It's early in the year—how's your content marketing strategy coming along?
While our goal is to help you advance your marketing techniques for your business, sometimes, it helps to go back to the basics. So we thought we’d give everyone a quick refresher on how to create a blueprint for your content marketing—
1. What do you want?
Start with goals.
Answer this question: what part of your business do you want to move using content?
So for example, if I wanted to build brand awareness, I would start tracking metrics focusing on numbers like reach (how many people are exposed to my content).
If my goal was to encourage engagement, I can use Google Analytics to make sure that my bounce rate goes down and time on page goes up.
If I wanted to focus on increasing sales, I’d start keeping track of my bottomline revenue.
Think about what marketing goal you want to achieve and figure out what metrics you can attach to each.
2. What do you have to offer?
After you’ve defined your goals, it’s time to drill down to specifics by creating your value proposition.
What makes your business different or interesting to a particular group of people?
This will streamline your content and provide a framework that delivers what you want to say.
One way to look at this would be by studying the different elements that make up your business–
Start by identifying your audience–and be specific. As much as you would like to convert and sell to every person on the planet, it’s just not possible. So look at your users and see which demographic would be best served by what you have to offer and whittle them down based on specifics such as age, gender or interest. And based these, what about your business would they find most value in?
Be specific about what you want to offer. You can’t be a Jack (or Jane) of all trades, master of none. Make sure your content drives this point across clearly.
3. Where do you want to go?
If you’re a more visual person like I am, it helps to use free tools available online to visually map out where you want your content to go. I’m a big fan of Lucidchart, which allows you to create graphs, diagrams and charts; Freemind, which is a mind mapping software; and for writers, Scrivener is a word processing and project management tool that makes it easier to streamline creative minds.
Now, in terms of figuring out what topics to cover, stick with what’s working already. From a content marketing strategy, you can use Google Analytics to see what posts are popular. If you already have an existing collection of published posts, check to see which ones get the most engagement; if not, review top blogs similar to yours and see what kind of content gets the most interaction from their audience.
What you’re trying to do is find out what your users already like and create more of that.
4. How do you plan to tell your story?
Use social media to share your content across different social media channels. Buffer can help you with this, by allowing you to automate the entire process.
You can also use paid media to boost your posts. Remember, while you are paying for advertising, you can also easily scale it up or down.
Keep in mind though, that as you promote your content through various social media, you have to be clear about the goals and results that you want to get and, that you are giving the kind of content that audiences expect through this channel.
5. How can you say what you want to say?
Repurposing content is one of the fastest and easiest ways to generate consistent content.
Take a specific piece of previously published content, whether it’s a blog post, a video, an inforgraph, a tweet–and you can reformat it in such a way that it becomes fresh content. So for instance, if you have a blog post, you can maybe create a slide share out of it; moving forward, you can take that slide share and create a video out of it, or summarize the visual elements and produce an infographic.
Be creative and make sure that you post them on the appropriate media platform.
6. Who do you want to say it to?
Yes, you are writing for people.
However, you need to make sure that the Googlebots understand what your site is about. It’s actually quite simple to do.
For example, tag your images properly to identify what the image actually is helps Google find your content better; and in terms of SEO, long tail keyword phrases work best. But you have to be specific. You can’t just pepper your content with the phrase “social media” for instance and assume that your target audience will find your website. Be more specific–review keywords to find what people are searching for and get to know your users to get better results.
In Conclusion…
If these strategies feel a little too overwhelming, my tip is for you to just pick one thing from this list and start familiarizing yourself with the process. Once you get the hang of it, you can always come back to this blog post and try out something else.
You’ll find that once you have these basics down, it will be easier for your to determine and manage your content marketing strategy. And if you have something to add to this list, or if you want to share a tip when it comes to creating a blueprint for content marketing, be sure to share it in the comment section below.
– Mercer
