Content marketing campaigns – It’s a term that you may have heard about with regards to digital marketing. But what exactly is content marketing?
Content marketing plan is all about creating and distributing relevant content to engage your target audience and persuade them to take action. Examples include getting visitors to sign up for a newsletter or enter their email for a free trial. These marketing tactics differ from traditional advertising as the main focus is to educate a target reader with informative content.
Content is what moves consumers throughout each step of the sales cycle. A solid content strategy plan not only helps your business reach more prospects but also increases brand credibility.
Let’s look at how you can build an effective digital content marketing strategy for your business.
1. Define Your Business Goals
Perhaps the most important aspect of a content marketing strategy is to define your goals. What exactly is your aim with content marketing? Is it to drive product sales or to generate more leads? Or do you want to leverage content to improve the overall customer experience (CX)?
Defining your goals matters because it will drive your entire content strategy. If your goal is to generate more leads, then the call to action will be on guiding prospects to a paid solution. You could even create an in-depth guide as an incentive to get people to fill out a lead form. Defining your goals also gives you a clear metric that you can measure to determine if your efforts are generating a return.
2. Create Buyer Personas
The next step to building an effective content strategy is to define your target audiences. Start by creating a buyer persona – A generalised profile of your ideal customer. It includes information like age, occupation, hobbies and interests, and income levels. Conduct customer interviews or look through tools like Google Analytics to gather data about your users.
Thi allow you to create more focused content that addresses specific needs of your audience. For example, someone in the early stages of the buying cycle is still likely looking for a solution to their problems. With that in mind, you can create a digital content marketing strategy that focuses on research type keywords and publish them to your site or share on social media.
3. Create Your Content Marketing Plan
So far you’ve defined your goals and created buyer personas. Next comes the hard part – Creating your content. Blogging is certainly a popular way to grow your audience through content marketing on the website, but other formats can also include:
- e book
- White papers
- Infographics
- Newsletters
- Videos
- Podcasts
Think about your potential audience/customer and their specific needs. What problems are they trying to solve? What questions are they asking? Use your buyer persona you created in the previous step to brainstorm content ideas.
Something else you can do is give new life to existing content on your site. That includes updating any old blog posts with new information to make it more relevant. You can also repurpose content and turn it into a different format. For example, if you have a popular blog post, why not turn it into a video or infographic?
4. Publish Your Content
SEO or search engine optimisation is one way your audience can discover your content. The way it works is straightforward – You create a blog post around a relevant keyword and then optimise it on your site to improve its rankings. Anyone searching for those keywords can see your page and click through.
SEO is an effective way to promote your piece of content. But there are many other channels that you can publish on to extend your reach even further, such as Facebook and Instagram. These networks have well over a billion active users each. By publishing relevant content on these platforms, you can build a following and increase brand awareness.
Of course, you also need to consider where your target audience is. If your audience is mostly on LinkedIn, then it makes sense to focus your efforts there. Consider using a content calendar to keep track of your website content creation and distribution efforts.
5. Measure Your Performance
With all the work you put into building and implementing a digital content marketing strategy, you want to know that your efforts are paying off. In other words, is the content you’re creating generating sales or leads for your business?
The only way to find out is to dig into your Google Analytics. Pay attention to key performance indicators (KPI) like traffic, bounce rates, comments, social shares, and conversions.
The content strategy you develop for your business should be flexible. If your content efforts on a particular channel are barely resulting in any sales, consider allocating those resources to another platform. Likewise, if a particular content type like blog posts does well, focusing more of your attention on it can help you boost conversions even more.
The digital landscape continues to grow more competitive. Follow the steps outlined above to build a content marketing strategy and help your business stand out.