Content promotion and distribution have been hot topics in growth marketing, and for good reason. Brands that have struggled to find success through content marketing initiatives are beginning to understand why they need more than a favorite social media channel. A struggling content distribution strategy is usually less of a quality content or platform issue and more of an audience issue. (more…)

One of the most important reasons any brand creates great content is to become visible. As Tony Robbins says, setting goals is the best way to make that happen. You know you need a content marketing strategy, but do you know why? What are your content strategy goals? Do you know what outcomes you want to get from creating content for your brand? How will your content marketing objective help you reach a potential customer?

Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible to the visible.
--Tony Robbins

By setting content marketing goals, you can tailor your content strategy to meet your business objective. By strategically setting your content marketing goal, you can focus on the type of content that will achieve these goals. This is far better than blindly creating content and hoping it gets read. No experienced content strategist takes this approach to digital marketing.

Creating Brand Awareness

Whether you're a small business startup or have been pounding the content production pavement for years, brand awareness is where your content marketing efforts all begin. It should represent the foundation for your content strategy framework and be the content goal that fuels your blog posts, social media, and other marketing efforts.

You won't make any sales if potential customers don't know who you are. Not only do you want them to know you, but you want them to think of your brand when they think of your industry or main product line. When you sneeze, do you reach for a tissue or a Kleenex? While your brand may never realize Kleenex-level recognition, setting brand awareness as one of your primary content marketing goals is crucial during your initial content strategy process.

Conversely, if you are a well-recognized brand, brand awareness will not be your primary business goal. However, it could still remain at the forefront of any content piece you create.

Creating brand awareness can be done through concerted efforts of outreach, which means focusing on good content, be it a blog post or social media content that can go viral and get you recognized, as well as build your presence and get you connected with your target audience.

Because more than 91% of retail brands use two or more social channels, you don't want to be part of that 9% who aren't participating in making a name for yourself. One of the best parts of social media marketing for new brands who undoubtedly have low marketing budgets? It is absolutely free, and the return on investment can be astronomical when executed strategically as part of your content marketing plan.

Consider Inviting Others to Speak Highly of Your Brand

Another great content outlet that helps you gain brand awareness is guest posting. Guest posting is the new "word-of-mouth," one of the most helpful content ideas, and this effective content strategy can pay off big time.

Up to 85% of small businesses get most of their business by word-of-mouth, so it is an avenue any brand trying to create awareness needs to go down. By getting your brand talked about in relevant publications, your target audience will take notice. Your digital PR should focus on creating a problem, solving the problem, and selling your brand as the best solution.

At this stage, it is all about building trust with your audience, and your content should be tailored accordingly.

• Winner: Social Media Content and Guest Posting

Positioning Your Brand As a Thought Leader

Running a successful company is normally the primary goal of any business, but more important than that is being a leader in the industry.

Thought leadership shows your audience that you don't just sell your products, you live them. This is important because it builds trust in your brand and creates value for your customers, ensuring long-term customer relationships.

In setting your content goals, if being a thought leader is important to your brand, you'll need to address this in your strategy, and you can do that by putting out more long-form content. You can achieve this by creating guides, e-books, and blog posts that are 2,000+ words.

It's not only about length, but your content should also be super valuable and give your readers actionable advice that they can't get from anywhere else. Long-form content can also ranks higher in search engines. It gets more shares and views, making it a worthwhile endeavor on all fronts.

• Winner: Long-Form Content

Driving Traffic

Quality content begets content in the case of driving traffic.

You want your customers and leads to reading the content you've skillfully created and curated on your website, but how do you get them there? With more content, of course!

If your primary content strategy goal is to drive traffic to your website, you'll need to focus on your outreach and your social media channels, as well as your SEO strategies. You can have a regularly-updated blog, with targeted keywords and value-driven content that you can link back to while doing guest posts and social posts.

To drive traffic to your website, your content strategy plan should be comprehensive and incorporate all aspects of content creation. This includes blogging, newsletters, social media, and guest posting. All of your content channels are important when you are trying to drive traffic.

• Winner: All Content Channels

Generating Leads

Traffic is great (unless you are stuck in it), but it is nothing if you aren't gaining valuable leads from the people who visit your site or your target audience isn't reading your content.

This is where your website, especially your landing page, comes in. Your content strategy should always incorporate your website, especially if you have valuable content and good traffic...but few leads.

Before you begin to create content, start by figuring out the purpose of your website and the primary goal of your homepage. Your content should reflect this and give your readers a great user experience for your targeted audience. Your home page should be quick, colorful, and appealing to those who you've already defined as qualified leads.

