How to create a strong content marketing strategy

4 steps to help you develop a robust approach to your content

What is your brand all about?

A clear brand identity is the first step in creating a content strategy. This is more than stating your business name, products, vision and mission, and target market.

Take a critical approach and assess your position in the market from every possible angle, and then define your brand based on that data.

Think about:

• Your current and potential customers
• Your unique value proposition
• Your brand personality and voice
• Your competitors and their content marketing style (although don’t spend too much time looking over the fence at competitors!)

Note: Your audience is not the same as your buyers.

In fact, audiences become buyers thanks to successful content marketing.

Your audience will engage with your content long before they decide to make a purchase. If you can work on understanding their needs, problems, and concerns, and present your brand as their best possible solution, you will have a much higher chance of converting your audience into active customers.

What is different about your brand?

In any competitive market, your audience has many options to solve their problems. They can choose from a host of products that best fit their needs. To capture their attention and convert them to customers, ask yourself, “What can my brand offer that is different from the competition?”

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes as you develop your content strategy. What does your customer want to accomplish? Why would they choose your product over others? What’s in it for them?

Rather than pushing your products, try and take the customer’s viewpoint into account and present a way to solve a problem, a comparison to help them make a decision, or an explanation of how to achieve something.

This is what content marketing is: publishing compelling content that makes your audience’s life easier.

How does your content support your business goals?

There are two main guidelines to help you narrow down your business goals, which are SMART goals:

• SMART = Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.

Use these guidelines to identify your long-term and short-term business goals. Every piece of content should meet these goals before you publish them online.

But how do you balance your business goals with your customer goals in your content strategy? Putting your business in front of your audience is one thing, but it’s another thing to connect and resonate with your customers.

One solution is to create buyer personas with as much detail as possible.

Buyer personas should include:

• Basic demographic information: age, gender identity, location, income
• Lifestyle preferences: interest in trying new things, range of interests, brand loyalties
• Communication preferences: social media, emails, podcasts, webinars
• Challenges to overcome: time management, budgeting, career progression or personal factors that will influence their decision-making process
• Solutions: products and services in the market that meet their challenges
• Any other relevant information that builds on your customer profile

You can get all this data from your sales team, online surveys, web forms, interviews and lots more. Match your SMART and CLEAR goals with your ideal customer profiles, then build your content marketing strategy around this information.

The intersection of your business goals, your customer’s problems, and what you sell is the ‘sweet spot’ that you can use to inform your overall content strategy.

How will you produce and amplify your content?

Creating content is no easy job.

Although some find it easy to tap into their creativity to generate engaging, memorable, and valuable content that makes a difference to your bottom line, it’s often a real struggle for many businesses!

That’s where outsourcing your content creation to someone who understands your industry can be a good move.

Whether you decide to get external help or you recruit your management team, sales staff or engineers to write for you, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• Try to build content for different customer journey stages, from initial awareness through to loyalty and maintenance of your current active customer base.
• Build diverse ‘omnichannel’ content (a fancy word for different mediums) to find your audience at their preferred information sources. Some customers may choose LinkedIn over Facebook, others may prefer podcasts over video content. Meet your audience where they are at.
• Leverage user-generated content to engage with your audience: what can you share or promote from your existing networks?
• Repurpose your content: turn a blog entry into a YouTube video, business data into infographics. Spend time creating something once and then find many different ways to reuse the information.
• Think about peak engagement times for each channel: when are people likely to see your content? Posting at midnight will have a different result than posting at 3pm on a Thursday. Also, recognise that repetition is ok: often people won’t see your content the first time around so it’s ok to repeat yourself, rephrase a social post or ‘beat the drum’ in other ways to ensure your message is getting across.
• Think about those business goals you have set when you decide which metrics to track. Performance can be measured through organic traffic, bounce rates, conversion rates, mentions, shares, comments and form submissions, but which will have the most impact on the business goals you’ve set?