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Developing Your Content Marketing Strategy: What You Need to Know.

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Creating and mapping out a killer content marketing strategy can seem as unrealistic as getting a group of musicians to agree on a practice time and style of music.

But if the band starts to share a vision, egos start to melt and the band becomes a unity. Each band member becomes driven to deliver their unique sound, to achieve their goal consistently.

Starting an Orchestra

A content marketing strategy can also become harmonious when it’s executed by the right team. A team that has a thorough understanding of all the steps of content creation — from setting objectives, conducting competitive research, writing, optimizing, publishing, promoting, and tracking performance.

If you want to establish your business as an authority in your niche, a clear content plan is a must. It’s also the key to an authentic and impressive brand identity. At GUB, we help people and companies understand and drive meaningful traffic to their websites.

So, we put together a guide for you to understand how to develop the right content marketing strategy for your business 

Read on and learn how to balance all the elements of a content strategy from research and analysis to content creation, the same steps we take to help our clients achieve their organic traffic goals and grow their businesses.

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What is content marketing? 

Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing useful and relevant content such as blogs, newsletters, white papers, social media posts, emails, and videos with the aim of reaching out to potential and existing customers. When it’s done right, this content showcases a company’s expertise and demonstrates its willingness to add value to its customers.

Some examples of content marketing include:

  • Blog posts
  • Emails
  • Newsletters
  • Social media posts
  • Podcasts
  • Ebooks
  • Videos

The consistent use of content marketing establishes and nurtures relationships with your prospective and existing customers. When your audience sees you as a partner who is genuinely interested in their success and a dependable source of advice and guidance, they are more likely to choose your products or services when it’s time to buy.

Why do you need a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a crucial aspect for any business to grow, it gives a direction to understand where to go and why. By having a strategy your business will have a direction with a strategic roadmap that will focus solely on using content to attract, acquire, and engage prospects and customers.

“You’ll never reach your content marketing goals if you don’t know what you’re looking to achieve. ”

What types of information should my content marketing strategy cover? 

When developing your content marketing strategy, it’s essential to include the following components

  • A business plan for innovation (optional): If your organization is not used to incorporating new processes like content marketing into its operations, you may need to start by convincing your stakeholders to allow you to innovate. This plan covers your bases in case you fail, and it ensures that everyone’s expectations are aligned
  • A business plan for content marketing: Once your organization has agreed to experiment, the next step is building the business plan for the content marketing program itself. It’s important to note that the business case is not meant to guarantee ROI, as it’s impossible to predict the ROI before you start.
  • Persona development and content mapping: This component helps your content team recognize your buyers as people with informational needs, and helps them create content to address their questions at each stage of the buying cycle. 
  • Your brand story: You will need to determine what your “pillars of content” will be. These are the stories you want to tell, and the framework will help you to develop the best way to tell your story.
  • A channel plan: This component focuses on how you plan to distribute the content you create, i.e., which channels will be most beneficial for your content distribution efforts? 

If you want to learn the best strategies for growing your online business, get in touch with our team and discover how a content strategy can give structure to your business.

What’s in a content marketing strategy?

Defining a clear strategy is essential for any content marketing efforts. Your strategy should outline the key business and customer needs that your content addresses. While every strategy will be different, there are a few essential components that should be detailed:

  • Purpose and Goals – Define the reason for your content, what you want your audience to do after consuming your content, and the value that their actions should provide for your business.
  • Audience Personas and Buyer’s Journey – Define the specific audience that will benefit the most from your content. Identify their current user state and estimate how their needs and goals may change over time. 
  • Differentiated Editorial Mission – Outline your company’s unique approach to creating content and define how it sets you apart from your competitors. It is important to clearly define your content marketing goals before you start creating content. Different types of content work better for different goals. Therefore, you don’t want to waste your time on efforts that don’t line up with what you want to achieve.

Setting your purpose and goals

To achieve your content marketing objectives, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish.. Since different types of content work better in pursuit of some goals than others, It is essential to define your organization’s goals first and then identify the type of content that will help achieve them, so you don’t end up wasting time on efforts that don’t line up with what you want to accomplish.

