How To Create A Content Marketing Strategy In 4 Steps

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a content marketing strategy that works on autopilot? - Imagine your content brings you thousands of visitors and helps you convert these visitors into loyal paying customers.

One thing is for sure - blogs thrive on consistency, and managing a consistent publication schedule can be difficult, but a content calendar tool can make your life easier.

If your content marketing strategy works like that - you will be able to grow your business endless in the coming years.

And you’ll also don’t need that high a budget. 46% of businesses spent 10k or less per year on content marketing.

However, most marketers struggle with their content marketing strategy. According to Marketing Profs and the CMI, 63% of businesses do not have a documented content strategy.

But why do most businesses not have a clear content marketing strategy?

It is because creating a content marketing strategy from scratch is very hard - it takes a lot of time and effort to research all the details you need.

I can not give you a magic formula to make your content marketing work, but I can show you what has worked well for most companies over the last few years.

These four steps will help you create a content marketing strategy tailored to your business needs.

1. Identify your marketing goals

The first thing you need to do is to identify your marketing goals. Why is content marketing better for your business than other marketing strategies?

What are the main goals of your content marketing? Do you want to create new leads, demand, or position your business as an authority in your industry?

Before you start a content marketing campaign, you need to know the answers to all these questions. And most important - you need to know the goal of your content marketing exactly.

To identify your business goal and the goal of your content marketing, try to answer these questions: 

How does my business make money?

What are the main goals of our content marketing?

How can content marketing help my business make more money?

What’s our budget for content marketing?

What’s our expected outcome?

In fact, you need to know how your business is making money in the first place. Then, you need to know how content marketing can help your business make more money. Finally, make sure to know your budget and your expected outcome.

2. Define your audience

When you know your business goals and how content marketing helps you achieve these goals, you need to define your target audience.

Remember that content marketing will only be successful when your content is tailored to your audience.

Your audience must find your content informative and engaging. They need to want to consume your content, share it and tell other people about your business.

Your content marketing is only effective if your audience is engaged by your content.

To create engaging content, you need to know your audience. Thus, developing different personas for your audience might be helpful.

Here are the main questions you need to answer when creating a persona:

• How old are your customers?
• What is their income?
• What is their highest level of education?
• Where do they live?
• What is their goal?
• What are their hobbies?
• What initially attracted them to your business?
• How often do they check their emails?
• What type of online or print articles do they read?
• What publications, blogs, or social media networks do they pay attention to?
• Which social media networks do they use?
• Which search engine do they use? 

You’ll know a lot more about your audience if you can answer all these questions. And not only that - you’ll also know which content you need to produce and where to spread your content.

3. Determine your content type

This is the next step if you want to develop a content marketing strategy from scratch. What content do you want to produce to achieve your content marketing goals?

48% of marketers are making YouTube Video a priority within their content marketing. 

50% of marketers are making blogging a priority within their content marketing.

It’s up to you which content type you use within your marketing. However, you need to consider your audience preferences to make this decision.

That’s the reason why you should create your buyer personas in the first step.

I would recommend that you combine blogging with video. What you can do is to create a comprehensive blog post on a topic and then create a video for YouTube to promote that blog post.

Keep in mind that marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see a positive ROI.

4. Decide where to spread your content

Creating awesome content is one thing. But promoting it is the other thing. If nobody consumes your content, all the hard work will be wasted.

To avoid this worst-case scenario, you must choose a few strategies to promote your content.

I would recommend searching Google for content promotion strategies; however, here are 5 strategies that worked great for the majority of businesses over the last couple of years:

• Facebook Ads
• Outreach
• Re-purpose Content
• Native Advertising
• Franchise marketing
• E-Mail Marketing

5. Pay attention to opportunity costs

Most people want to promote their content for free - but they don’t realize that there’s no free promotion strategy for their content.

Let’s say you want to promote your content on Quora. You need to invest 5h per week to get 100 clicks per month to your article. This means that you need to invest 20h to get 100 clicks by the end of the month. 

What is that for a miserable ROI?

This is where opportunity costs come into the game. Here is what it is:

Opportunity costs represent the potential benefits an individual, investor, or business misses out on when choosing one alternative over another. The idea of opportunity costs is a major concept in economics.

Source: Investopedia

Keep track of your opportunity costs when choosing between different content promotion strategies. In this case, it would be much more lucrative to spend $50 on Facebook Ads.

Conclusion

Whether you own an eCommerce business, want to start as an Amazon seller, or own a SaaS business, you need to do content marketing.

Creating a content marketing strategy from scratch is hard - but it’s uber important if you want to succeed with content marketing.

If you have no goal and no strategy, you’re likely to fail because you won’t be able to achieve a positive ROI for your business.

To avoid this, go through each step of this article.

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