Content marketing offers numerous opportunities to businesses to boost their results. By creating relevant and valuable content for users, you can increase your reputation online, grow advocates for your brand, and build your community. Content Marketing is not just about delivering and creating content. There is an entire strategic approach to content marketing that allows you to attract and engage a clearly defined audience and generate profitable customer action.
Four Elements of Content Marketing Strategy
- Positioning Your Brand
Clearly defined product and brand positioning will help you build the right image and provide a consistent experience for your audience through all your content marketing channels. The following questions will help you in brainstorming about their position in the market.
What is my brand’s unique value?
Who are my potential and existing customers?
What problems are my product solving?
What makes my product a better choice than my competitors?
How do I highlight my brand’s personality?
- Owned Media Value Proposition
You need to define your owned media value proposition, to establish your brand as a credible content publisher. Start researching the type of content your audience prefers, the type of information, and their favorite resources. Ofter brands pay more attention to their market rivals and don’t pay enough attention to their content creators. Also, make sure to make unbranded media, like online magazines, influencer videos, and industry blogs part of your competitive research.
- Business Case
In addition to attracting a new audience and readers, Content marketing should drive your business forward. Providing value to your customers is also an integral part of your content marketing strategy.
- Strategic Plan
A strategic plan should focus on how you will achieve your business goals. This strategic plan should help you decide how you will reach your target audience, how you will deliver your content to them, and lastly how you will achieve or measure your targeted results.
Seven Steps to Creating a Content Strategy Plan
Step 1: Audit your existing content
Considering there are approximately 1.6 billion websites on the web and 70+ million blogs published every month there is numerous information for the user to click on. A content audit can basically help you in this era of mass content production to stand out.
Step 2: Establish Your Content Marketing Goals
To meet your content marketing goals, you need to ensure that every piece of your content should help you reach your business goals. Start with the goals related to your vision and mission and then move on to identifying long-term and short-term goals.
Step 3: Determine Your Audience
Finding your audience and driving them to your content will require you to understand their lifestyle, problems, concerns, and needs. Moreover, drawing your audience to your content pieces is the key to success in your content marketing. Before you make your content to reach your buyers, it is essential to deliver content that will attract your customers first.
Step 4: Develop an Editorial Plan
Planning your content beforehand will allow you to allocate resources appropriately. It will also help you see which workflow is taking longer than expected, and then adjust your expectations accordingly. Planning includes prioritizing your actions, finding relevant topics, and using an editorial calendar to organize your work.
Step 5: Plan Content Production
Before starting with your content creation process, think of the purpose of each piece you will be creating. Also, make sure to cover every part of your customer journey. Planning content production includes diversifying your content, creating SEO-friendly content, repurposing content, and taking advantage of user-generated content.
Step 6: Plan Content Distribution
We already discussed previously that one of the four elements of content marketing is owned media development. Owned, earned, or paid media helps to represent essential elements of a content distribution strategy. This generally includes creating an integrated omnichannel experience, identifying the most relevant channels, and automating social media posting.
Step 7: Analyze Your Content Performance
Analyzing your content performance will help you to understand which content is connecting better with the audience. It will also help you in planning your next content piece based on the analysis. The four categories of content metrics are user behavior, engagement, SEO result, and company revenue.
Conclusion
To sum up, the methods used to deliver content are continuously changing but the core elements remain the same. Thus, plan a top-notch content marketing strategy using the core elements and the seven steps to a content strategy plan. Also, we a digital marketing agency in Indore are here to help you in creating a successful content marketing strategy because we understand your needs and the work that needs to be done.