How to Create a Successful Content Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing is a very successful type of digital marketing in which the user publishes content related to their business on digital platforms such as blogs, and websites.

Nowadays people who wish to buy things prefer to research first. So, they look for information on the internet and ask around as well before they commit to a purchase. 

By putting out content for them to find, you increase the likelihood of getting them to purchase from your business. Perhaps that’s why content marketing doubles website conversion rates.

But it is wrong to say that all content is the same. It is possible that your efforts in content marketing may be wasted. That’s why you require a good content marketing strategy. Here’s how you can create one and increase your chances of success.

How to Formulate a Content Marketing Strategy

1. Define Your Goals

What are the goals of your business? You need some tangible goals before you can create a marketing strategy that aims to reach those goals. Goals provide direction and purpose without which any and all efforts are ultimately useless.

Goals are typically broad in perspective and not very specific. For example, as a business, your goal may be to increase the number of your customers, increase your profits, or expand into a new region.

To reach those goals you will need smaller more specific goals or objectives. So, if your ultimate goal is to improve the number of converting customers, then your objective is to publish compelling content with a lot of CTAs on your platforms.

So define your goals so that you know what kind of content you need to create.

2. Learn About Your Target Market

It is common sense that people have different likes and dislikes. So, not everyone is going to like your content. Going for mass appeal frequently leads to losing out on even your regular consumers. You should always research what kind of people are interested in your brand and specifically target them with your content.

You can learn about what kind of demographic is best suited for marketing by gathering data from your own platforms. Websites allow you to see what pages were frequented by certain customers, and what kinds of pages provoked the most responses. 

From this information, you can understand what kind of things certain customers are interested in. Thus, you can create content that specifically caters to these customers and motivate them to commit to a purchase.

3. Do Keyword Research Before Creating Your Marketing Content

Keywords are the single most important thing when it comes to content marketing. Content marketing as you know is heavily dependent on SEO. One aspect of SEO is using keywords in your content naturally. By doing this you are telling the search engines that your content needs to be shown to specific searches related to those keywords.

Of course, as a business with a specific type of service or product, you will have to target keywords related to them. But the thing is the keywords that a business insider knows are not what the customer knows. This means that your customers will use different keywords when searching for your business. 

You need to conduct research and find what are those keywords and use them in your marketing content. This will make sure that your content shows up in the SERPs when people search for those keywords. That will improve the amount of organic traffic that your site will get and most of those people may commit to a purchase as well.

4. Publish Content on Your Own Platforms

Publishing content is not a one-and-done deal. It requires a lot of fore and afterthought. The first thing you need to do to ensure that your business actually benefits from your content is to publish it on your own platforms. That will ensure that your online system where you sell your services and products and your content is on the same platform. 

That facilitates easy access to the store and your audience will not have to run around looking for your store. The other thing that you need to do is to ensure that your published content is very easy to read. Sometimes it is possible that a draft passes the editorial process, but due to human error, some readability issues still remain. 

It is your job to ensure that you look carefully at the content and make sure it is extremely readable. If you do find some parts that you think are difficult to read, you don’t have to worry about writing them again from start. Some paraphrasing will do the trick. All you need to do is to rephrase a text that is hard to read and make it easier to read by using simpler wording. Then when you publish your content on your platforms, it will have markedly better conversion and performance.

5. Track Your KPIs and Adjust as Needed

Simply formulating a content marketing strategy is not enough. You need to keep an eye on it and see if it is performing well or not. The thing is that with content marketing, results can take a long time to show. Usually, it takes about a few months before you start seeing results. 

So, what you should do is create a two- or three-month-time frame and start working on your content strategy. But you should also establish some KPIs that you will watch. The KPIs need to be something that is deeply related to your content i.e., you can track things like; conversion rates, monthly organic traffic, bounce rate, dwell time, and really any other SEO Metric that is related to content.

If the KPIs are not looking good at the end of your prescribed period, then it means that you need to adjust your strategy. Rinse and repeat until you find success. 

Conclusion

And that’s how you can create a successful content marketing strategy. If you follow all the steps that are present in this guide then you will be able to market your content to the right audience. This will ensure that the people that are truly interested in your business will come to you and become customers. Of course, this was merely a small guide, so, if you want to learn more about conversion with your content then head to our blog.