Everyday, 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared. With so much content being promoted, shared and liked, how to you compete? The challenge of continuously producing content, the kind that can compete and get attention, requires one thing – a content marketing strategy.
“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”– CMI
Simply documenting a content marketing strategy will make your efforts more effective. According to CMI – those with a documented content marketing strategy:
- Are far more likely to consider themselves effective at content marketing
- Fee significantly less challenged with every aspect of content marketing
- Generally consider themselves more effective in their use of all content marketing tactics and social media channels
- Were able to justify spending a higher percentage of their marketing budget on content marketing
The purpose of creating content is to attract your audience by providing them with something of interest. By documenting your strategy, you will increase the effectiveness of your efforts by delivering content that is relevant to the audience that is most interested – helping you to breakthrough the content clutter. Having your goals in writing also helps to direct your efforts to achievement. And as an added benefit, by providing quality content, content that is considered to have value to your customers, you will contribute to boosting your SEO.
Michael Brenner defines 3 Steps to Building a Content Strategy:
- Why? What is the Business Case? What are your mission and business goals?
- How? Team, actions, and budgets needed.
- What? Show results tied to your business objectives.
According to SAP, content strategy is “the mindset, culture and approach to delivering your customer’s information needs in all the places they are searching for it.”
The benefits of having a content marketing strategy include:
- Consistency in your brand voice, and style of content.
- Planning which results in greater efficiency in content production. Using an Editorial Calendar helps to map each piece of content to a goal, the who, what, and where – who creates the content, what type is developed and how is it leveraged, and when and where is it distributed.
- Having set goals will help with monitoring your metrics, tracking to your KPI’s which helps to make you more effective.
Rather than disrupting your audience with facts and figures they are not interested in, share information that is helpful. Listen to what they are saying and use that to develop content that will be valuable. Therefore, prior to planning the types of content to create, consider the following:
• Buyer Personas - Who is your audience? What are their needs? Understanding your customers and their needs will help you focus your content and marketing efforts.
• Buying Stage - Where are they in the buying process? Knowing your audience is in the process of buying will not only help to determine what the content should be but also the type to create and where to deliver.
“Take your brand out of the story. Make your customers the hero.” – Ann Handley
Define your types of content that will best meet the needs of your customers. Break out your content types by buyer stages. A few types of content to consider:
- Blogs
- Infographics
- Photos/Images
- Video
- Presentations
- Ebooks
- Worksheets and Templates
- Whitepapers
- Case Studies
Putting structure behind your strategy will ensure you stay focused with your content subject matter, the types of content you provide, who and when your content will be created, where it will be distributed, and metrics to define success.