Strategic Content Marketing to Appeal to Your Audience
With more consumers turning to the internet to research products and services before making purchase decisions, your business needs to make high-quality content creation a priority. Since much of today’s consumers’ interactions with brands take place online, they want to read (or view) content of substance that addresses their questions and provides educational value. With this being said, it’s critical that you take a strategic content marketing approach to get the most from your online presence.
The Danger of Not Having a Content Creation Plan
Too many businesses make the mistake of creating content for the sake of creating content. They don’t have a clear content marketing plan and are focused on the number of posts that they’re publishing each month rather than the quality. In an effort to hit their monthly publishing quota, businesses often fill the spaces on their content calendar with topics that have been overdone or aren’t of interest to their audience. Without strategic content marketing, you’re not going to get results from your efforts.
How to Plan for Strategic Content Marketing
If you haven’t already done so, you need to create a strategic content marketing plan for your business. Here are five steps for helping you to accomplish this:
Step 1: Define Your Audience.
You need to have a thorough understanding of who your audience is if you’re going to be able to write content that resonates with them. Take the time to write buyer personas. Since you likely have several different types of customers, you need to develop a buyer persona for each of these groups.
Step 2: Set Goals.
What do you want to gain from your content marketing efforts? Examples could be new leads, more conversions, and increasing website traffic. Be sure to set measurable goals so that you can monitor your progress and make tweaks when necessary.
Step 3: Evaluate Your Existing Content.
Take a look at your existing content to see if it can be re-worked into your strategic content marketing strategy. Perhaps you have some blog posts that have performed well that could further benefit your business by repurposing them into video content.
Step 4: Make a Content Plan.
Once you have a clear definition of who you’re targeting and what you want to accomplish with your content marketing efforts, you’re ready to develop a plan. Brainstorm topics that are relevant to your audience and put together a content calendar to map out your plan of action.
Step 5: Distribute Content.
Realize that distributing content means more than just hitting “publish” on a blog post. Come up with a plan to get your content in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Establish a plan for how you’ll distribute content once it’s published, such as promoting it on social media, including it in an email blast, and encouraging industry influencers to share your content.
Instead of approaching content marketing with a blindfold on, it’s to your benefit to have a clear plan of action in place. Strategic content marketing will allow you to maximize your efforts and reach your goals faster.