You Will Thank Me — Everything You Need to Know About Content Marketing Strategy

91% of B2B businesses used content marketing to reach their customers last year for a good reason. Content marketing can be a game-changer, but only when done correctly. You don’t have a better tool to generate leads and convert them into customers.

When this 91% were asked to rate their content marketing success, the picture was less rosy: 74% thought they were only minimally or moderately successful.

Yikes.

Many businesses appear to be trying, but failing to use content marketing effectively.

What is going wrong if so many businesses use content marketing, but a large percentage of them don’t get desired results?

The answer is simple: these companies are missing out on something. They don’t follow a solid content marketing strategy.

In this guide, I will explain what content marketing strategy is. You will also learn how to create one. I will then clarify why every company should have one, how to use it, and whom it will actually help on a daily basis.

Finally, I’ll walk you through all the processes of developing a content marketing strategy to boost your marketing efforts, ensuring that your content is working hard to generate excellent leads daily.

Understanding Content Marketing Strategy

First and foremost, what is content marketing strategy?

Simply said, your content marketing strategy is a plan that outlines:

The material you’ll develop;

How you’ll make it;

Where and when you’ll publish it;

Whom you’ll target with it;

And, most importantly, what your goals are for it.

However, a content marketing strategy is more than a practical plan. It helps your entire team understand why you engage in content marketing.

It is critical to realize that when we say “content marketing,” we mean creating and distributing useful, instructional, and entertaining content to attract, engage, and ultimately convert prospects into clients.

As a result, content marketing is time-consuming and needs extensive research, planning, content development, and resource allocation.

If you aren’t clear internally on your content marketing strategy, you’ll wind up with a blunderbuss approach that is at best a waste of money, and at worst, discourages prospects from trusting you.

What is Content Marketing Strategy for?

Everyone on your team can benefit from your content marketing approach.

It is not something you, as a marketing manager or business owner, should keep to yourself. It is a dynamic and living tool over which everyone on your team should have visibility and control.

Content will play a continuous role in assisting each team member in accomplishing a great job, from sales to customer service and everything in between.

That is why they must know what content will be developed and when, how your prospects will be reached, and whether you are on schedule to provide results.

Also, don’t forget that your staff is a fantastic source of content ideas! It goes without saying.

Because your sales and customer support teams are typically your front-line eyes and ears, include them in your planning process. Employees who believe their views are heard are 4.6 times more likely to perform their best work, so seek inspiration from them — and act on it!

What Is the Process of Developing a Content Marketing Strategy?

Your content marketing plan works by coordinating your company’s business goals with your content efforts over a set period of time.

Here’s a high-level overview of the procedure:

Your company will create a budget for the quarter or year, including revenue objectives.

Your revenue objectives will be translated into new lead generation and/or customer retention objectives.

You will know from the prior success that new lead targets will necessitate a specific degree of traffic or engagement with your site.

The volume, rate, and type of material you publish will then be determined by traffic and engagement data.

Finally, all of this must be tied back to a strategic vision. This is where your content marketing strategy comes in, by providing a clear source of truth on how the material you invest in will help to fulfill your company’s overall business goals.

Developing Your Content Marketing Strategy

Now let’s get down to the process of establishing a content marketing strategy for your organization.

It’s normal to want to get right into your fantastic ideas for posts, ebooks, or webinars when you first start thinking about content marketing — but hold your horses!

The very first thing you must define is what you aim to achieve.

Do you want to enhance lead generation, increase engagement with your audience, or persuade more of your audience to buy your products or services?

Or do you need to do something completely different?

Whatever you want to do with your content marketing, your objectives must be S.M.A.R.T., which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Specific — Referring to a specific business area or aim.

Measurable — Supported by evidence that clearly reveals success or failure.

Achievable — Within your company’s scope of possibility.

Relevant — To your entire business goals.

Timely — Referring to a period that has a beginning and a finish. Let’s look at an example of how to set a S.M.A.R.T. target for your content marketing strategy:

By raising our blog publishing rate from two to three times per week, we will increase unqualified sales leads by 50% within the quarter.

When developing a content marketing plan, your objective should always be measurable.

‘We will raise brand recognition,’ for example, is not S.M.A.R.T. We can’t quantify anything about this aim.

