Did you know that only 37% of businesses have a documented content marketing strategy?

It won’t be surprising then, to learn that those businesses that do have a plan are much more likely to feel that their content marketing efforts are successful.

The fact is, without a strategy, success or failure is nothing more than a coin toss – and you risk all your time and effort being wasted.

It also won’t be surprising to learn that 64% of businesses say they need help learning how to build a content marketing strategy to help them reach their growth goals.

If you’re in that group, we’re here to help! Let us guide you through developing and executing a content marketing strategy that will help you grow your business without wasting time, effort, or money.

Determine Your Content Marketing Strategy Goals

The best place to start with planning your content marketing strategy is to define why you’re even trying content marketing – specifically, what your goals are.

So, what are your content marketing strategy goals? To boost lead generation? Build relationships with loyal customers? Announce a new product or service?

Whatever your growth goals may be, you must remember to keep them sustainable in the long-term, and that they actually connect back to your overall business goals and mission. The best way to keep your content strategy focused and sharp is to stick to three-to-five well-defined goals, and document them.

Examples of Strong Content Marketing Strategy Goals

Your content marketing strategy goals will likely differ from your competition. That said, here are five examples of goals business can use content marketing to focus on:

• Brand awareness.
• Brand loyalty.
• Customer education.
• Customer engagement.
• Talent recruitment.

Measure Your Content Marketing

If you want to track the performance of your content, you’ll have to do something trackable, and prove that it works, before you make even one piece of content. The key here is deciding which metrics are important.

In order to understand what your content is really doing, you need to look to the 4 categories of content marketing metrics:

• Consumption: What did your audience do with your content? These are actions, like view, download, listen, visit, etc.
• Sharing: How often was your content shared with others?
• Lead generation: How many leads came from a piece of content?
• Sales: Did you make any money on this content?

Focus Your Content Marketing Strategy on the Right Audiences

One of the keys to success with your content marketing strategy is relevancy. To be relevant you need to understand who you’re talking to; who your ideal target audience is. After all, you not only have to speak to them intelligently, you’ve got to be where they are.

There are a few versions of what this looks like:

• Audience: A high-level list of people with similar motivations, interests, or agendas. This is people like repeat product purchasers.
• Segment: This is a cross-section of your audience, in which those identified share one or more traits. For example, parents who work from home.
• Persona: A buyer persona is a data-driven, realistic characterization of the goals of a hypothetical group of users, boiled down to a single, fictional “person.” An example might be “Charles In-Charge,” or “New Mom Nancy.”

Remember, you are not your audience! Focus on their needs and desires, not yours.

Craft a Compelling Content Calendar

A content calendar not only includes the actual content you’ve created for your audience, but when and where it will be shown. This means deciding on the types of content that will best resonate with your audience, as well as the best places to share that content. Depending on what or where your audience is, this might be email lists, blog posts, and most likely, social media.

Creating a content calendar that is not only effective, but closely matches your content marketing strategy is fairly simple and straightforward. As long as you follow these simple steps:

• Start with your ongoing content efforts that are created at least twice a month. These might be shows, or even blog posts.
• Next, add in those big, one-time bits of content. These might be things like one-time specials, contests, or events.
• Fill it in with what you might think of as “regularly scheduled programming.” Depending on what your industry and what your audience might be hungry for, this could include industry news, memes, articles from third-parties, games, etc.

Plan, Schedule, Publish, Promote, Track, and Update Your Content

Regular strategy and editorial meetings including all involved in content creation is critical. These meetings are important for reviewing key metrics from the previous period, and assessing what has been most successful. This data can then be used to reinforce and improve your content marketing strategy on an ongoing basis.

Looking for a little more help developing your content marketing strategy? Asset Digital Communications can help! Book you free consolation with Mary-Jane today, and get started on the path to reach your growth goals!