5 Tips To Help You Create A Tip-Top Content Marketing Strategy

Too often, content marketers jump into the execution of their content marketing ideas without first creating a sound strategy.

It can be tempting to plunge right in instead of doing the groundwork of developing a plan, but this approach could do some serious damage to your marketing.

Research from the Content Marketing Institute found that 62% of the most successful content marketing performers had a well researched and documented content strategy, compared to only 16% of the least successful.

No matter how good your content is, if you haven’t got a strategy, you’re unlikely to get the level of engagement that you’re looking for – it might drive some traffic, but not in a consistent and sustained way. If you haven’t taken the time to think through and document your strategy, or you think your current plan could be further refined, it’s time to take it to the next level. Here are five tips to help you.

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1. Do you know who your audience is?

If you don’t know who you’re writing for, figuring out what to write is going to be tricky. If you already have an existing audience then you have a good head start, but if your business is new or you don’t have buyer personas for your existing customers, you’ll have to do a bit of digging.

A good place to start is by engaging with your customers in the places they already congregate online - forums, message boards, social media, review sites - and listen carefully to the things they’re talking about. This will give you a good idea of the tone and content of what you need to produce, and what will be useful to your customers.

2. Establish content themes based on customer pain points

A customer’s ‘pain point’ is a problem or challenge that they face, something that can be solved and soothed by your product or service. If you can figure out what these pain points are through listening to what current or potential customers are talking about, you can adjust your content offering to speak to them in a way that is helpful and meaningful.

However, as your buyers are always changing, and so are their pain points, you need to stay constantly engaged with them. Speak to them directly via social media, forums and email, or use a tool like Buzzsumo to find out what content is currently performing well.

If you can identify popular topics that you can have a take on or, even better, identify topics that no one else is currently discussing, your content value will soar.

A good example of addressing customer-specific pain points comes from presentation tool Prezi:

They have directly tackled the topic of presentation science, as well as mentioned the market leader (PowerPoint) in the mix.

It’s a good idea to directly reference big players in your content if you’ve got something that’s likely to successfully disrupt the market. Just be conscious that you are still ‘playing fair ‘ — this is not an excuse to trash the competition.

3. Use a variety of content formats

Just because you like to get all your content in bite-sized chunks of video, it doesn’t mean that your entire audience does too.

If you only produce content for one channel or in one format, you will miss out on a big slice of your potential audience, so don’t get stuck in comfortable rut.

A recent study on content marketing trends found that marketers use, on average, eight different types of content, including blog posts, social media updates, email marketing, videos, white papers and podcasts, so the competition for attention is stiff.

Do some research on which types of content work better depending on what your aim is: for example, are you trying to raise customer awareness or convince them to make a purchase? Different content is needed for the different points of the buyer journey or sales funnel, and different content formats cater to the different purchasing habits of your customers.

For any business in a multichannel environment, multiple content formats are definitely the way to go.

4. Create an editorial calendar and stick to it

The most successful content marketers know that they have to publish content regularly if they are going to see continued success.

However, they also know that quality is just as important: sharing a lot of poor content will only damage a marketing strategy. Creating an editorial calendar is the key to content that is both high quality and regular because it enables you to plan in advance, giving you the time necessary to craft really great content.

Map out a quarterly or six-monthly plan for the content that you wish to publish across all platforms (if you’re new to editorial calendars, there are plenty of tools and templates available to help you).

A step-by-step approach like this gives your content marketing strategy stability, plus it allows you to more easily track the progress of each piece of content. You will also want a watertight content tracking method to ensure that you’re staying on top of all the items of content you are your team are responsible for.

5. Track the success of your content

Tracking how well your content performs is vital; if you don’t know how well each piece of content is performing, you’re undermining your whole strategy. Every part of the content journey needs to be tracked, from initial interest to engagements to conversions.

Analytics should be used to address both issues and opportunities within a content strategy, and yet only 6% of marketers say they consider themselves very successful at tracking the ROI of their content marketing.

At a basic level, you should be tracking your content via social media metrics and Google Analytics, but you also need to get comfortable with attribution models and tying content products to sales. As well as content marketing, on-site copywriting is a powerful sales opportunity, so don’t just get tunnel vision and focus on campaigns and blog posts. Look at your content production in a holistic and all-encompassing way.

You find this blog post interesting? Discover 7 Simple Ways to Write Product Descriptions That Sell - highly recommended.

Developing an in-depth content strategy takes time and effort, but once you have done the groundwork of identifying your audience and their needs and creating an editorial calendar, you will be freed up to create high quality content that meets your customers’ needs.

  Victoria Greene is a branding consultant and freelance writer. She’s a content marketing enthusiast and on her blog, VictoriaEcommerce, talks about the hot topics in the industry. She is passionate about helping brands develop their marketing strategies.