Content marketing strategy is a business master plan that focuses on creating and sharing media such as blogs, articles, e-books, videos, and podcasts to attract, educate, and grow a target audience.
These days, when people have questions, they most often turn to Google. Because Google is constantly refining its search algorithm, the search results will display the content deemed most relevant to a search inquiry. This content may be in the form of a business web page, a blog post, e-book, video, etc. Put simply, content marketing is a strategy used to produce content relevant to popular Google searches.
Think of it this way: when you’re looking for information online, you might read a blog post, watch a how-to video, or listen to a podcast. That’s content marketing in action! It’s about giving people something they find useful or interesting, which helps them get to know your brand better.
In short, content marketing is all about sharing great content to engage and connect with people, making them more likely to become loyal customers. It’s a long-term strategy that focuses on creating a meaningful relationship rather than just making a quick sale.
What is a content marketing strategy?
Let’s define content marketing strategy as the process of developing and launching a competitive content marketing plan. This plan is the roadmap for all the original content your business plans to create. That content can include written materials, as well as visual ones.
To separate the two, think of your content marketing plan as the “what,” or the goals you have for your content , and your content marketing strategy as the “how.” Your content marketing strategy answers the question of how your content marketing plan will increase brand awareness or improve lead generation, for example.
There are some steps to make a Content marketing strategy
Set Your Content Marketing Goals
Content Marketing strategy Goals means what you want to achieve with your content . like, you need to increase the attention of your brand, create more leads, or increase sales. A clear goal helps to focus on content creation and promotion. It’s important to make your goal specific and measurable, like saying, “I want to increase website traffic by 30% in the next six months.” This way, you know exactly what you’re aiming for and can track your progress. By aligning your content goals with your overall business objectives, you ensure that your efforts contribute to the success of your company.
Research and Understand Your Audience
The main research that all marketers use before even thinking about the campaign is audience research. Audience research is designed to establish the size, composition, and characteristics of a group of individuals who are, or could be, potential customers. It’s important to note that this research is about the people and individuals who make up your target audience.
Goal
The goal of all audience research is to find consumer insights that can help you deliver on your campaign or business objectives. Because the goal of a digital marketing strategy is to influence the buyer’s journey, marketers need to connect with the audience by knowing what they think, how they behave, and how they live their lives. You should know your audience as well as you know your best friend!
Benefits
One of the key benefits to conducting audience research is the ability to identify obstacles. For example, are other brands trying to communicate with your audience but not experiencing much success? Why? By being aware of such obstacles you can then develop appropriate, personalized content that is more relevant to your audience. in this , you want to find ways to stay ahead of your customers and discover solutions that anticipate future needs they may have. Audience research allows you to understand your customers, and ultimately makes you more effective in delivering your digital marketing strategy by catering to their needs.
To focus efforts, it is common practice to create a buyer persona. This is a description of your ideal customer in terms of motivations, demographics, and channels used to access the internet. Buyer personas help digital marketers choose the channels and messaging that will resonate with their ideal customer and efficiently deliver on objectives.
Execute Competitor Research
It’s impossible to put together a comprehensive content marketing strategy without understanding a client’s competitors.
Our competitor research starts by identifying the most relevant competitors (typically three) in our client’s niche and compiling a list of the top keywords they rank for. We use tools like SEMRUSH refers for this:
This step helps us both determine the useful keywords our client already ranks for and discover new, relevant keywords that we think they should rank for.
When examining competitor content, we try to determine:
High-quality keywords they currently ranking for
Which of their pages are getting the most organic traffic
Which topics they’re covering
The type of pages they’re ranking with
The different types of content they produce
Once we have this information, we have a clearer picture of what type of content we have to create to compete with competitors for relevant keywords.
It also provides valuable information about what kinds of content we need to produce to capitalize on new or under-explored keywords that’ll take your marketing plan to 11.
Create your content plan
At this point, you have a strong base on which to start planning your actual content. Reflect on the work you have done so far to decide the content topics you’d like to address across your various content types. Here, consider topics at the intersection of your unique expertise and your target audience’s interests, values, or needs. You may also brainstorm ways you can further conversations around content areas that have historically performed well for you or that perform well for your direct business competitors.
Some people find it helpful to organize their content plan with a content calendar or an editorial calendar.
Identify what’s working for competitors
When crafting your strategy, there’s no reason to go in blind. You can see what your competitors have done successfully and any holes in their strategy you can capitalize on.
When you’re analyzing your competitors, there are a handful of questions you’ll want to keep in mind:
How much traffic are they getting?
sources provide the most traffic?
What keywords are they ranking for?
it is websites are linking to them?
How well is their content performing?
Are there any gaps in their content strategy?
The best tool for this is SEMRUSH. With SEMRUSH, all you have to do is input your competitor’s URL, and you’ll get information like:
Competitor analysis
The organic keywords that send the most traffic
The total number of keywords they rank for
The pages that send the most traffic
The top organic search competitors
Optimize your content for the web
Even if you have incredibly well-written content, it will be hard to rank if it’s not optimized correctly.
ON PAGE SEO is usually overshadowed by OFF PAGE SEO factors. However, by getting on-page right, you’re laying a solid foundation to make your other SEO efforts much easier.
Here are a few key elements of proper content optimization:
- Make your URLs short and readable; include your target keyword if possible
- Optimize your page titles with your target keyword and a compelling headline
- Include your target keyword within the first 100 words of the body content
- Add relevant and related keywords to your post
- Create content that effectively answers your target keyword (usually over 2000 words)
- Link out to authoritative resources that enhance your content
- Interlink your content to other valuable articles you’ve written
A proper SEO blog writing, but the tips above will help your content marketing strategy rank higher and start moving in the right direction.
Measure the effectiveness of your content strategy
The only way to create a content marketing strategy that brings your business results is to analyze how your content is performing. This will help you determine what content/topics connect with your audience and what’s helping you reach your goals.
Here are a few content KPIs to measure:
- User engagement – This refers to how your visitors interact with your content via shares, comments, and mentions from other websites
- User behavior – This includes the number of unique visitors, bounce rate, page views, time on site, etc.
- Organic search traffic – You’re looking for increased organic traffic, the number of keywords you rank for, and more backlinks.
- Conversion rate – This could be more leads, better conversion rates, more email purchased, or more products purchased.
Remember that content marketing is long-term and requires patience to see results. These are some steps for content marketing strategy