Learn Content Marketing Strategy From Scratch

Content marketing, in simple terms, is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. More or less any brand can increase awareness here or there, but the ones that stand the test of time have a specific content marketing strategy or plan in place to guide smarter decision-making.

Content strategy boils down to figuring out what kind of content will attract the target audience and inspire them to take actions that will prove beneficial to the business. Doing that successfully requires co-ordinating various moving parts. To put things in perspective, the business needs to set goals, research the target audience, and map out how buyers will interact with the content and ultimately drive profitable actions.

As per MarketingProfs, 63% of businesses don’t have a documented content marketing strategy. That is where the need for a proper content blueprint comes in.

(Source: Higher Visibility)

(Source: Cision)

How a brand creates a content marketing strategy will depend on many factors. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy that every brand can emulate to double its revenue. However, there are some core tactics that will put marketers on the right path.

We present some points to focus on before businesses start dishing out content.

Setting Goals

A business can’t stand for n number of things. It’s only viable to stand for one thing and stand firm. Proper goals and responsibilities should do away with confusion and chaos while paving the way for a proper goal-oriented content marketing strategy.

Some of the most common goals marketers pursue through their content programs include:

• Brand awareness: Getting discovered by the right consumers
• Audience engagement: Capturing the interest of casual readers and turning them into subscribers
• Lead generation: Identifying and qualifying consumers who are most likely to become customers
• Creating loyalty: Retaining existing customers by increasing their positive perception of the business
• Increasing sales and profitability: Closing more deals, reducing marketing costs, and opening up new revenue streams

Take a look at the following video for reference.

Analyzing the Anatomy of the Target Market

Target Market or Target Audience, broadly, is of two types: Primary and Secondary.

Primary Audience is the section which a business can reach directly and reap the majority of the profits from. Secondary Audience refers to that fraction which is indirectly reached and often through the primary audience.

In ‘content wilderness’, the major mistake marketers make is leaning too heavily on intuition. They either try to reach everyone, or they cut down their focus too narrowly on the person who has the most purchasing power. Gut instinct has a place in content marketing, but not if it goes unchecked. A proper understanding of the Target Market is imperative for long-term business success. Marketers need to define their own audience before they can start to “own” it.

Demographic analysis can be effectively done by specialized tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, Twitter Analytics, etc.

(Google Analytics)

(Facebook Analytics)

(Twitter Analytics)

Creating Buyer Personas

When the marketer has enough demographic data and customer interaction, he or she can create buyer personas. Buyer personas, also known as customer avatars, describe the ideal audience or customers to better target content.

The best customer avatars include information on the customers’ concerns or so-called ‘pain points’, challenges, sources of information, and behavioral motivators.

When such information is known, a marketer will have a better understanding of:

• The kind of content the audience will respond to
• How it will help them
• What will make them care about it

(Source – Optinmonster)

Mapping the Buyers’ Journey Through Marketing Funnel Analysis

Brand Awareness is the primary objective of most content marketing strategies. But the job doesn’t end there.

A competent content marketer must develop his/her content marketing strategy with the entire marketing funnel in mind since the ultimate goal is to drive revenue. Brand awareness occupies the top layer of the funnel, establishing trust through blog posts, infographics, videos, and social posts that avoid self-promotion. Eventually, though, content needs to connect to consideration, purchasing decisions, and retention.

(Content Funnel | Source: Contently)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – At the Heart of Content Strategy

As soon as content marketers have a better picture of the audience, they can lock the crosshairs on what topics they care about the most. Search engines like Google take the front seat in this regard.

Search algorithms, back in the days were like the Holy Grail of SEO but most of them didn’t understand what goes on behind the scenes. Thankfully, things changed over the years. Tools like HubSpot, Moz and BuzzSumo now offer data on valuable search engine optimization data like keyword volume, difficulty, and click-through rates.

Now marketers have to gather all of this information and compile a list of primary and secondary keywords. For example, the primary keyword is a frequently searched term that just about everyone in our audience cares about. A secondary keyword, though important for part of an audience, is a bit more niche and probably isn’t what a buyer would search when they’re ready to make that purchase.

These days it is commonplace for businesses to expect a majority of their traffic to come from organic search – up to 70 or 80 percent in some cases.

(Keyword Analysis using SEMRush)

Deciding the Content Platforms to target

During the course of platform research marketers will eventually start to get a sense of where most of the target audience hangs out, and on which platforms the brand already has a successful online presence. It’s best to focus on what’s working and expand from there, rather than try to do everything at once. Leveraging one platform’s success on another platform is also a viable strategy here.

(Source – Optinmonster)

Apart from strategy, a proper content marketing strategy also depends upon the creativity and experience of the marketers in charge. These are some of the elementary steps for proper content marketing, feel free to add to this list if you want to!

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