Content marketing is a critical part of your business marketing strategy. However, having a successful content marketing strategy isn’t as easy as writing a few blog posts and publishing them on your website. Before you get started, there are a few steps you should take and questions you should answer to make the most of your strategy.
Do your research.
First, complete a SWOT Analysis. This analyzes your business strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It also maps out marketing strategies your company has implemented in the past, your target audience, and where gaps or opportunities lie for future marketing tactics. A few questions to ask yourself include:
- What advantages does your organization have?
- What do you do better than your competitors?
- What is unique about your business or products?
- Where could you improve?
- What opportunities can you spot?
- Are there industry trends you can take advantage of?
- What obstacles do you face?
Doing an in-depth analysis of your competitors will provide insight into what your business is doing right, or where you can improve. What types of content are they producing? What does their marketing look like? Are they active on social media? What comes up when you Google them?
It may also be helpful to analyze your industry. What are other bloggers writing about? What are potential customers looking for? What questions they have? What solutions are already out there, and where are there gaps in information?
Map out your goals.
What are you hoping to accomplish with your business and how can you do this through good content? Are you hoping to tell your brand story? Build an email subscriber or blog following? Increase brand awareness? Build brand loyalty? Generate leads?
Write your goals down somewhere where you can see them every day.
Strategize.
What do your prospective customers want? What do they need? When, where and how are you sharing your content? Maybe you have an existing page on your website or are planning on building a new page to focus on content. Perhaps you are creating a new website all together. Or, you are planning on using the content solely for email or social media marketing?
Among other things, you must determine what you will do with the content once you create it, how you will share it, and how often.
Develop a list of article topics.
After you’ve determined where, how and when you will communicate your content, it’s time to brainstorm. Before making your content live, you should have 10-20 articles already published. This will take time, and it’s important to spend the time developing good, killer content right off the bat so people immediately see you as the trusted, knowledgeable source. Deciding what to write about should be easy. No one knows your business, industry, products and services better than you!
Get a piece of paper and a pen, or open a new Word document, and list anything that comes to your mind that you could write an article about.
Start writing.
Unless you have journalism or writing experience, this is the stage where a freelancer might come in handy. Writing good content takes research, time and effort, and many businesses, both small and large, won’t (or can’t) commit to a strong content strategy because they don’t have the time.
Not only is publishing good content important, it’s also critical to publish new content on a consistent basis. This keeps your business top of mind, at the top of search engine results pages, and top of industry expertise.
Once you begin publishing content, be sure to share it across all of your marketing channels, including social media and email. Then, you can begin measuring success through clicks, time spent on the pages, increase in leads or website traffic, final sales, and social and content engagement.
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