Marketing strategy is an essential element in every company, even a small one. It can concern different areas, but for me the most important is the online strategy, because it is part of the content marketing strategy. It is the most important element of the effective content marketing circle, to which I devoted the first entry on my blog. Today it is time to answer the question of how to create a strategy. Creating a strategy can be divided into 6 stages.
CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY IN 6 STAGES
content marketing strategy
STEP 1: Defining the Goal
You can read more about this here , but for now I just want to remind you that a well-defined content marketing goal is a measurable goal. So if your goal is to increase traffic to your site, then be specific greece business email list about how much traffic you want to achieve. If your goal is to increase the number of leads, then also be specific about how many new people you want to acquire.
I also want to remind you that the goal must be not only measurable, but also time-defined. So you can assume that you want to achieve the goal within 3 months, half a year, a year.
The safest perspective is six months – it is already long enough for you to be able to see the effects of your actions (remember – content marketing is a long-term activity, not a sprint!). However, it is not too long for the set goal to fade in time.
Of course, you can set yourself an annual goal, but then after the first half of the year it is a good time to check and analyze the situation and, if necessary, modify the activities carried out.
STEP 2: Building a persona
Now that you know what you want to achieve, it's time to build a persona. This is an essential step in building a content marketing strategy - in fact, probably the most important step. Without knowing who a persona is, you won't be able to precisely target the needs of your audience, and as a result, you'll reduce your chances of achieving your goal.
My previous posts will help you build a persona: part 1 and part 2. If you would like to receive an additional tool that will support the entire process, sign up for my newsletter. On the last Monday of February, a useful Excel sheet will be sent to all subscribers that will support the work on building a persona.
STEP 3: Competition Analysis
Before you start creating content based on knowledge about your customers, you should take a look at your competition. See how they communicate with customers, what image they are building, what content marketing strategy they have adopted.
The ideal situation would be for your competition to have no content marketing activities. Then your company, offering potential customers valuable content, can gain a huge competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the probability that this is the case in your industry is very low. More and more companies in every industry are deciding to engage in content marketing activities. Some do it better, others worse, but it is always worth observing their activities in this field.
If you think their strategy is really good, then it's worth being inspired by these actions and learning from the best. I'm not encouraging you, God forbid, to copy their content or method of communication. I'm rather encouraging you to be inspired, analyze their actions, draw conclusions, or simply use benchmarking, which always works out for the best.
STEP 4: Defining the topic
Stage 4 definitely brings you closer to the actual production of content. At this stage, taking into account your goals, personas and the strategy used by your competitors, you need to determine what topics will be the best. So you need to take on the role of your persona and think about what exactly they are looking for on the Internet.
So, for example, if you are a seller of children's shoes, you can write an article about how to measure the length of the foot, when to change shoes to new ones or when to buy your first shoes. With such topics, you will give your potential customers the answer to their questions before they even look for a place to buy shoes. Thanks to this, you increase the chance that they will remember your store and come back to it when they want to make an actual purchase.
When determining the topic, it is also useful to research the competitiveness of keywords that are related to your industry. This is important not only for positioning, but also for the usability of the content offered. One of the guiding principles of content marketing is that the content presented should bring value.
Remember that you don't have to plan your topics for the entire six months. It's enough to define your topics, for example, a month in advance. This will allow you to notice what content is the most popular, what really interests your readers, and to choose the content you publish accordingly.
In my case, the first list of topics for the blog had 10 items. After publishing 9 of them, I can already see which topics are more popular and I will develop them. For now, the most popular topic is building a persona, so (as I mentioned above) in the next newsletter I will include tools useful for creating one.
STEP 5: Publication Calendar
The editorial calendar is nothing more than a list of topics developed in stage 4, set in a specific time frame. For me, it is simply entering topics of posts on specific days of the calendar and I try to stick to that calendar.
Some topics also have a note about infographics by design. Other infographics are created during the writing of posts, because only then do we discover that certain topics would be better supplemented with graphics.
STEP 6: Content Creation
Here we come to the point where many of my clients come to me. While many of them develop the previous stages themselves, they often outsource content creation. As a copywriter, I often receive a list of topics to develop and a calendar of their publication. On this basis, I create SEO-optimized texts , which are later published on company blogs.
Of course, not all companies outsource these activities to copywriters. Some of them do it on their own, which is especially important when the content being published requires specific knowledge, e.g. technical or medical. In such areas, good substantive content is difficult to obtain, even based on sources, because it often also requires practical knowledge.
