Studies continue to show that content marketing generates more than 3x as many leads compared to traditional marketing. Furthermore, it costs 62% less than traditional marketing efforts. If those numbers alone aren’t enough to convince you that your business needs a high-performing content marketing strategy now, here are a few more compelling reasons.
8 reasons your business should have a content marketing strategy
1. It Builds Loyal and Trusting Fans
The number one benefit of having a solid business content marketing strategy is that you’ll generate a loyal customer base. Word of mouth is still one of the most highly effective forms of marketing due to the trust factor. When you create invaluable content that your consumers love, they’ll naturally rave about you to all of their friends.
2. You’ll Establish Your Brand Identity and Position Yourself as an Expert
Position yourself as an authority in your niche to create a strong brand identity that separates you from the competition. Consumers are eagerly searching to purchase from brands they can connect with, either consciously or subconsciously.
3. It Will Increase Your Online Visibility Through Organic SEO
Have you heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Research shows that nearly 80% of shoppers use the internet to research products and services before they buy. The best way to show up on search engines is to take advantage of organic SEO. In order to do this, you need to create informative, useful, and engaging content across all of your online channels (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, your website, affiliate sites, etc).
4. To Attract and Nurture Qualified Leads
When you create valuable content with the customer in mind, you’ll attract and guide the right target audience through every phase of your sales funnel. Through content marketing, you’re providing useful content that drives new leads directly to you in a well-thought-out customer journey! No more chasing cold leads. When done correctly, a content marketing strategy will nurture and convert qualified leads straight into your business. Sounds pretty good, right?!
5. It is Extremely Cost-Effective
Compared to other types of marketing, content marketing is more cost-effective and produces a higher ROI. But don’t expect instant results! It is a long-term strategy that can take a bit of time to start generating conversions. However, there is no quick solution that will produce these kinds of lasting results.
6. It’s Simple to Measure and Analyze
As a business owner, you want to see that what you’re paying for is actually working. A killer content marketing strategy will outline new goals to be met on a consistent basis. Through data analytics, such as Google Analytics or social media insights, we can provide measurable results to improve your ROI every month. This is an effective way to keep us on track and you in the loop of what’s working and what isn’t. The content marketing strategy should be tweaked and tailored every month to ensure the highest quality results for your business.
7. It Boosts Brand Awareness Across Social Media
Looking to become insta-famous or to go viral? This isn’t an overnight goal, but we can generate share-worthy content that can spread across social media like wildfire! When creating fun and engaging content for your audiences, they’ll want to share it with their friends, who will want to show their friends, and so on. This is a fantastic way to boost your brand awareness and get people talking about your brand across social media.
8. It Drives Website Traffic
All of the content that you create should have one main goal in mind: driving traffic to your website. Whether you’re launching a new product or service, offering a limited sale or promotion, or releasing a new blog or video, your target audience should be directed to your website to learn more or make a purchase. With an effective content marketing strategy, all of these touchpoints in the customer journey will be planned out and executed to capture and nurture your leads into life-long customers.
What’s included in a content marketing strategy?
In order to be successful, your content marketing strategy should begin by outlining these four key components.
1. Brand Positioning
Discuss brand positioning with your creative team to clearly define how your brand and products differ from competitors and how you will communicate with your audiences. This is extremely important for your branding as a whole to stay consistent with your messaging across all of your marketing channels. Start by asking these questions:
- How does your brand’s voice and personality differ from the competition?
- What value does your brand bring to the market?
- What problems do my products help resolve?
- How will you stand out from the competition?
2. Target Audience
A major component in any marketing strategy is understanding who you’re trying to reach with your content. Identifying one or multiple buyer personas – an individual person with certain characteristics and traits – can help you write content that piques their interest.
Each buyer persona may include a breakdown of demographics (age, gender, geo-location, education, job title, annual income, and family status), as well as behavioral and cultural traits (fears, goals, values, needs, buying habits, political or social standing, and other interests).
3. S.M.A.R.T. Goals
It’s crucial to know why you are creating content so you can efficiently assess the risks involved, costs, and success of implementing a content marketing strategy. Establishing S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals will help you decide what should be included in your content marketing plan.
4. Content Marketing Strategy Plan
Once all three components above have been outlined, it’s time to develop a content marketing strategy plan. A strategic content plan should include a breakdown of:
- S.M.A.R.T. Goals
- Target Audience
- Competitor Research
- Keyword Research
- Content & Asset Review
- Customer Journey Roadmap
- Content Calendar
Your content marketing strategy plan will need monthly maintenance and quarterly reviews to ensure you are achieving the defined goals. Let’s further outline the specifics of building a strategic content marketing plan to help you get started.
