How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is a strategy for creating and sharing content that engages your company’s target audience. An effective and consistent content marketing strategy can help your business become an industry thought leader, create brand loyalty, reach more customers, and educate buyers.

The best content marketing allows businesses to bypass intermediaries and publish content directly. For example, a plant store might use video marketing, releasing videos directly to social media about how to care for plants—in turn attracting potential customers to the business and leading to more plant sales. Though it can be less expensive than other marketing methods, content marketing may take more time to show positive results as you build content and increase your audience.

Companies from small businesses to large e-commerce brands can benefit from great content marketing. Consider these examples of content marketing you can use in your campaign:

1. 1. Infographics: This form of visual content is an effective way to communicate instructions or a complex topic in a clear, comprehensible format. Infographics typically consist of vibrant graphic imagery mixed with short informative statements to tell a story or explain information.
2. 2. Social media: Consumers may discover or research a product on social media before deciding to make a purchase. Social media provides a platform for you to develop a personal brand and to share video content, text, and photos with potential customers. You can also build a social listening strategy—a plan to monitor social media engagement—to effectively engage with your target audience. You can also partner with social media influencers to reach a wider audience.
3. 3. Blogging: Blogging is an inbound marketing tool used to publish information about products, company news, and topics relevant to your brand. Use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to drive traffic to your blog, and from there, use your blog to generate subscribers to an email list.
4. 4. Podcasts: Use audio content marketing to develop episodic content that engages listeners. Podcasts can help you build a strong, intimate relationship with your target audience.
5. 5. Webinars: This interactive form of content marketing involves hosting virtual seminars. Informational videos provide an opportunity for comprehensive discussions about products or trends in your company's industry.
6. 6. Case studies: Case studies can showcase your product’s value through data. Using concrete metrics and user success stories in content marketing provides facts to potential customers.
7. 7. E-books: A marketing e-book is an educational document designed to be read on a digital device. E-books are similar to marketing white papers, which are in-depth educational guides. E-books are more formal than white papers and are mostly composed of text and graphics.

Follow this step-by-step guide for content marketers to develop a successful campaign.

1. 1. Solidify your objectives. Before launching a new content marketing strategy, outline your goals for the campaign. Defining objectives will help you identify the steps needed to achieve them. Boosting consumer engagement, increasing brand awareness, educating users, or increasing your bottom line are examples of campaign objectives.
2. 2. Set key performance indicators. A KPI is an indicator that measures the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy and can be used to track your objectives.
3. 3. Choose types of content. The content for your marketing strategy should be tailored specifically to your target audience and include a call to action (CTA) that appeals uniquely to them. Consider your ideal customers’ demographic information and how they consume media to identify the best type of content to create.
4. 4. Decide where to distribute your content. Next you must choose the content channels for your marketing strategy. If social media is your selected content type, choose which social media platforms you will use to share the content.
5. 5. Produce and share your content. A good content-creation team is essential to producing high-quality content, so be sure to assemble the best writers, editors, and graphic artists for the campaign. Work with your content marketing team to create an organized content release calendar to schedule the roll out of the content marketing strategy.
6. 6. Supplement content with paid advertisements. Incorporating PPC (pay-per-click) marketing into your content marketing campaign can drive traffic to your website through paid ads on social media networks, website landing pages, and search engines.
7. 7. Evaluate. Once your content is out into the world, use the KPIs you set to see if your marketing tactics are achieving your objectives. Whether or not you meet your goals, analyze this data and use it to improve each piece of content you produce going forward.

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