The majority of companies are messing up content marketing. They are producing content just to produce content, publishing aimlessly, and wondering why their engagement is pathetic and their conversions are nil.
The real deal is the following: 9 out of 10 businesses make use of content marketing, yet not a lot of them achieve real results. The difference? They even have a working content strategy.
To be included among the 74 percent of marketers who have been generating leads via their very content, it would be first advisable that you stop treating content as a hobby but rather as the business-critical activity that it is.
Stop Wasting Time: Define Your Content Strategy Goals First
Your content strategy will not be of any help without clear goals. Period.
My biggest frustration is that I always find many companies writing their blog posts, making videos, and posting on social media without any idea about what they want to accomplish. It is like driving cross-country without the destination in mind; you are going to waste resources and end up nowhere.
The objectives within your content strategy have to be business-related. Are you making an attempt at
- - Increase awareness of the brand?
- - Create good leads?
- - Maintaining customers?
- - Create thought leadership?
Choose one major objective, and make it SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound).
Bad goal: More traffic to our site
Good goal: "To have a 25 percent growth in organic blog traffic over the next 6 months with our content strategy."
The second objective provides you with a very tangible target, timeline, and criteria of the measurement. That is the way to create an effective content strategy that leaves no traces in the form of empty vanity metrics.
Know Your Audience or Waste Your Time
This is the difference between a content strategy that works and an unsuccessful content strategy: How well you know who you are talking to.
Most businesses believe they understand their audience, but they are making guesses. Your strategy on content must be data-driven and not based on a concept.
Develop buyer personas for your content strategy. And these are not general demographic descriptions; they are specific characters that describe your dream customers. Include:
- Demographics and psychographics
- - Pain and problems
- Internet behavior and content interests
- Purchasing triggers and sales motives
Real case: In SAP they tailored the content to 19 segments of customers. The outcome? $3.7 million in new marketing opportunities as well as more than 50 million in pipeline revenue.
That is the strength of an action-oriented strategy. When you understand your audience to the core, every piece of content will strike more because it will appeal to their needs.
Research Keywords That Actually Matter
Your content strategy should be findable. The greatest content in the world is worth nothing when nobody can grab it.
Quit focusing on keywords per se. Begin to think in topic clusters of your content strategy.
The way topic clusters operate is the following: Write a multi-topic of a major subject to make up an overarching pillar page and construct posts on related subjects to support it. The strategy enables search engines to comprehend the type of expertise that you have and enhance the general performance of your content strategy.
An example is where you work in the fitness industry, and among your content strategies are
- Pillar page: Full Guide on Weight Loss
- Cluster pages: Meal Planning to Lose Weight, The Best Cardio to Burn Affections, Strength Training as a Beginner
Employ Google Trends and BuzzSumo to find out the popular topics before they become popular among other competitors. An offensive content approach is always better than a counterattack approach.
Build a Content Strategy That Scales
Successful content strategies all have one thing in common: consistency. It is not just a thing of posting randomly and expecting some outcome.
You must have a calendar on the content strategy. There is no bargaining on this. Write down what you would publish, at what time, and how you would publicize it.
Variety of content in your strategy:
- SEO and leadership blog posts
- Engagement and visual learner videos
- - Infographics of complex data You can use infographics to visualize complex data.
- Podcasts for the busy professional
- To build trust and credibility, case studies can be utilized.
Lay out a content strategy and manage tasks with such tools as Trello, Asana, or Notion to be sure that you do not miss anything.
Create Content That Actually Adds Value
In content strategy, quantity loses out to quality every time.
Mediocre just does not work. The content strategy you develop has to address actual problems, answer actual questions, and give their direct solutions.
The best content solutions are the ones that are depicted through the story where the person can create a relationship with the audience. See the travel guides on Airbnb—the guides not only mention places to visit, they share the stories of the places, which leads to trust and leads to a booking.
In the current approach to content strategy, authenticity is non-negotiable. The readers could detect a lie at a distance. Use:
- - Actual testimonials by real customers
- - User-contributed content
- Out-of-scene material
- Real-world case stories and outcomes
Optimize Your Content Strategy for Discovery
You should not leave out SEO when defining your content strategy; it is paramount.
Minimize each detail:
- Headlines containing your target keywords
- Compelling Meta Descriptions
- Descriptive alt image
- Internal linking structure that gives engagement to the users
Your content strategy must be well optimized to be mobile-friendly. The majority of users access content on phones, and therefore much content does not reach the viewer in case it is not in a mobile-friendly format.
Your strategy for success with content directly depends on user experience. Good loading speeds and seamless navigation and responsiveness do not constitute things that are nice-to-have but rather necessities at this point.
Measure What Matters in Your Content Strategy
What you do not measure, you cannot improve. Your content strategy must have definite metrics:
Primary metrics:
- - Organic traffic growth
- - Lead generation
- - Conversion rates
- - Engagement metrics
Secondary metrics:
- - Time on page
- - Social shares
- - Email subscribers
- - Brand mention increases
Find out what works in your content strategy and where you need to improve it with the help of all the necessary analytics tools. Data-driven decision-making is what draws the line between an effective content strategy and guessing.
The Bottom Line on Content Strategy
Eighty-seven percent of marketers indicate that content marketing has resulted in brand recognition, and 74 percent of marketers get leads directly due to their content strategy. These are no accidents; they are outcomes of strategic and planned strategies.
Your content strategy does not just mean marketing because it serves as a driver to the growth of your entire business. However, only when you make it such.
Don't cease producing material just to be producing material. Begin an outline of a content strategy that:
- - Has clear, measurable goals
- - Speaks directly to your ideal customers
- - Gets found in search results
- - Provides genuine value
- - Drives real business results
It is not the company that produces the most content that succeeds in utilizing content strategy but a company that produces the most strategic content.
You either are incurring growth through your content strategy or are wasting resources. There is no in-betweener.
Choose growth. Construct an effective content marketing strategy.
