9 WAYS TO CREATE A CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

Photo by Alena Darmel: https://www.pexels.com

So, how should you go about creating a content marketing strategy? It’s not a simple endeavor. It’s also not something that only one person develops. All stakeholders should participate in some way.
As a primer, let’s go through the steps and exercises.

Step 1: Define What Content Marketing Means for Your Organization

Content marketing is the consistent publishing of relevant content that drives business outcomes. That’s the general definition, but what does it mean for your company?

In this introduction to your strategy, you’ll be formulating the goals of producing content. Such goals may include:

• Generating more qualified leads
• Boosting credibility and trustworthiness
• Improving brand equity and awareness
• Ranking better on Google
• Supporting sales team efforts
• Driving more traffic to your website
• Building a community

In this section, you also want to define the tactics that will help you achieve these goals — consistent content production, more gated content, optimization of content to rank well, nurturing leads, and mastering amplification.

Lastly, you need to make the connection between content and revenue. This is for the stakeholders that aren’t content marketing astute who make budget decisions.

If you can’t connect the dots for them, they’ll continue to look at you as a cost center, not a revenue generator.

That means you have to track efforts on the backend. For example, if you can attribute traffic and conversions to organic search, it demonstrates that optimized content delivers new customers.

Step 2: Determine Your Content Pillars and Types

Content pillars are the main categories from which all ideas originate. They keep your content creators focused. Once you begin to build your content calendar, tagging pieces with the pillar helps with auditing to see if you have gaps.

You’ll also want to document the types of content you’ll create. There’s more to content marketing than just blogging, which is, of course, critical.

You’ll also have long-form content, case studies, infographics, video, social media posts, webinars, and more.

Step 3: Create Your Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are pivotal to your strategy. You are creating content for them, so you need to know them well. This goes beyond demographics and titles.

You also want to define their pain points, assumptions, challenges, motivations, and objections.

Buyer persona creation should be a group exercise that would include content marketers, product managers, sales, and other SMEs (subject matter experts).

Revisit buyer personas at least annually to refresh them. If something big changes in your industry or company, that’s also a good time to review them.

Step 4: Design Your Content Calendar and Workflows

In this section, you’ll need to identify what your content calendar will look like and where it will live. Check out these content calendar templates for reference.

A content calendar is a living document that provides visibility across all projects. That’s where your workflows are as well. There are many tasks involved to take a content piece from ideation to publication to amplification.

Step 5: Develop a Voice and Tone

Brand voice and tone documents create parameters for content, attributes of the brand’s voice, foundational language, and product language.

Your brand voice should have at least three attributes. For example, one could be conversational. Then you describe it: it’s not formal; slang is okay; it’s benefit-driven, not feature-focused.

Then, you can outline some dos and don’ts. With the example above, a conversational voice doesn’t use complex words and is friendly and personable.

Then, you’ll define parameters around:

• Syntax, structure, and readability (e.g., keep sentences short, use confident statements and not finite ones, and don’t use passive voice)
• Word choice: What do you call your buyers? What language is familiar to them?
• Phrases to avoid: A list of words you shouldn’t use, like cliches
• Blog parameters: Minimum word count, sub-header usage, appropriate CTAs, etc.
• Foundational language: Includes your USP (unique selling proposition), value proposition, and elevator pitch
• Product language: A messaging matrix that’s specific to each product

Step 6: Develop Your SEO Strategy

SEO is critical to content marketing. However, write for people first, Google second!

You’ll want to address:

• Keywords to target and track
• Technical issues that are causing crawling or ranking issues. This will probably include an audit.
• SEO best practices for all your website content (e.g., internal links, meta descriptions, using image alt tags, etc.)
• Backlinking opportunities (guest posting, outreach, editorials, etc.)
• Site health and the issues impacting it (e.g., broken links, mixed content issues)

Using a platform to track your SEO efforts is a good idea. You’ll get insights and discover issues immediately. Tracking your rank position is also critical.

If you lose ranking, you’ll want to understand why. Then take remediation steps to improve it.

Step 7: Outline Your Distribution Strategy

You’ve got content. Now you need to send it out into the world.

Within distribution, you’ll have several buckets:

• Social media: Define the profiles you’ll use, what you’ll post, how often you’ll post, and how social media engagement ties to revenue.
• Email marketing: What types of emails will you send to distribute content? Newsletters? Long-form content offers? Nurture campaigns?
• Amplification tools: There are many options for amplifying your content, including services like Boca, Converge, GaggleAMP, and Outbrain. If you have the budget and resources, check these out.
• Third-party distribution: This could be paid or organic. For paid, you can use sponsored content opportunities with trusted industry publications. Organic would be working with a partner to create mutually beneficial content.

Step 8: Illustrate How Content Marketing Supports Traditional Marketing

Content marketing can complement traditional marketing like trade shows, PR, and product launches.

In this section, you’ll outline how content can contribute to these areas. For example, you can create pre-event blogs about a trade show, promote an exclusive piece of content for registrants, and then deliver that post-show.

Step 9: Identify the Metrics That Matter

How will you determine content marketing ROI? What metrics do you need to measure to discern if you’re meeting your goals? The most crucial content analytics include:

• Traffic to website
• Top pages
• Pageviews: blog pageviews are the most important
• Source referrals to the website: social media, organic search, third-party websites
• Average time on site
• Bounce rates
• Social media engagement (likes, shares, comments, clicks)
• SEO position rankings, visibility, and site health
• Conversions from content marketing efforts
• Email opens and clicks

Choosing a Content Marketing Template

Now that we’ve explained the steps to developing one, you need to put it all together in a way that makes sense for all parties.

Not everyone that views or uses it will be an expert in content marketing. Consider that when reviewing these content marketing templates.

Here is a totally free content marketing worksheet (google sheet) I give away and use with clients in our content marketing strategy workshops.

DivvyHQ
Our tool of choice is DivvyHQ and they have a 30-day content marketing strategy template that offers lots of guidance on building a unique strategy that will support your business goals. It’s 10 steps, but it’s not overwhelming.

Backlinko
Backlinko offers a content marketing template in three formats. It’s fairly simple and doesn’t include all the steps above, but it’s a good starter version.

CoSchedule
CoSchedule offers a more robust template and provides instructions on how to use it. It’s available for download if you complete the form.

ContentCal
ContentCal boasts its template is very flexible, and that’s a good thing. They also offer direction on how to use the template. They even offer you a glimpse of their own strategy to inspire your own.

HubSpot
HubSpot has a content strategy workbook that you can download. It’s very detailed, especially around types of content and the ideation process.

It might be helpful to take pieces from each of these templates to develop your own so you address all the components that are specific to your company.

A Content Marketing Strategy Template in Action

Going through the steps and organizing the template is a great first step for your content marketing efforts. However, you’ll need to put it into action. Implementation can often be a giant hurdle.

That’s where we can help. We can help you develop the strategy and put it into action by being your content creators.

If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, or Need help attracting and retaining your audience’s attention? We can help! 

Get in touch with us today by leaving a comment and Subscribe to our platforms or via email for updates to discover marketing strategies or Engaging Content for Your Social Media in building relationships with long-term value.