How to create content marketing strategy and plan is the most asked question business owners ask me.
Some business owners think that there is a special trick or secret method I use for creating content.
The truth of the matter is that there are no secrets used for creating content marketing strategies.
Instead, I make use of my proven 6 steps framework as a guide for my content success, with the addition of plenty of meaning and resourceful time and effort.
These 6 proven steps provide the perfect framework for long-term content marketing success.
In my post today I will outline them for you so you can master them and make use of it to achieve success in your content marketing strategy and shoot your business to the next level.
Why Content Marketing Strategy Is Important for your business
Before I move further into the steps, I will like to emphasize that a content marketing strategy isn’t a nice strategy to have for businesses that want to succeed, it is a fundamental requirement for success.
According to research by Content Marketing Institute In 2021, 57% of content marketers say that they don’t have a documented content marketing strategy and plan, yet those that have a content marketing strategy and plan consistently rate their efforts as far more successful than those that don’t have.
In addition to the research, the covid-19 pandemic has made it important and critical for businesses to have a content marketing strategy.
More than 70% of content marketers with a strategy report that the Covid-19 pandemic has had an impact on their content marketing strategy in an average to major way
Content Marketing Strategy in 6 Steps
In order to help you get started on how you can level up your business content efforts, below is an overview of each of the seven steps you can use to create your content marketing strategy;
1. Your Content Marketing Should Have a Goal
The first question you need to ask yourself is why are you doing content marketing? Is it to get leads for your business? Is it to build business relationships with your customers? Is it to improve your customer’s experiences?
No matter what your content marketing goals are, you need to make sure that they are sustainable for a long-term purpose and that they are actually connected to your business goals, mission, and vision.
In order to keep your strategy focused and crystal-clear, it will be a good idea to stick to not more than five business goals.
Keynote: Creating content for your business because of content's sake is never a goal and should not be added as one.
2. Your Content should align with your branding goal
There is numerous content on the internet today, yet more and more are been published every single day.
This means that before you can be successful in your content strategy you will need to create content that set your organization apart.
Particularly, what is the heart and soul of your business content program? Is it to
The appropriate answer to the above questions is a resounding YES! Or else you run the risk of providing more of the same inferior content that is out on the web today and contributing enormously to the growing content glut on the internet.
Your content should be created around one thing that will set your business apart from the rest.
Let me give you a tip for gut-checking your brand content marketing goal.
Firstly, you need to write down all the brand messages that you use for your business.
After that, you should take your industry's top three competitors and cross off any messages on your list that they are already making use of.
After you have done this your business will be left with a completely unique set of brand messages, which will help you clarify the one thing you stand out for among your competitors.
Take Away: You should give yourself permission to make your brand story bigger.
3. Your Content Marketing Efforts Should be Measured
You need to track and measure your content so you can make the necessary adjustment to the content that is not working.
If you want to track your business content, you will need to do something trackable and you will need to figure out how you will prove your content works before you make it.
You should be careful of using vanity metrics that don’t really talk much about anything you do.
Instead, you should understand if your content marketing is working great for you, you will need to look at the relevant actions.
These are the important 4 categories of content marketing metrics you need to pay attention to.
4. Identify Your Business Target Audience
Relevancy magically creates attention and time that is needed.
For you to stay relevant with your content marketing strategy, you will need to understand who you are talking to and who you are targeting, and there are various versions of what that actually looks like:
Whichever definition you use for your audience or to guide your business content marketing efforts.
You have to make sure you are focusing on only the right audiences, and look at their psychographics, not just their demographics.
You also need to consider replacing the stock photos with icons or symbols in order to avoid getting stuck on what your potential audience will look like physically or stereotyping by race, gender, or age.
Take Away: You need to focus on the needs of your audience and not yours.
5. Know How to Solve Your Target Audience Problems
In spite of the approach, you will use to classify and identify your potential audience.
you need to know how to solve their problem with your content.
You can easily solve some of their problems with your content by using keyword research tools like SEMrush to search for keywords they are using to look for solutions to their problems.
You should also create relevant content that they will need at each stage of their sales funnel which will let you understand their needs, wants, and expectations so that you can create compelling content that will resonate with their demands.
You are most likely to already have content that answers some of the doubt questions they might have, so you will have to start looking for the obvious content gaps first.
Once you have the content gap list, it gives you a better understanding of who your target audience is, plus how your content can help them solve their problems.
Keynote: Your web content must answer your target audience's doubt questions, not just fulfill your business goals.
6. Create More Content with Less Available contents
When it comes to the problems of content marketing, most people think the solution to the problem is to create more content.
As I have said earlier, there is a lot of inferior content on the web and it will not be ideal to add your content on top of the already massive heap of inferior content.
If you are a business owner with lots of content on your website then it is time to remix and refresh your web content before you start thinking about creating another one.
You can move on to new content creation after you have repurposed and atomized most of the content on your website.