Four Starting Points for Successful Content Marketing Strategy

Companies now have a golden opportunity to develop content in different formats to promote their business through content marketing. As with anything you do with your business, there has to be goals, a plan, and strategies to achieve your objectives. As a digital marketing agency, we have put together a quick infographic as a visual guide, as well as an overview of the four starting points of a successful content marketing strategy. Enjoy!

Below you will find more details about the four starting points.

Developing your content marketing strategy:

There are four steps to implement to develop your online content. While each step is considered a starting point, once they are all completed, the end result will be a sound content marketing plan.

The focus, while implementing each of these steps, has to be on producing well structured content that is useful to the reader and could potentially be used by them to meet their needs.

Starting point 1 – Planning:

The first thing that you want to do when developing your content marketing plan is to outline the purpose or primary goal. For some companies it may be to generate leads. For others, it may be to position themselves as thought leaders in their industry.

Once you have outlined the purpose of your content marketing campaign, you need to get a deep understanding of who your target audience is. The mistake that many companies make is they try to talk to a large audience, which is the wrong approach. The best content speaks to an individual. Take the time two write down the following for your ideal customer or buyer persona:

Age:
Income:
Marital status:
Location:
Personality:
Lifestyle:
Hobbies:

Then, find a picture of your exact ideal customer to help you visualize what they look like, so you can write to one individual.

Once you have an understanding of their basic demographics and psychographics, outline what drives them emotionally. The simplest way to determine this is by answering the following questions:

1. What are their top desires?
2. What are their top fears?
3. What obstacles are they trying to overcome?

Starting point 2 – Decision Making Process

Everyone goes through a linear decision-making process from attention, to information gathering, to comparison shopping, to purchase and post purchase.

Outline the typical questions that your prospects ask at each step in the decision making process. The, outline the answers that you can give to these questions. This helps you visualize how you can develop content to connect with your target audience at each step of their decision making process.

Starting point 3 – Key Messaging

Now that you have an understanding of who your target customer is, their decision making process, and their emotional drivers, outline what’s unique about you. Start by outlining your primary message. For example, for one of our clients, their primary message is that they build winning cases as lawyers. Then, outline your secondary messages. The reason that you want to develop a list of messages including both primary and secondary is to ensure that you stay on message with all of the content that you develop, while having a great enough variation of content to keep people interested in what you have to say long-term.

Starting point 4 – Content Creation

Now that you have an understanding of both what’s important to your target audience, as well as your key messaging, take some time to research where you can find your audience. What associations do they belong to? What publications do they read? What social networks do they belong to? You want to get an understanding of where you can find them, which will help you understand what channels you can use from a content marketing perspective.

We typically recommend beginning to develop content as text in the form of new Web pages, blog posts, eBooks, and slides. This enables you to drive traffic for various keywords on search engines, such as Google, while developing a list of content that can be repurposed.

Once you have a good volume of content, try repurposing the content as podcasts, videos, and infographics. This adds another layer of complexity but enables you to drive additional traffic to your landing pages and Website though channels, such as YouTube.

A great third step of content development is to then repurpose your blog posts, audios, and videos as your own online publication.

This three step process of content development does not happen over night. It will take a few months to accomplish, but it provides a roadmap that you can work towards over the year.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We know we covered quite a bit. You can also download our free ebook on Content Development, which provides an in-depth overview of what you can do to achieve success through content marketing!