Whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve been doing it for a while, it never hurts to review your content strategy and make sure it’s fresh and interesting for your prospects and customers. Content marketing strategy involves creating, publishing, and distributing valuable content to attract and engage a target audience. It’s about building brand awareness, generating leads, and driving customer action.
Content marketing has become a must-have strategy for businesses that want to engage, inform, and convert their target audience. In this blog by FOR®, we’ll explore what a content marketing strategy is that drives more engagement.
Brand Guidelines
Brand guidelines are documents that sum up your brand’s overall look and feel its colour palette, typography, personality, messaging and so on. Although used to set up a website’s design language or ad creatives, brand guidelines also help with your content strategy.
You can build your content governance model on top of your brand guidelines, so your creative teams always produce content that’s on brand and drives awareness. You can use your brand guidelines to specify the style of your written or video content, tone of voice, colours and fonts images or graphics should use and pinpoint your image or video editing style for example.
Content Calendar
The terms “content calendar” and “editorial calendar” are often used interchangeably but are slightly different. An editorial calendar looks at the bigger picture, and it gives a broad overview of the themes your content should cover within a specific time period. A content calendar breaks down each individual post within that time frame.
For example, while an editorial calendar might simply say all posts in October should be about Halloween, the content calendar gets into the details. It organizes a series of individual posts, each covering a topic related to that theme.
Audience Persona
An audience persona (or buyer persona) is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on data and research. It’s who you’re creating content for. To create an accurate audience persona, you’ll need to research through surveys and interviews and analyse your social media engagement to gather insights.
These insights include demographic information, interests, pain points, content preferences, etc. Knowing this will help you determine what types of content, topics, and marketing channels will help you achieve your goals.
Content Audit and Analysis
Once you have your audience persona sorted, review your existing content to see what’s working and what’s not.
This will help you identify gaps and opportunities for content.
In the Content Audit section of your content strategy plan, include:
- What types of content and topics are already working for you (e.g. blogs about web development, micro-videos about coding tips and tricks etc.)
- What types of content and topics are not gaining traction (e.g. white papers about the history of programming)
Content Clusters
On the same lines, content clusters are a series of connected posts that cover all aspects of a topic in detail. Topic clusters help establish brand authority and target consumers across multiple stages of your marketing funnel.
For example if your main topic is SEO you could create a central post that’s a general overview of the topic also known as pillar content. You can then branch off and create separate posts that cover all sub-topics related to SEO, like on-page, off-page and technical SEO.
Marketing Funnels
And talking of funnels, make sure your content strategy is designed to attract consumers from all stages and drive conversions.
For example, the SEO content pillar I mentioned earlier would attract top-of-the-funnel consumer leads interested in a topic but not ready to buy just yet. The content pillar would give just enough information to get readers to learn more about the topic.
Competitive Research
Take a look at your competitors. Get as much detail as possible here — what topics they cover, what content formats they use, what channels they’re on, and how they perform.
This will help you spot weaknesses to exploit, like not covering a topic as in-depth as you do. Knowing what content and channels work for them is another great starting point for your marketing strategy.
Set your KPIs
The best way to achieve goals is to make them specific and measurable. That means setting key performance indicators (KPIs) for your content marketing strategy.
The KPIs will give you a way to know when you’ve achieved your goals by giving you checkpoints to tick off. They’ll include revenue, sales, traffic, SEO, traffic and other digital marketing metrics like email marketing and social media metrics.
Conclusion
It takes time, effort and creativity to build a content marketing strategy. From building the foundations of your content marketing plan to adding tools to manage your content, setting up won’t be a chore if you follow these steps. Start with the data and check in regularly to see how your content marketing works. Do regular audits and refine your content and your engagement rates will stay healthy.
You don’t want to be following behind in marketing. Lead the pack! Keep your nose to the ground and your strategies up to date, and you’ll be building customer relationships that last. If you want to Boost your online presence by engaging the audience using a content marketing strategy, you can contact Toni Hukkanen, the head of FOR®’s Digital Marketing Agency.