Take a good look at your current website and its existing content. Conduct a content audit. Look for content gaps that surface in your Google Analytics reporting. Optimize what you do have for search engine optimization (SEO). Ensure your content format suits your brand and gives that amazing user experience your customers are looking for. Provide a full report of your findings to your content team.

Commit Your Plan to Writing

After all this has been done, you're ready to build an effective content calendar. In addition to clear deadlines, every item should identify content type. It should name the marketer on your team who is primarily responsible for completion. Who will be writing your blog posts? Which content marketer gives the go-ahead for your email campaigns?

Email marketing is another avenue that is important for lead generation. In fact, email can be more important than social media marketing in terms of customer retention. It's a part of any good content strategy. A full 80% of retailers say that email marketing is their most important customer retention channel. Another 59% of marketers say email is the most effective marketing channel and an especially powerful tool in the B2B marketing space.

• Winner: Web and Email Content

Converting Leads and/or Upselling

You may have a fairly large audience already but aren't getting the sales you want to see.

If your goal is to convert more leads and get more upsells, you'll want to tailor your content marketing strategy to hook your existing leads and customer base. Your focus should be on your emails and newsletters and your social media. This is where your customers have already opted in. They are most primed to see your content.

It's important to keep them hearing your name by sending out regular emails and social media updates. The information should be pertinent and valuable to your audience so that you can pull them back to your brand with everything they read or see. Specialized offers that are tailored to them as loyal customers will do the trick and turn your leads converted into long-term and dependable customers. (Make sure you take down or revise limited timeframe offers as part of your regular content audit!)

A recent study found that brands that post on social media regularly have more loyal customers. By keeping your social media presence up, performing your content audit regularly, and giving your current audience value, they'll go from lead to customer easily.

• Winner: Email and Social Media Content

By focusing your content strategy on one or two specific goals, you better position your brand to realize those goals. You will see a better ROI from the content you take the time to produce.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, there are four goals that ought to remain front and center whether you are engaged in B2C or B2B content marketing. However, your goals may change over time. Consequently, it is always important to reassess what you've done and how it has worked.

If you are interested in a call to help with your content marketing strategy, please schedule a call with a Relevance strategist.

Content marketing is nothing without a content marketing strategy. Content marketing strategies are critical to have in hand before you commit to a social media platform, engage in email marketing, develop interactive content, hire marketers, or even just conduct a brainstorming session for content ideas.

You can have the most interesting, thought-provoking piece of interactive content out there. You might have the world's greatest content marketer on staff. However, it's all for naught if it can't be found by the right people. Likewise, professional marketers know that great content means nothing if it doesn't reach its target audience.

No matter what stage of your content creation process you're in, whether you're in pre-planning - deciding on content format, conducting a content audit, or finishing up and wondering how to present your blog post to the world through social media marketing - now is the time to start thinking about the best content marketing strategy for optimizing and distributing that content to your audience.

Seasoned marketers know that the world's greatest content production workflow and search engine optimization tactic means nothing in the absence of a documented strategy. Similarly, content marketing strategies help convert existing customers into unpaid brand loyalty cheerleaders.

Do I Really Need a Content Strategy?

Yes! The point of your content is to be seen, read, heard, and, most importantly, shared as part of the average customer journey.

But what good is your high quality content if it's never seen? Why develop any top-notch content asset if it doesn't gain any traction in the marketplace? Research by the Content Marketing Institute has shown that countless brands who succeed at digital marketing develop and follow a content marketing strategy. As a result, they consider their content marketing efforts to be more successful and found content marketing, in general, to be less challenging.

Significantly, these companies were later able to justify a higher content marketing budget that allowed them to invest in higher quality content.

What Does a Successful Content Marketing Strategy Look Like?

Your content marketing strategy should be a part of any content creation your company does.

While there are no defined "rules" for building a content marketing strategy, it's important to include these nine key components in any content marketing effort. Make sure you address all nine of them before you create content, sink considerable resources into video marketing, build a content calendar, or engage in any form of content promotion.

1. Understand your audience better with a buyer persona and research.

Every piece of content your brand develops should be created with someone in mind.

A potential customer is more likely to make a purchase from a brand they identify with. Consequently, relevant content begins and ends with that brand demonstrating a keen understanding of its audience. Valuable content gets shared via social media and starts moving up in search engine results.

Understanding your target audience includes very basic factors such as their age, gender, education level, and even income. However, it also goes deeper than that. What does your audience want? What problems are they facing? Which social media channels do they seem to prefer? How can your product or service create content to help solve those problems?

