These days, everyone knows that content is king. In fact, many, many businesses have been moving over to a content-centric approach for marketing, or content marketing for short. We’ve discussed this style of marketing in a previous blog post, though we’ll also spend some time going over content marketing below. However, the main focus of this article is to examine the new strategies that have emerged with the rise of content marketing. We’ll be able to answer the question – what is a content marketing strategy? How do you develop a good content marketing strategy? And how can doing so help you and your business?
A Brief Summary of Content Marketing
Before we get started, it’s important for us to briefly summarize what content marketing is. As you can probably tell just from its name, it’s an approach to marketing that’s centered around creating and distributing content. This content should be relevant and beneficial to your target audience and can take many forms, from videos to eBooks to, of course, blogs. By creating this high-quality content, you’re able to tell a story to your audience about your company, defining who you are, what you do, and how you can help your customers. This sort of content can also build a high level of trust with your customers, and have them always coming back for more. This is in contrast to traditional marketing, which centers around simply pitching your products or services. Content marketing is all about showing and not telling, giving your customers a good story to latch onto, and giving them high-quality and relevant content to consume.
Developing Your Content Strategy
So, as you might imagine from the above description, there are many factors to consider if you want to pursue and develop your content marketing strategy. Most importantly, it’s vital to understand that this development of content strategy is really unique to your organization. While there are broader goals that every company can strive for as they create this marketing content, your strategy will still be dependent on what you’re aiming to do with your business, who your audience is and what their needs are, what kind of content they want to consume, and more. These considerations are vital when properly developing your content strategy.
That’s why it’s so important to have a good team behind the development of your content strategy. Planning, creating, and distributing this content on a regular basis is a tall task, and it’s important to spend the time and money to properly develop and implement your content strategy.
Though your content strategy will vary based on you and your company’s individual needs, there are still important steps to take regardless of what you do. First and foremost, it’s important to start at the beginning. To know what kind of content to make, you need to be able to boil down what products and/or services your company provides in order to properly communicate that through your content.
In tandem with that, you also need to know who your audience is, who your customer base is. It’s important to do the proper research and analysis of who you’re selling to in order to create the content that will best reach them. For example, if you’re in the business of rehabilitating wastewater collection systems, it’s likely that you won’t reach a lot of customers advertising on Instagram or Tik Tok. You have to make sure you’re creating the appropriate content for your customer base and meeting them where they are. On top of this, it’s important to know the “journey” an average customer will take with you. Knowing your audience is hugely important if you want to properly develop your content strategy and to know what kind of content to make.
Once you know what content you want to create, it’s important to have a proper editorial schedule in place. That way, everyone knows what content is supposed to go out when. On top of that, this will allow you to properly space out your content, so that your audience receives consistent, regular updates. This also allows you to plan for the future, to ensure that you stick with your content strategy. Determining the proper deployment and creating a schedule for your content is massively helpful.
Getting your content out there can be difficult, but it’s also hugely important since you want the most eyes on your content as possible. Here it’s vital to diversify the ways that you promote your content. These days there are several avenues to getting content out there, like social media, email marketing, paid media and advertisement, and more. It’s important to determine which strategy is best for you.
Conclusion
To adopt a content marketing approach, it’s important to have the right strategy to go along with it. Though there’s no one-size-all approach, we’ve gone over several ways to develop your content strategy. And, on top of that, there are plenty of businesses out there that can help you with your content strategy development.
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