How to build a content marketing strategy plan
After discussing and outlining the first three key components with your team, you can start to build a content marketing strategy plan. Developing a content plan allows your team to stay organized and on track of accomplishing your goals. Here are seven major steps to build a content marketing strategy plan:
1. S.M.A.R.T. Goals
It’s important to note that you’ll have overarching business goals, as well as separate content goals. Your business goals, such as your mission or values, will likely remain the same year after year. But your content goals will need to be monitored closely every month.
For your content marketing, you’ll want to define key performance indicators (KPI’s) or metrics to help you measure the success of your goals. Some important metrics to review more frequently include:
- New followers
- Likes, comments, or messages
- Profile views
- Link clicks
- Website visitors
- Email signups
- Open rates
- Click-thru rates
- Monthly revenue
2. Target Audience
Once you’ve defined your target audience, you can tailor your content plan to create various types of content and distribute it on various channels to reach your ideal customers. Your target audience won’t live solely on one channel, so knowing where your audience lives online will allow you to reach more than one type of individual.
Make sure to include a diverse mix of content types within your strategy – such as video, individual or carousels of images, and custom graphics – to help you reach an even wider audience.
3. Competitor Analysis
An essential part of digital marketing is research. By researching your competitors and recent trends, you can create relevant content that your target audience is searching for online. When you perform competitor analysis, take note of high-performing content types (i.e. single image vs. video content), subject matter, and visuals to help spark ideas for your content plan.
4. Keyword Research
Find content topics that your audience is searching for by performing keyword research. This will help your content generate more reach (number of views) and drive traffic back to your website.
From this keyword research, create engaging blogs or articles, video content, infographics, PDFs, E-Books, or other interesting content.
If you’re not a marketing professional, this step can be tricky to do on your own. All of the leading industry platforms for keyword research are quite costly, but you can start to get a general idea of relevant keywords by using Google Ads Keyword Planner for free.
5. Content & Channel Review
If your business has been up and running for some time, it’s best to have an in-depth review of all past content and marketing channels. This may include:
- Website copy, imagery, and sign up forms
- Landing pages
- Blog posts, articles, case studies, and testimonials
- All Imagery and/or custom graphics
- Downloadable content (PDFs, E-books, brochures, etc.)
- Audio (such as podcasts) or video content
- Each Social media channel (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc)
- Email marketing campaigns and/or automation
- Digital ad campaigns
PRO TIP: It’s highly beneficial to index your content as it’s being created. Keep track of the title, final URL, images or graphics associated with it, relevant keywords, and the original date of distribution. Once you have enough content, you can start to redistribute past content as part of your overall content marketing strategy.
6. Customer Journey Roadmap
Depending on the size of your business and your goals, it can be valuable to create a customer journey roadmap. This is a visual outline or map highlighting each step or interaction your audience takes when navigating towards a purchase. It can also be defined as a marketing or sales funnel.
Start by outlining each stage of the customer journey – Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, and Advocacy – then add in details of each step your audience will take within each stage of the journey. An example for each stage could look like this:
- Awareness: an individual found our brand on Instagram.
- Consideration: this individual clicked on our profile link to sign up for our monthly newsletter.
- Purchase: individual bought introductory service highlighted in our monthly newsletter.
- Retention: we requested feedback from individual for our introductory service and offered a discount on our monthly subscription to continue the service.
- Advocacy: we provided superior customer service and individual loved it so much they referred two friends!
7. Content Calendar
Now you’re ready to begin mapping out your content using a content calendar or content management system. This is a visual way to help you organize your content and streamline the distribution, engagement, and analytics of your content marketing strategy plan with your team. A few key elements to include in your content calendar may be:
- Content Title and/or caption
- Distribution Channel (i.e. Instagram, Facebook business page, Facebook group, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Website, Email, YouTube, podcast, affiliate, publication, etc.)
- Date and Time of Distribution
Most channels now have a free built-in scheduler within their platforms to schedule content ahead of time. For example, Facebook and Instagram have Creator Studio, Pinterest has a built-in scheduler within their platform, and Twitter for business has a scheduler within their Ad account. Make a plan to schedule your content in batches, either weekly or monthly, to further streamline your efforts.
Content Marketing Strategy is the foundation of any successful digital marketing effort. It’s not a one-and-done service that can be turned on and off. An effective content marketing strategy encompasses your brand’s voice and mission to deliver impactful messaging to your new and existing audiences, as well as your entire team. It’s the lifeline that your business shouldn’t be without.
Contact us when you’re ready to make a powerful impact. We can’t wait to assist you.
