Content marketing is the heart of all forms of digital marketing. It can help you drive traffic, build trust with your consumers, increase conversions, and generate more business. It can make or break your brand’s reputation.
Given below are the 5 essential stages in the process of formulating an effective content marketing strategy.
- Research and Planning
- Content Creation
- Scheduling and Publishing
- Promotion and Distribution
- Analysis & Strategy Revision
Research and Planning
The first step is to identify and understand who your audience is, then formulate an appropriate content strategy that can help you engage them.
- Conduct thorough customer research.
- Analyze consumers’ online behavior and interactions with your website.
- Engage consumers with surveys, polls, quizzes, etc.
- Analyze your social media audience.
- Regularly check for consumer complaints, feedbacks, and suggestions.
Next, Plan and Create your Content Marketing Strategy:
- Set practical and time-bound goals
- Identify KPIs to measure these goals
- Create Consumer personas
- Select a Tone of Voice
- Choose Appropriate Content Types and Formats
- Create Content Marketing Funnels
Content Creation
Brainstorm ideas and start curating content for your target audience.
- Use online tools such as Buzzsumo and Google Keyword Planner to find out popular content related to your topic.
- Discover trending keywords for your industry or niche.
- Create a list of topics for your content pieces.
What’s next? Begin curating your content.
- You can either hire writers from outside or assign the responsibilities to your employees.
- Build a workflow to streamline the content creation process.
- Create a content calendar.
- Strictly stick to the content calendar while creating the content.
- Use appropriate tools and software for effective team and task management.
Besides, you can also:
- Create templates for future use.
- Train your employees on copywriting and other skills.
- Leverage user-generated content.
- Curate relevant content from different sources.
Scheduling and Publishing
Once your content is complete, edited, and proofed, you are ready to publish it online.
The steps involved here are:
- Select the platforms where you will publish your content.
- Post or cross-promote the same content on different platforms.
- Make use of scheduling tools to auto-publish the content as per your content calendar.
- Customize your content for each platform.
- Post regularly and choose the best time to post for each platform.
Promotion and Distribution
Just publishing the content is not good enough. It should also be promoted in relevant channels to reach the targeted audience.
- Promote content by sharing the links on social media
- Optimize your blog posts for search engines to get more traffic.
- Share your content on aggregator websites in the form of mentions.
- Use email marketing to share useful content with your subscribers.
- Use guest posting to share content on prominent industry websites.
Analysis and Strategy Revision
Measure the performance of your content and improve your future content strategy.
Measure Your Performance
- Use social media analytics tools to analyze your social media content.
- Leverage Google Analytics to analyze your web content.
Analyze & Draw Insights
- Look at the predefined KPIs to see if you met your goals
- Understand what type of content works for your audience
- Identify areas for improvement.
Revise your strategy
- Focus more on platforms that are performing well
- Stop creating content that does not engage your audience.
- Experiment with new content formats that you have not tried yet.
These are the most essential steps to formulate an effective content marketing strategy.
