Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing Strategy
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING, AND DO I REALLY NEED IT FOR MY BUSINESS?
Content marketing is simply the way you educate, inspire, and provide value to your audience. It’s the key to cultivating the kind of relationship that supports their needs and wants.
Your emails, social media posts, blogs, videos, landing pages -- that’s all content, and how you share that content is called content marketing.
The forms in which you share information - written, visual, or audible - with your audience is absolutely crucial to attracting your ideal client.
The reason that having and implementing a content marketing strategy is so important to your business is because it’s your pathway to building brand awareness, online authority, and web traffic which will ultimately produce new leads and sales.
Bottom line? It’s the most effective (and totally free) way to boost your know, like, and trust factor.
HOW TO DEVELOP A CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY
The goal of a content marketing strategy is to create, curate and share content. You want to choose content that builds a trusted relationship between what you offer (your products and services) and the people who may eventually buy them (your ideal client).
STEP 1 : Start with your vision.
Where is your business headed in the next few years? What are the goals you’re looking to achieve? What stepping stones do you need to put in place to accomplish those goals?
The content you create should be used as a conduit to help you fulfill this vision. Think of it as moving you onto each of those stepping stones, ever closer to your goal.
STEP 2 : Know your audience.
If you developed a business plan, you likely have a strong sense of your target audience. This is the perfect time to revisit it.
If you haven’t created a business plan, no worries, check out my Business Plans for Startups Checklist here. Simply ask yourself questions like:
Where does my ideal client hang out online?
What are their pain points?
Which influencers do they follow?
How do they consume information?
The answer to these questions will set the foundation for the content you create and curate.
Step 3 : Establish your voice
Much like in your brand strategy, the tone of voice and specific words you use in your content should be in alignment with your brand voice.
Do you take a serious approach? Educational? Funny? Are you more practical and tactical in what you provide, or is your content more philosophical and theoretical?
Use your brand descriptors to guide your content. Better yet, use them to create some writing prompts for your content!
Step 4 : Develop a bank of content ideas
A bank of ideas for your content will help you stay organized in your marketing, make it easier to timeblock your content creation ,and provide inspiration when writer’s block hits. Write it all down now when you’re in the planning stage.
What topics will grab your audience’s attention? What obstacles do they face that you can address? What can you provide that helps move them from where they’re at now to where they want to be?
Want to know the secret to getting it done in 15 minutes flat? Make a list of the bigger categories and then break them up into smaller content ideas to develop a bank that you can use as content marketing in your business.
WHAT TYPE OF CONTENT YOU SHOULD CREATE
There are many different forms of content you can create and there are two considerations to use in determining what type of content is right for your business.
First, how does your ideal client like to consume information? Are they readers - online or offline? Digital or print? Do they prefer to listen? Watch? Slideshow?
Second, in what form do you enjoy creating content?
Find the intersection of what you enjoy and what your ideal client consumes to determine what type of content you should create. Think of it as a Venn Diagram of your content preferences.
Feel free to mix it up a bit as you’re just getting started to “test” out what’s working and gaining the most traction. And don’t be afraid to ask your audience for feedback and suggestions to get to the heart of what they want.
HOW TO USE CONTENT MARKETING TO INCREASE ONLINE VISIBILITY
The key to mastering content marketing is in the distribution. The challenge every business owner faces is getting their content in front of the right people at the right time.
Here are three ways to increase visibility for the content you create:
1 | Post it on your blog
This one seems obvious, but the key is consistency. It’s not about posting every day or even every week, but the regularity with which you add new content to your blog should be reliable. The more the merrier is the theme here as your ideal client will come to anticipate your new content and visit your website with added frequency as you become their go-to resource.
Also, if you create YouTube content or host a podcast, include links to that content on your blog. One of the most effective ways to do this is by embedding the YouTube video, Spotify player, etc. into your blog post page with an introduction to the content or a quick recap of the main points.
2 | Be Active on Social Media
Like it or not, social media is where it’s at. With billions of people using at least one social media platform on a daily basis, you’d be missing out on enormous potential by ignoring these channels.
But how do you get the most benefit from social media without selling your soul (or giving up hours every day!)?
There are two ways you can use social media to increase traffic to your content.
The first is to share your content with links back to your website or blog.
Post it on your Facebook page.
Post videos on YouTube.
Create an Instagram Story about the new blog
Share an excerpt of the content on LinkedIn
In all instances, the important thing is to link back to the content on your website.
The second way to use social media as part of your content strategy is engaging. Yes, this can be time-intensive, because it requires actually showing up, spending time in conversations, and providing value to your ideal client. It works because it builds trust and authority.
You can do this by commenting on posts, starting conversations in direct messages (DMs), offering suggestions to their questions. This is how you ignite relationships on social media that ultimately translate to new visitors to your website and customers for your business.
3 | Focus on SEO
There’s a trick to getting the search engine traction that brings floods of leads in your digital doors. The easiest way to get started and improve your ranking among the search engines is to incorporate more links in your content.
Link to your other blog posts, your videos, your guest podcast episode, your social media posts. Look for themes emerging in your content and add links to other content where you’ve shared similar or overlapping ideas.
Another quick and easy SEO tactic to increase visibility is to incorporate specific keywords into your content.
Before you write or record, ensure you’re tackling topics that people are searching for and so you can meaningfully and intentionally incorporate the keyword or phrase into your content that the search engines are primed to pick up.
Sometimes, just by creating a list of keywords you want to use, you’ll incorporate them naturally because they’re top of mind. Don’t worry about stuffing your content with extra phrases just to get keywords in there.
Here are three free tools you can use to get started with a keyword search:
Google Adwords Keyword Planner provides monthly global and local keyword search volumes.
Google Trends is a useful tool for determining which of several similar terms is more popular
Keyword Tool is a free online tool that generates hundreds of relevant keywords for any topic.