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How to Develop an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing refers to the strategic creation and use of content to tell your story in a consistent and cohesive matter. It encompasses all of the content your business or organization develops to bring awareness to your company, including website content, blogs, social media, email newsletters, marketing collateral, public relations and more. Generally speaking, content marketing is informational not promotional, and it can be highly effective when used properly.

Content Marketing Tips

Now that you understand content marketing, you need to develop an effective strategy. To get started, follow these tips.

  1. Define your goals. What does your organization want to accomplish with its content marketing strategy? Do you want to generate leads? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want to boost website traffic? Do you want to develop content to help your sales teams? To develop an effective strategy, you must first determine your goal.
  2. Determine your audience and the best way to reach them. By setting your goals, you should also be able to determine your audience. As such, by knowing your audience, you should know what methods of communication will be most effective in reaching them. For instance, if your audience is C-level executives, you will want to focus your social strategy on LinkedIn whereas is your audience is women aged 35-62, your social strategy should highlight Facebook. No matter what, your digital footprint will be important because there are an estimated 4 billion people using the internet on a daily basis and 75% of those people search out information from the internet every day. That is a large audience, but also a highly competitive environment, making your content strategy that much more important. Therefore, your website content and blogs will need to be search engine optimized to ensure your organization shows up in search results.
  3. Audit your existing content and research keywords. As noted above, you want to show up in search results, but first, you need to ensure your content matches the search terms that you want to rank for. Additionally, your existing content is part of your content marketing strategy whether you want it to be or not, because it is what people will find when they search your company. Therefore, you need to conduct an audit. Log what content you have, whether it is working for your established goals, how it can be improved if it is not helping accomplish your goals and what gaps there are in the existing content that you will need to fill with new content. Start with your website content because it is currently customer-facing. All other content can be audited and updated as you have time. Make sure you research the keywords that people are using to search for your type of organization and develop content around those keywords.
  4. Plan your process. This step is huge. It outlines the type of content you will utilize, who will produce the content and the overall message your organization will put out. There will need to be a plan for creation, approval and implementation as well as a schedule for how often and when you will publish new content.
  5. Stick to the plan and publish content on a consistent basis. Now that you have developed the strategy, know your audience and your goals, have outlined the type of content you want to produce and what you already have, then you need to work on publishing consistently and with a cohesive message to intrigue your audience. Without consistency or strategy, you simply have content – not content marketing.

Are You Ready to Implement Content Marketing for Your Company?

With your new knowledge of content marketing, it is time to buckle down and develop your plan. Most companies understand the importance of content marketing, yet according to Statistsa, 60% of companies find it difficult to produce content consistently. And without content, you cannot effectively institute a content marketing strategy. Therefore, you must have a realistic approach to your content marketing. Utilize your existing content and develop new content before you launch your content marketing plan. Consider using a third-party firm to help develop your strategy and your content if you need help. At The Impact Group, we are ready to help you tell your story! Contact us today.