When you have a well-thought-out strategy for content marketing that is designed for success, you can expect benefits that can change your business completely.
Good Content Has Purpose
First, you need to come up with content that is purposeful. When you have a strategy, you will have content that can contribute directly towards the goals of the business. When you create something without any strategy, you risk failing miserably.
Are you The Expert or Another Fish in the Sea?
You also need to create content that shows that you are an expert in your industry/niche — this creates immediate credibility and authority. Consumers seek credibility and authority in their ‘customer journey’. For this to happen, the consumers need to believe that you are confident about the things you are doing, your product/service has desired benefits, and that your company cares about the customers’ needs.
Meet a Need or Don’t Bother
For your content to be useful, it is to be pre-planned and researched. Aim at meeting the consumer needs and show them that you are knowledgeable about the industry while offering know-how, education, and/or alternative uses for your product/service.
Planning content is essential. You need to plan the ideas well to meet the audience and support the goals that you had already set. You will need a calendar to organize your time and track measurement later. You should aim at coming up with diverse content formats such as: video, white papers, blogs, and articles. In addition, audience segments are important because your audience could be at different stages of the customer journey (think: new customer and acquisition vs. current customer retention). People love different approaches and different types of content. You should also include different types of content approaches, such as: evergreen articles, thought leadership, and news round ups. It’s important to try to figure out exactly how the pieces fit together to create the big picture for customers in all categories of the journey. Let your audience have a clear plan of action of what they are supposed to do once they read/consume the content.
Your Brand Descriptors Rely on the Quality of Content
You need to know that there is a cross relationship between your brand and content. You need a strategy that will help you to come up with content that is consistent with the brand and how you want your customers to think of your brand (i.e. helpful, useful rather than inconsistent and boring). This will ensure that you always have a regular and steady supply of content that can be shared with your followers, email subscribers, and brand advocates.
Stand Out — Don’t Just Fit In
With content marketing, you have no choice but to stand out — not just fit in. Businesses are making great investments in delivering the best content. This means that there is no way you can compete if you do not have a content strategy that is competitive. The strategy needs to also evaluate what other businesses like yours are doing. You need to come up with content that is both exceptional, valuable, and that which is worth the readers’ time.
Set Goals & Measure
When you want a strategy that will hold water, you need to have actionable/measurable goals. Having a clear picture of exactly how content can help you to achieve business goals helps you to broaden your thinking and expectations. It’s good to know what kind of effect you are trying to achieve. Do you want more customers? Are you trying to create awareness about the business? Are you trying to retain customers and strengthen relations? The above questions can help you determine the formats that you should use as well as the tone of the content.
When the goals are all set, you need to choose a way that can help you measure success. You will need to lay out a criterion about what is considered as success and what is not. You may base it on how many people end up finding the page and the conversions that you receive. It is important to have targets and measurements to get feedback on the impact of the content as they relate to your goals.
It is important to come up with a strategy that is effective and easy to implement. As for distribution, make use of paid, earned, and owned content distribution to have a wider reach.
