Long back contents existed in papers and they were not at all memorable. The lifespan of those contents is very short. When the internet became popular digital content came to the limelight. Those contents are everlasting and can help to get a brand name. According to a recent survey of the Content marketing institute, B2B marketers spend more than 40% of their budget on content marketing. The main aim of content marketing is to promote the business and make it visible to online users. It is not easy to make that content distinguished among thousands of online content.

Without a skill to create interesting content you cannot make it successful. Planning is very important for any business. Businesses choose various ways to promote their product. Advertisements, campaigns, creating content etc are various forms of it. Contents are mainly created to show the value of the product to users.

In this digital era users are very smart. They want to know more about a product before buying it. These online contents will help the customers to know more about a product and persuade them to buy it. By knowing this benefit, businesses are investing money to create contents that can help the buyers to know more about a brand. But when it comes to content marketing you need to know more about the possibility before starting your investment

There is no use in creating content if there is not a good plan to distribute it. While creating content every marketer should know the way they can follow to make it reach to their audience. That’s why businesses hire a team of marketers whose main job is to create and distribute content effectively all over the digital media.

It can help businesses to increase their sale and have credibility among the audience.  There are many aspects you need to consider before starting content marketing. You need to consider the audience you want to share it with and there should have some specific business goal behind your marketing strategy. With a strong content marketing strategy, it is very easy to make content visible to as many users as possible.

This article deals with various aspects of content marketing and its strategies. The main points we discuss in this article are

• What is a content marketing strategy?
• Why does a business need to invest in content marketing?
• 7 steps you can follow to create an effective content marketing strategy

If you are a beginner in this field this article will help you to learn more about content marketing strategies that can help with your business growth. Before learning more details about content marketing strategies to implement in your business let’s check out the concept of content marketing strategy

What is a content marketing strategy?

Content marketing is a type of marketing that deals with sharing valuable content online as a part of business promotion. It will help to build a strong relationship with a brand’s target audience. Content marketing should not focus on increasing sales and promoting your business but it should provide some interesting actionable content for business customers. Contents are created mainly with an aim to attract more customers to a business and thereby an increase in the sale.  Content marketing strategy is a plan for creating, maintaining, and delivering content that can attract and engage the audience towards a brand.

You may have heard many times that quality content is very important when it comes to business promotion. The main role of content in a business is that it will help the users to understand more about your brand, drive sales, build brand credibility, establish trust in the audience about your brand and increase search engine ranking.

All of these factors are very important for business growth. It is very important to protect your brand well among users. As a result, it can help you to improve your brand authority. Nowadays users want to know more details about a product before buying it. They search all over the internet to get as much information as possible about the brand. If businesses can provide that information through their content then buyers will trust you and will start to follow your website for the latest updates.

Various types of content are used to promote a business. Blogs, videos, infographics, eBooks, whitepapers, guides, case studies etc are some of the most widely used content types. You have to find out the suitable content type for your business and concentrate more on it.  Planning is very important when it comes to marketing content. If you have a clear plan about the marketing of contents it will help you to get the result you are expecting from it. With a clear goal, you can achieve it by choosing the right path. Here are some questions you need to answer before creating a content marketing strategy

• What is your company’s goal?
• Who is your targeted audience?
• What type of content do you want to create?
• What are the results you are expecting from these contents?
• How will you analyze the success of your content?

If you have answers to all these questions it is easy for you to develop a content marketing strategy for your business.

Have a clear goal in your mind while creating content so that it will be easy to plan further steps and accomplish it. Some businesses aim for an increase in sale and some other wants to build credibility among users. Like this your goal can be anything and all you have to do is work towards your goal.It is better to create content with a clear marketing strategy than creating one without any idea about what to do.

Why does a business need to invest in a content marketing strategy?

The content marketing strategy will help businesses to achieve their goals. Buyers are expecting compelling content from a brand nowadays. This is what content marketing fulfills by creating compelling content and distribute it through various channels to reach to as many audiences as possible.

Most marketers invest a good percentage of their budget in creating compelling content and distribute them all over the internet. Have you thought about the reason behind it?   Before knowing about the strategies, you can accompany while distributing contents it is very useful to know the benefits that they can bring to your business

• Can help to build online presence-: Most buyers search on the internet when they want to buy a product or service. If they found details or a website about that product, they will believe in it and will buy it. Your content will live online for long by investing in a content marketing strategy
• Boosts SEO-: As a part of SEO, you may have to implement various strategies that can bring your website to the top of the search result. Keyword implementation is one of them and when someone searches for keywords regarding your business it will help your content to appear many times in search results and this can improve your search traffic.
• Create leads-: With a good content marketing plan, you can create new leads. B2B business creates more than 60% leads than those who don’t invest in content marketing.
• Build a relationship with customers-: This is another advantage of a good content marketing plan. The main aim of businesses should be to create a good connection with their customers. It can help to build trust and thereby a good sale
• Make your brand unique-: Good marketing strategy can improve your brand credibility and help it to be unique among thousands of other brands that exist in the market.
• Addresses all three stages of buying cycle-: When you create a clear content marketing strategy to distribute your content online it can help to cater to all three stages of the buying cycle. When someone new to your website will get a general idea about your product. Through whitepapers, guides, and seminars you can give a detailed idea about your business to a lead. By offering them true testimonials and demos you can make them as your customers.