And, while we’re on the subject, don’t mistake ‘vanity measures,’ such as Facebook likes, for goals in and of themselves.

Sure, seeing an increase in social media activity is really exciting — this can be a wonderful incentive for yourself and the team. But how does it assist you in meeting your S.M.A.R.T. goal? Your social reach is only useful if it has a positive impact on your business’s growth.

Understand Your Audience

Now that you’ve defined your S.M.A.R.T. goals, you need to focus on whom you’re going after.

To do so, you’ll need to create ‘buyer personas’ for your business.

A ‘buyer persona’ is a profile of your ideal client that is based on the reality of who your existing customers are and some assumptions about what characteristics they have.

Buyer personas are neither fictitious nor true. They should be grounded in truth while not referring to a specific individual in the world.

Importantly, creating a buyer persona allows you to develop empathy for your customers.

If you design your content with their requirements and concerns in mind, you are more likely to produce the material that they require. On the other hand, if you do not appropriately envision your buyer persona, you are likely to develop inward-looking or self-referential content that does not effectively attract potential leads.

You will most likely need numerous personas that reflect approximate categories, which is a good thing.

If you only have one buyer persona, it will most likely be too broad and will not help you focus on the demands of your users. Conversely, if you have too many characters, your efforts will be too narrow to have a commercially sized appeal.

3–5 well-developed buyer personas are ideal.

Your buyer personas will be detailed in terms of both demographics and psychographics. Demographics are observable characteristics such as age, race, gender, education, life stage, or socioeconomic background.

Psychographic aspects are those that cannot be measured or quantified, such as belief systems, hobbies, or attitudes.

Depending on these factors, you will naturally design distinct content marketing strategies, as they will affect the type of material and where it is released.

Give your buyer personas a name, a profile photo, and start filling up their profiles with as much detail as you can. Who are they, what do they look like, and why are they interested in your content?

If you’re stuck, think of real customers you’ve met and the characteristics they all have in common.

Carefully Examine Your Current Resources

Unless you are a very early stage start-up, there will most likely be a plethora of instructions, sales presentations, blog articles, and/or videos scattered throughout numerous folders and files, departments, and websites.

You’ll need to conduct some research to categorize them all and choose what you can recycle.

An audit of your content will assist you in two ways:

Avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ by reusing content that you already have.

Recognize where your shortcomings and possibilities are.

During this audit, you should take the time to categorize all of your content based on its role in the buyer’s journey. An ebook, webinar, or blog post should not be viewed as “nice things to do for our clients,” but rather as having a role to play in bringing them to you, creating trust with you, or promoting a purchase.

The purpose of a content marketing strategy is to work with material in this manner so that all of your efforts are focused on establishing genuine business opportunities and growth.

Have a Clear Brand Story

So far, we’ve examined your content marketing plan with an emphasis on technical, objective components.

Now I want you to start looking inwards into the heart and soul of your organization and consider why it exists, as this will direct you why and how you are communicating that story through your content.

What makes your company distinguishable from others? What are your guiding beliefs, or what do you want to change about the world? Which people’s lives do you want to improve, or what problem do you wish to solve?

This is about you understanding what sets you apart from your competitors and why that matters to your clients. Hold an informal gathering with your team members to learn everyone’s reasons for coming to work to gain a company-wide understanding. It might just spark some thoughts and ideas that you hadn’t considered before! Who knows?

Creating your brand story is an essential component of any content marketing strategy because it specifies the ideas and messages you want to convey through your content. It improves your tone of voice and character, and it allows your customers to interact with your company on a more personal level than strictly transactional.

What Kind of Content Should You Create?

Once you’ve determined your goals, your target audience, and your existing content assets, you’ll want to determine the type of content you’ll focus on developing in the future.

If increasing organic traffic is one of your key goals, you must blog!

Yes, you will require a landing page and website copy that position you as the best partner for your prospects’ needs. A blog, on the other hand, supplements this excellent work by allowing you to publish longer-form content that demonstrates your thought leadership while also increasing visitors’ on-page time.

Your blog should constantly be optimized to match your objectives, which involves having clear calls to action to increase email signups or route traffic to a sales page.

