documented content strategy. In the same survey, a similar number of respondents reported that content marketing was effective for their business. This shows a well thought, clearly defined strategy makes content marketing easier and successful.
Here are the top 3 things that you must consider while creating your content strategy:
1) Marketing Persona
The first thing to consider while creating the content strategy is knowing the marketing persona. They help you create most relevant and useful to your audience. Unless you don’t know who your readers, your customers are; you will not be able to broadcast information they are looking for. Your content will have no direction.
Research your marketing personas by interviewing your existing customers and prospects, social media research, taking short surveys etc.
A basic marketing persona template may include information like their name, job title, Demographics, pain points, where they look for information online, their values, fears or objections, how do they select a product or service etc.
Once you list the properties of the marketing persona, your content creation job will become much easier. Also the content you create will be relevant exactly to what your audience is looking for.
2) Content Mission
Think about the mission of content marketing. The content mission statement describes 3 main things:
1) Who are you creating the content for?
2) What content you will create for them?
3) What value will provide to them?
For Example, the content mission statement of The Hartford’s BIZ AHEAD is:
“Visit Biz Ahead, powered by The Hartford, for the latest insights and advice to help you manage and grow your small business more effectively.”
Here’s the breakdown of what it says:
1) For whom? - Small business owners
2) What? - Small business insights and advice
3) Value delivered? - Manage and grow business more effectively
Sticking to your mission statement helps you focus your content marketing efforts. Moreover, you can always verify if your content idea fits within the mission statement. This prevents wasting your efforts on content that doesn’t serve the purpose.
3) Define Goals & Metrics
Companies that are sophisticated in their use of data grow faster. To measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy, it is important to define goals and their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Content marketing can have various goals such as -
1) Driving traffic to the website
2) Generating marketing qualified leads
3) Generating sales qualified leads
4) Onboarding clients
5) Building brand
6) Customer retention
Your content strategy should define 2-3 goals and the KPIs (metrics) against which these goals will be measured. The metrics can be -
1) Number of unique visitors
2) Number of email subscribers
3) Social media likes and shares
4) Number of sign-ups / quote requests
Content Strategy Conclusion
Having a well defined content strategy is critical for marketing your business online. Content strategy defines marketing personas, content mission statement and content goals and metrics.
I hope you enjoyed this article about content strategy being a vital part of your business content marketing campaigns.
Interested in more articles about content marketing strategy?
Read My Blog Posts:
- How To Create Compelling Content That Crushes It
- 3 Benefits Of Content Marketing For Startups
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