7 steps you can follow to create an effective content marketing strategy

Are you looking for a change in your business strategy? Content marketing strategy must be planned thoroughly so that businesses can get the ROI they are expecting. While spending so much money on content marketing it is very important to have a better plan to distribute it evenly across various digital media platforms. This is a detailed guide that deals with 7 steps that can make your content marketing strategy successful. Here is our 7-step content marketing strategy for you

1. Analyze your niche

It is very important to analyze the niche well before creating a suitable strategy. By researching well, you will get a clear idea about the strength and weaknesses in your niche. SWOT analysis is a technique that deals with strength and weakness and also helps to identify the opportunities that are available for you in the market.  The data from SWOT analysis is useful for your marketing strategies and there are data analytics tools available for you to collect data.

Most websites do site auditing and from conducting content audits you will get a clear knowledge about everything related to your website. See how many visitors are there on your website and the time they spend within it. Analyzing the number of visitors, returning visitors, bouncing rate, etc where you can find some scope of expansion. It is very hard to get noticed among other content that handles the same topic. Brainstorm ideas and create plans to strengthen your content management and get as many targeted audiences as you want.

Competition analysis is also very useful to get an idea about current marketing strength. You can do an analysis of their content and see how they promote their content and the strategies they are following to make their content notable. See the channel they are using to promote their content using various analyzing tools. Comparing yourself with competitors is always a good practice to follow if you want to be successful in your strategies. Clear research will help your content to be on the top of the search result.

2. Define your goals

This is the next step in your marketing strategy. Every business should have a goal and it applies to this field too. You can define your business goals before creating a proper strategy. Here are some questions you can ask yourself

What is your aim behind creating content?

Why are you creating a content marketing plan?

What results are you expecting from implementing a content marketing strategy?

There could be many goals like increasing sales, brand awareness, creating trust, and many more. After defining your goal define key performance indicators (KPI). KPI measures the effectiveness of your business objectives. The SMART method is very useful to measure KPI. Your content marketing strategy should be Specific, Measurable, Agreed-Upon, Realistic, and Time- based. There should be an end result for your marketing strategies. While planning a goal it should be attainable and you can define a specific tie frame to achieve that goal.

One of the most suitable examples for attainable goals is that “ I should create content that can increases the brand awareness by 250%within the next 6 months”. Here you can see that there is a specific and realistic goal with a time frame of six months. There could be multiple goals behind a content marketing strategy. You should have a clear plan on how to achieve those goals by implementing it in the right way. If you have a clear goal in your mind it can be easier to determine your marketing strategy.

3. Determine your target audience

Target Audience defining is very important to every business. Each business will have a different group of customers. Whatever your business is the customers you are going to deal with will be different and you need to approach each group according to nature and needs. This is where targeting an audience will help your marketing process. Creating a persona of the group of customers you are targeting will help you to create appropriate strategies that can attract them to your content. While creating a customer’s persona you can concentrate on their location, needs, interests, age group, demographics etc.

Try all the channels and get details about the customers you need to impress. It can help you to create marketing strategies accordingly. Today people like customization and if you can provide customized content for your audience it can bring huge success to your marketing campaigns. You can get help from the marketing team to know more about the type of customers you want to impress while creating content as a part of business promotion. You can also monitor your competitions and see how they interact with their customers through social media and other platforms to know the type of audience you may have to consider.

After getting a clear idea about the type of audience you want to impress make a clear plan that can help your content to get attention from those groups. Once you started marketing your content do an analysis and find out the type of audience you are getting. To attract all your targeted audience, you may have to spend some time on analyzing the type of people who are reading your content and find new ways to attract more visitors by implementing something new. So, targeted marketing is very crucial n defining the success of your content marketing campaigns. Spend enough time on analyzing the response and implement new strategies to make marketing strategies more successful.

4. Create a content plan

After defining your target audience next step is to define a clear content plan.  In this section, you have to spend a lot of time online and find out the type of content your targeted audience is interested in. It could be long-form content, short-form content, infographics, YouTube videos, and so on. You have to be familiar with all types of content that can create an impact among your audience about your business and find out the one which will work for your business type as well as your audience.

There are a lot of tools available online for you to check these details. You can make use of them to find out the latest trends that are happening in your niche and try to achieve your goal.

