Table of contents
How to create a content marketing strategy
Why content marketing strategy is important
Content marketing strategy in 7 steps
1. Set your goals
2. Determine your “one thing”
3. Measure your content marketing results
4. Understand your target audience, identify your top 5 audiences
5. Research the needs of the public so that your message is correct
6. Create more content with less
7. Create a content calendar
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One of the questions we are most frequently asked at DIGIOFI is list of argentina whatsapp phone numbers how to create a marketing strategy and a content plan. Some people assume that we have the magic wand or the “secret recipe” for content marketing.
The truth is, there are no secrets to creating a content marketing strategy. Instead, we simply use our 7-step guide as a reference, plus it adds a lot of time and significant effort.
These 7 basic steps provide the essential framework for long-term success. We’ve summarized them here so you too can take your own content marketing strategy and plan to the next level. By the way, you can download a free content marketing strategy template to guide you along the way.
If there is anything else we can do to help you or your organization, please write to us .
Why content marketing strategy is important
Before we jump right into the steps, we want to emphasize that a content marketing strategy is not a “nice to have” but rather a fundamental requirement for success.
The Content Marketing Institute confirms this fact year after year with its annual Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report.
In 2021, 57% of content marketers said they don’t have a documented content strategy, though those who do rate their efforts as far more successful than those who don’t.
These facts and figures also reflect what we see every day at DIGIOFI, where we create content marketing strategies for well-known brands. That’s precisely why we’ve put together this guide that summarises our methodology for creating a content marketing strategy. Plus, we have a handy content marketing strategy template that will help you stay on track over time.
You can download the PDF template here.
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Content marketing strategy in 7 steps
To help you get started on boosting your marketing efforts, here’s an overview of each of the seven steps to creating your content strategy:
1. Set your goals
Goal-based marketing
Why are you doing content marketing? Is it to create leads? To build relationships? To improve your customers’ experience?
Whatever your content marketing goals are, make sure they are sustainable over the long term and are related to your organization’s overall goals, mission, and vision.
To keep your strategy focused and clear, limit yourself to three to five business goals at most and document them.
Remember: Creating content for the sake of having content is never your goal.
2. Determine your “one thing”
There is a huge amount of content out there, and more and more is being published every day. So, what are you going to create in your content marketing program to differentiate your organization? In other words, what is the heart and soul of your content program?
Is it for:
Being incredibly useful?
Building your branding?
Motivating and inspiring?
Educating and entertaining?
The only appropriate answer to all of the above is YES! Otherwise, you risk offering more of the same and contributing to that huge and growing content glut.
If you want to go “further” in your approach to testing your “one thing,” we recommend first writing down all the brand messages your company uses; then take your top three competitors and cross off the messages from your list that they also use.
What you’ll be left with is a set of completely unique brand messages that can help you clarify your “point of difference.”
Remember: Allow yourself to make your story bigger.
Analytics
3. Measure your content marketing results
If you want to track content, make it trackable and figure out how you're going to prove the content works before you make it.
Warning: Be wary of using vanity metrics that don't really tell you anything.
Instead, to understand whether your content is actually doing what it claims to, we need to look at the action.
That's where the 4 categories of content marketing metrics come in:
Consumption Metrics: This is one of the best and easiest places to start. Basically, what did the audience do with the content? Think actions: views, downloads, listens, visits, etc.
Sharing Metrics: How resonated is this content and how often is it shared with others?
Lead Generation Metrics: The ultimate goal for most organizations: how many leads have come from a piece of content?
Sales Metric: Have we made money from this content?
4. Understand your target audience, identify your top 5 audiences
Relevance magically creates time and attention. To be relevant, we need to understand who we are targeting:
Audience: High-level collections of similarly motivated individuals with some common interest or agenda. Think: repeat product buyers.
Segment: Cross-sections of an audience or list where individuals (or companies) share one or more common traits or can be grouped by a common trait. Think: work-from-home parents.
Buyer Persona: A detailed but fictional, data-driven characterization of the goals and behavior of a hypothetical group of users. Think: Carlos, the engineer who needs to automate, or Veronica, the entrepreneurial mom.
Whatever audience definition you use or look at to guide your content marketing efforts, make sure you focus on only your top 5 audiences, and look at their psychographics, not just demographics.
Also, consider replacing stock photos with icons or symbols to avoid getting bogged down in your audience’s physical appearance or stereotypes based on age, race, or gender.
Remember: you are not your audience. Focus on their needs and motivations, not your own.
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5. Research the needs of the public so that your message is correct
Regardless of the approach you use to classify and identify your customers in step 4, get to know them using the 5x5x5 methodology.
The 5x5x5 methodology takes your top 5 audiences, examines their top 5 questions at each of the 5 key stages of the marketing funnel (Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty, and Advocates) to better understand their wants, needs, and expectations so you can create content that satisfies it all.
If you do the math, you'll realize that this method yields 125 questions to create content for. But don't worry, once you narrow down the 125 questions to unique questions and remove duplicates or near-matches, you'll typically only have about 50-60 unique questions. And chances are, you already have content that answers some of them, so start looking for the obvious content gaps first.
Once you have this list, you'll know your audience much better and know where your content is at so you can help them.
Remember: your content should answer their questions, not just meet your business goals.
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6. Create more content with less
When it comes to content problems, almost everyone thinks the solution is to create more. But, as we saw in step 2, there is a glut of content, and we don’t want to add our content on top of the overwhelming amount already out there. Plus, you probably have a lot of content already created at this point, which means it’s time to mix up and refresh our content before we think about creating another new piece:
Repurpose content: Give content new life by giving it a quick remix. This could include updating some still-relevant content with new information, turning an infographic into an animated video, or republishing content to make it discoverable to users.
Curate content: Why reinvent the wheel when there's already plenty of great content out there? Keep content from trusted sources, but be sure to give credit where credit is due and include your own perspective in the content piece as well.
User-generated content (UGC): Turn to your customers or social community for ideas and additional content pieces.
Atomization: Take a huge piece of content and break it down into eight smaller pieces of content. This is a DIGIOFI favorite.
Only after you have identified gaps in your content or remixed, refreshed and atomized your content, should you move on to creating new content.
Remember: Content isn't free. Make the most of what you have, and then create new content if necessary.
7. Create a content calendar
In the next few days, you'll have a full blog post on the content calendar, as well as a free content calendar template, that will guide you through exactly how, what, and why to structure a content and publishing calendar, but here's the gist:
Start with your watch-worthy products: Add the most serious problems your brand solves (i.e. the most useful pieces of content—run at least twice a month) to your calendar first, and make sure to pay attention to key dates or big events.
Add your one-time specials: Pay attention to how your quarterly content commitments, or one-time specials, overlap or complement your watch-worthy programs.
Fill in with regular programming: Last but not least, add your regular programming. This should help fill in any gaps in your cadence and keep content consistent. (You don’t need to post every day…)
Add content to the content repository: Don’t have a place on your calendar right now for some great ideas? Add them to the repository. Let this be your storage solution for great ideas, and check back often.
Remember: A content calendar is part of a content marketing strategy, but it never replaces it.
Content calendar
Thank you for getting this far. If you have, it is because you are really interested in a content strategy for your brand. Now you have the tools in your hands, so let's get to work!
If you have realized that your company or venture does not have the necessary or suitable personnel to effectively execute a content strategy, contact us . We are ready to help you and make your brand visible on the Internet.
It will be a pleasure to work with you!