Depending on your primary aims, you may wish to examine other content types. I’ll concentrate on textual content for the sake of this guide:

Longform content, which delves considerably deeper into a specific subject or business area and can be written in 5,000 to 15,000 words with confidence. These are frequently in the form of ‘Ultimate Guides,’ and they break down large topics into step-by-step procedures.

Case studies will demonstrate your business knowledge and assist you in developing thought leadership in a specific field. Keep in mind that your reader wants to hear the emotional ups and downs along the road, as well as see themselves in the story. Case studies are a wonderful technique to persuade individuals who have progressed pretty far down the funnel to make a final purchase decision.

White papers are in-depth, very thorough (sometimes data-driven) examinations of a particular issue or topic. They represent the philosophy or strategy of your organization. Because white papers are intended to be the final word on a subject, they must be properly researched and hence require a significant amount of time and effort to write. However, when done correctly, they may be a very effective approach to develop thought leadership.

Ebooks are excellent lead magnets that can be readily distributed to prospects in return for contact information. Always be certain that your ebook solves a genuine problem or responds to a specific question.

Infographics are a type of content easy to digested and shared. Depending on the subject, infographics can frequently assist the reader in visualizing information, flows, or processes. They are widely shareable, making them an excellent method to increase engagement and brand recognition.

Choose Your Channels

Okay, so you know what you want to accomplish, whom you want to reach, and what forms of content are most relevant to you and your audience… But where will you concentrate your efforts?

Which content type has the biggest promise for your company?

To make a choice, your team should evaluate current evidence wherever possible; this prevents subjective decision-making or biases from coming in.

Use Google Analytics to learn which channels are already driving page views to your site, generating shares and interaction, and providing you with organic reach.

Consider using tools like BuzzSumo or UberSuggest to gather statistics on how your audience interacts with different sorts of content across various media.

If you’re just getting started with content creation, you may not have much of your own data to work with — but don’t worry!

Examine your competitors’ content distribution channels: where are they posting it? In terms of engagement, how well does that appear to be working for them?

Remember that indicators like LinkedIn reads and likes are mostly ‘vanity metrics,’ so don’t put all your eggs in the same basket as your competition just yet. Make sure your channel selections are strategic — fish where the fish are. If your buyer profiles reflect a large audience on Twitter but a smaller audience on Facebook, don’t waste time building an expensive lead magnet for a Facebook campaign.

Remember that it is far better to focus on one or two channels and use them exceptionally well. You don’t want to scatter your efforts over too many platforms and dilute your content.

Create a Calendar

The primary components of your content marketing plan are now coming together as you’ve set your goals, content kinds, platforms, and story.

The following phase in the process is to plan when and where you will create and publish your content.

Depending on your budget and objectives, you can use a variety of online tools to create an effective calendar. Monday.com, Trello, Evernote, and Sprout Social all provide tools to help you organize, coordinate team members. You can even post your content automatically at the best time.

However, there is such a thing as being overly organized with your content schedule — you may want to prepare your calendar only one month in advance to stay relevant.

You should also plan your content with the season in mind. Many times of the year have a particular significance or focus, such as religious holidays, major sporting events, or moments of national remembrance.

Allocate Resources and Create Your Content

When planning your calendar, keep in mind how much time and money you have to devote to your content marketing strategy.

To do so, consider each individual piece of content in your upcoming plan and estimate a production timeline and cost.

This stage also includes assigning responsibilities to team members to ensure they are aware of what they need to produce in a timely manner.

If you know, you’ll need to outsource your content development, acquire quotations on how much it will cost, and begin the process. Outsourcing your content machine to a team of low-cost experts can often significantly increase its outputs.

The Last Step is Analysis

When your material is complete and live, it is time to begin distributing it through the channels you specified in your content marketing strategy.

Your work, on the other hand, is not yet finished!

Performance analysis is the final step in your content marketing strategy, but it is undoubtedly one of the most crucial.

You will never know what is working well and what isn’t. Also, you will never discover how or where you need to improve if you don’t analyze your data.

Make a point of returning to your calendar and posting results statistics on views, shares, and engagement one week after each piece has been published.

Of course, the most crucial aspect of any analysis is ensuring that your content marketing plan is accomplishing your business objectives. The many content marketing tactics that you have chosen will obviously need to be changed, optimized, and adapted to match the needs of your organization and your audience.

The most essential strategy is to figure out what works and to keep improving.