You can find out what type of content is more acceptable to your audience from this research. Also, you can check your competitor’s website and see how they are trying to attract more audience towards their website. This will help to design a proper content plan that can outstand among your competitors. After finalizing the type of content you can move forward to create an editorial calendar. If you want the audience to follow you then it is very important to post content more frequently. Consistency is very important for content marketing and you can achieve this by creating an editorial calendar.

Include how often you are going to post and various channels you are going to use while marketing your content. It is very good if you consider the most peak time when your targeted customers come online. Find out when your content is getting more views and finalize that time to post the content in the future. Be on time and post it on your website to see how your customers are reacting to those content. You can also post the contents part by part so that more customers will visit your website to know about the next part. Make a good content plan that can help your content to achieve the goals you are looking for.

5. Develop an SEO-friendly content structure

If you have experience in content creation or marketing you may have knowledge of the importance of SEO in content marketing. No one will see contents that are appearing on the second or third page of the search results. Most users believe in contents that are appearing on the first page. So, it is very important to consider Search engine optimization.

This process mainly deals with some factors that you can change in your content or website that can help your content to be on the top of the search result. Google always wants to show relevant search results to its users. As a part search engine want its content to be clear and accurate with the user’s queries. You can make the search engine believe that your content is relevant to users’ queries and can help them in finding a solution by implementing these optimization factors.

Know the keywords your audience uses and include them in your content so that your content will get listed under the search result.  You can use tools for keyword analysis to find out the keywords related to your niche. Google Keyword analyzer, SEM keyword tools, etc are some popular keyword analyzer tools you can try. Know your customer needs and interest and include the keyword that can make you content on the top position. Keywords that you want to include should have a high search volume and low competition.

There are many other factors other than keyword implementation. It includes optimization of titles and metatag, link building, mobile optimization, loading speed, better user experience, page security, etc are some other SEO factors.  Content quality is the most important of all these SEO factors. If you can provide quality content with some SEO factors in it then you don’t have to worry about bringing your content to the top position of the search result.

6. Create and implement content

Now you can start with the creation of content. This is a crucial part of content marketing strategy. Quality content is what makes your content marketing successful.  You need to find out the best performing content types and topics through research.

Shape your content that can reflect your brand personality. Follow the steps above and then make it unique by implementing keyword implementation and other SEO tactics. Help your business to achieve the goal by creating convertible content. Include CTAs, social media icons, and other types of content that will help to make your content more acceptable. Here are some tips to make your content outstanding

• Cover every detail related to the topic and make it informative and more authoritative. Content quality and relevancy are important than quantity.
• The title of the content should be interesting and clickable. It should have the capacity to create curiosity in users. A unique titled content that explains well about the topic can help your website grow
• Use various types of content to reach a different type of audience
• Provide valuable content that can help the user to know more about your business through eBooks, whitepapers, and seminars
• Interact with readers and reply to all their comments. Communication is the key to success and if you can use this to connect with your followers you can see an increase in your ROI

7. Plan your distribution

After creating unique informative content that can reflect your business value find ways to distribute those effectively. There are various channels available for you to distribute your content. The main aim behind content distribution is that you have to ensure to spread it to as many audiences as possible. This can increase your chance of getting in connection with as many customers as possible. There are many channels which you can use to spread your content such as social media platforms, email, campaigns, newsletter, etc. it is very hard to manage everything at a time.

Social media is very powerful and most marketers depend on it when it comes to marketing programs and campaigns. You can use social media scheduling tools to make your work easier. There are apps like Buffer, SproutSocial, Tweetdeck etc to make it happen. Automating some repetitive tasks can help you to save some time. It will also help you to concentrate more on content creation. Monitor social mentions and save you time to evaluate your content performance. Detailed analysis using an analytical tool can help you to get an idea of channels that can perform well when it comes to content distribution.

Find out the channels which bring you more traffic and concentrate on it to make your content marketing successful. You should concentrate more on analytics while creating strategies because it can help you to analyze which strategies are working and which are not. Make sure to create up-to-date content marketing strategies that are only possible through consistent analysis. Implement strategies and measure their results to know the success of the strategy. It is very useful if you can evaluate the result of your marketing strategy. A self-evaluation can help you to save your time, money, and effort at the same time.

Conclusion

Are you ready to see some real results? Implement these strategies and see how they can impact your content marketing process. If you are doing content marketing without any strategies try out the above plan step by step. You can see a good ROI for your marketing efforts. One important thing to keep in your mind is that while creating content make sure to embrace the equality and values of your brand you want to project to your audience.

While implementing content marketing strategies you need to be patient as this is a process that takes more time to get the result.  Stay up to date about the latest trends. Do a monthly evaluation of your strategies and see how it works. If you cannot find any relevant changes in 6 months you should reconsider your strategy. Tell us about your content marketing strategies?