7 Simple Steps to Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is a very effective way to grow your company’s online presence, generate more traffic to your website and acquire high quality leads on a regular basis. The key is to create useful and relevant content consistently, and promote this content on your company’s blog, social media sites, email newsletters, etc. to get as much visibility and traction as possible from each piece of content. Setting up a content marketing strategy will help to make the process of creating and publishing good quality content on a regular basis much easier.
1. Identify Who You are Trying to Reach
Before creating any content, it’s important to clearly identify your target audience and who the content will be created for. Creating a buyer persona will help you to formulate key demographics, and the needs, desires, and pain points of the people you are trying to reach through your content marketing strategy.
2. Establish a Structure for Your Content
Once you’ve identified your target audience, the next step is to determine how you want to organize your content. Content can be organized by themes, products, services, categories, time periods, events, etc.
For example, Aspire ID’s content marketing strategy is organized by the types of services we offer. These include: Website Design, Search Engine Optimization, Blogging, Social Media (with sub-categories for each platform), Email Marketing, and Online Branding. All of the content we create falls into one of these categories.
3. Conduct Keyword Research
Conduct keyword research to learn the keyword phrases people use when seeking out companies like yours. Try to find keywords that have high volumes but aren’t very competitive.
4. Create a List of Content Ideas
Create a list of at least 50 content ideas and organize them by category, theme, service, etc. Here are 30 content ideas to help inspire your content list.
5. Create an Editorial Calendar
Create an editorial calendar at least three to twelve months out. The calendar can be easily created using a spreadsheet or an actual calendar tool such as Google Calendar.
Using the content list, schedule content for each month and include details about who will be responsible for creating the content, and deadlines for development.
6. Work the Plan
With your plan in place, it’s time to put your content management program in motion. As with many things in life, practice will make the process easier over time. It doesn’t need to be perfect from the beginning. What matters is that the plan is in place and is being executed on a continual and consistent basis.
7. Measure Results & Modify as Needed
Track and monitor your results each month, ask for feedback from your current customers, and adjust your plan as needed.