Don't just assume. You won't hit upon an effective content marketing strategy by spitballing. Research your target audience and see who's already engaged with your brand. What content type hits home consistently? Can you create content that answers felt needs?

Additionally, you can even set up simple online surveys to send via email marketing to your current audience. Build audience profiles and your content calendar based on the results. Begin to have your creative types sketch out some content marketing examples they think might be seen as in tune and responsive. However, your audience won't fit a single category. On the other hand, research can help you develop a primary "buyer persona" that fits the profiles of much of your audience, as well as several secondary personas.

2. Conduct some keyword research.

Now that you understand your main audience, place yourself in their shoes as you consider various content marketing strategies.

What are they searching for when they need your product or service? Make a list of basic keywords surrounding your brand, as well as any variations: "New York painters" and "New York painting," for example. You know your niche well, so draw from all possible terms used for what you have to offer.

Once you have these keywords, you're ready to do some digital marketing. Integrate them into your content. Here are a few reasons why.

• Integrating keywords into blogs and other online content is good for SEO and generating organic traffic.
• It allows your audience to figure out quickly whether or not they've found the content they need before moving on.
• It establishes your brand as an authority in your field.

3. Identify effective content.

Next, you need to ask yourself, "What sort of content will my audience respond to? What content format are they looking for?" If your audience is more likely to read a blog post, would you waste time creating a video? Do they enjoy email marketing more than SMS texting? In the same vein, if they want how-to guides, will they spend hours looking at case studies that only tell them "Why?" Probably not.

Identifying the most effective content starts with identifying and listing to your audience. However, it will likely also include some trial and error as you experiment with different types of content to see what works for you and your content strategy. In short, the most common types of content include:

• blog post, articles, how-to guides;
• infographics;
• video content;
• eBooks and white papers;
• email newsletters;
• social media posts;
• podcasts; and
• eCourses and webinars.

4. Decide on placement.

Another reason to develop an understanding of your audience is to determine where they're looking for online content.

Are they searching YouTube for the latest videos on your niche...or do they spend most of their free time browsing Instagram for great photos? Similarly, are they likely to respond to (often expensive) Facebook ads?

For content such as blogs, articles, and landing pages that lead to additional content, implementing an SEO strategy is a good place to start. However, it's also important to maintain active business pages for any relevant social media platforms. Likewise, influencer marketing can be another effective way to expand the reach of your content and build brand awareness.

5. Develop your brand's voice.

The most successful brands develop a "personality" that their audience can recognize and identify with. This is often overlooked in content strategy, but it's also one of the most important aspects of a brand.

As with every stage of your content marketing strategy, start with your buyer personas. What sort of personality will they most identify with? Is that voice friendly, formal, or silly? What sort of language and terms will they understand? Where does this crowd gather when on social media? Additionally, what do they not want to hear about?

6. This one's tough. Stay consistent.

The key to knowing whether your content strategy is effective is to stay consistent.

If you publish one post per month on Facebook, it shouldn't be surprising that your social media presence isn't growing very quickly. Develop a content schedule and stick to it.

7. Analyze the results.

Whether it's weekly, monthly, or quarterly, never leave your content without tracking the results.

This can include monitoring view and click rates, reading customer comments and responses, social media likes and shares, or even tracking eCommerce stats in relation to your content releases. Data tracking will allow you to analyze the results of your content marketing efforts and learn what's effective...and what isn't.

8. Revisit and revise.

Why track the data if you're not going to utilize the results? Collecting data by itself won't affect even one search engine. You need to leverage what you've learned.

It's a good idea to sit down with your content marketing team at least once per year, if not once per fiscal quarter, and go over your current strategy. Take note of what worked, what didn't, and where you'd like to improve. What do your website analytics reveal? Which social media campaigns received the best response? Adjust your existing content accordingly.

9. Try new things!

Research is great, but it never hurts to try something new if your content marketing timeline (and budget) allow for a little experimentation.

Jump on social media trends, try out new technology, or reach out to your audience and ask them what they'd like to see. This is where maintaining a content calendar will really pay off. Just make sure you're always tracking the results so you can revisit and potentially add something new as part of your successful content marketing strategy.

Now that you've developed and followed your content marketing strategy, it's time to go through the entire process again!

Content marketing strategy is a never-ending process that needs to be followed, analyzed, and revised on a regular basis if you want your strategy to be effective at capturing leads for your business. Engage, refine, and rework on a regular basis, and your content marketing efforts will show better results consistently.