Find your purpose

Identifying your business purpose is the first step towards achieving success. You can do this by pinpointing the areas where your business is currently facing the most challenges. For example:

  • Brand awareness: Are you struggling to enter a new market, launch a new product, or compete with a well-known market leader?
  • Audience engagement: Do you need to enhance your brand’s profile as a reliable source of information? Are you looking to attract social media influencers to promote your products
  • Website traffic: Are your ad campaigns failing to bring traffic to your e-commerce website? Do visitors bounce off your site pages immediately? Are they unable to find the information they need on your website to make a purchase decision?
  • Lead generation/nurturing: Is your sales team having difficulty finding or qualifying new leads? Are they facing resistance in any particular area when attempting to move existing leads down the funnel?
  • Boosting your marketing ROI: Are you interested in finding ways to decrease your marketing expenses, increase sales, or create new revenue streams? 
  • Customer retention and loyalty: Is customer support inundated with calls? Are you struggling to secure repeat business from customers or upsell them on product options and add-ons?

Set goals around that purpose

Identifying the primary purpose for creating content is crucial. Once you have determined your purpose, it is essential to outline the goals you expect your content to help you achieve. 

Common content marketing goals usually fall into three main categories:

  • Sales goalsThese aim to support specific campaigns or product-driven goals.
  • Cost-savings goalsThese are designed to increase the cost efficiency and performance of your other marketing activities.
  • Business growth goalsThese serve in an entrepreneurial capacity, such as creating new revenue streams or new product lines.

Despite their differences, all these categories have one thing in common: they rely on a foundation of value-subscribed audiences. 

Why focus on subscribers? Because the deeper level of ongoing engagement that characterizes the subscriber experience makes this audience more likely to exhibit desirable behaviors than non-subscribers. 

These behaviors include a greater willingness to share personal data, a greater interest in upselling opportunities, and greater brand loyalty and evangelism. With your purpose and goals documented, you can move on to the next step in your strategy: finding the right audience to consume the content you create.

Identifying and understanding your target audience

While every business hopes its content has universal appeal, content marketing typically works best when it is targeted to serve one audience above all others. When you publish broad-reaching content that aims to be all things to all people, it never gets specific enough to provide much value to anybody.

Narrow your focus to a single niche audience

To uncover the primary audience to target, look for the one type of customer you can help the most with your content. These questions should help:

  • Are there relevant yet underserved audiences who aren’t getting the information they need from other sources?
  • What customer group is our business struggling the most to gain traction with? Can content help us bridge this gap?
  • If we don’t provide content for this audience, would they care or notice? Can we become the leading information resource for this customer base?

Craft your content marketing personas

Identifying your core customers is essential for developing a successful content marketing strategy. Once you have identified them, it’s important to gain a clear understanding of who they are as individuals. This will help your team to connect with them on a more personal level, understand their unique interests, goals, and challenges, and create content that resonates with them. 

Content marketing personas are an effective way to create composite character sketches of your ideal customer. By identifying commonalities among your customers, you can tailor your content to their needs and preferences. This will help to make your content more appealing and engaging to them. 

It’s also important to keep in mind that your audience’s needs and behaviors may change over time. Creating a map of your buyer’s journey can help you anticipate and adapt to these changes. This will enable you to continue providing value to your audience as their needs evolve.

Identifying your mission

Once you know your audience, your purpose, and your goals, you have the information to develop the final component of your strategy: your content marketing mission statement. This is a brief declaration of your company’s unique content vision, the value that content provides, and the specific audience it benefits, along with the priorities and principles it upholds.

As you craft your mission,BoomeRank founder Facu E recommends all content marketers ask themselves, “In what subject area can we become the leading informational provider?” If you don’t believe you can own the relevant conversations around the content niche you have chosen, you may need to narrow your focus to an area of content where you can have a bigger impact on the audience.

For example, take a look at BoomeRank mission statement, which focuses on helping a specific sub-segment of the broad content marketing audience:

BoomeRank leads the industry in advancing the practice of content marketing for enterprise marketing professionals. We educate our audience and help online businesses by providing services and solutions for growth with a focus on ROI.

Your content marketing mission statement should help your entire organization better understand what distinguishes your brand’s content experience from all the other content competing for your audience’s attention. Defining the core features of your brand’s differentiated story also helps your content team make more informed content creation decisions, as it is easier for them to see which ideas are well-aligned with your goals, and which ones may not serve your unique purpose. Learn more about finding the right differentiated story, or content tilt, for your brand, Get in touch.

Conclusion

Let your expertise and unique value shine through by creating content that attracts, engages, and sells. With some planning and systematic content marketing, you can reach the right people and drive brand loyalty. 

At BoomeRank we can help you take your online content marketing strategy to the next level by allowing you to create optimized content for social media, your website, and your email marketing campaigns. We will give you a unique approach and create branded content, including landing pages and paid ads, that can inform your customers about your offerings and business.

With your own brand style guide, you can begin to build a brand identity and let your business show customers its remarkable personality.

Stay Tuned and Keep Growing!