Must-need content marketing strategies for any business to follow

If you have been applying the same content marketing strategies in your business those were developed years ago; then you might need to change it slightly it for a better outcome this year. Since the competition is growing and each business wants to perform better, your content marketing strategies also require being improved along. According to a report by the Content Marketing Institute, more than 71% of the B2B Marketers plan to develop more content in 2017. Their main aim to step up to the competition is to create smart and solid content by developing fresh strategy and new ideas to initiate it. In this post, we’ll discuss the different content marketing strategies that a business can follow to boost their business productivity.

Why is Content Marketing essential for any business?

Content Marketing helps businesses define themselves with a proper planning with the effective resources of website traffic and prospects. A strong content has the ability to fetch more leads and traffic, which will give you the flexibility to experiment with the other marketing techniques like sponsored ads, social media advertising, etc. for generating additional revenue. Additionally, the content will help attract more traffic, educate your readers, and create brand awareness resulting in expanded reach. So let’s learn about the different steps to create a content marketing strategy.

Steps to create a Content Marketing Strategy

In this section, I am mentioning a few of the effective steps to create a content marketing strategy.

Determine your objectives

Have you ever focused on what is your motive behind creating a content marketing plan? It’s not just for the sake of following the marketing rules, but you should also learn and understand why this content marketing matters to your business. Some people implement it to gain traffic, some to generate leads, and some use it to create awareness about their brand.  The reason varies with each business, and this is why it is necessary to figure out your goals with a content marketing strategy. So focus on what your business requires at the moment and define your content marketing plan for that specific objective.

Define the uniqueness of your content marketing

Almost every business implement a content marketing strategy that distinguishes from each other in one or the other way. So it’s significant to determine the exclusivity of your content marketing plan. What is that one thing that will make your plan stand out? And will your plan implementation be successful and beneficial to your business? So these are the things that you need to define to make your strategy work out. You can also perform a market research to learn what strategies, business houses are using and which of them stood beneficially.

Decide your target audience

Determine the type of audience you are targeting for your business. For instance, if your business offers content writing services, then your targeted audience should be the online business sectors and companies who manage a website. Then it is not meant for the common public or students, and that is how you have to set your content marketing plan. You need to understand the needs of your audience and learn, what they seek from your business. Understanding your audience is one of the major factors in a content marketing plan.

Learn what your audience needs

I have already discussed in the above point about understanding your audience’s needs. But I did not tell you how. How would you know what your audience is looking for? You can conduct a survey via social media groups and conversations or via your customer service program. Set a few questions those the audience doesn’t hesitate to answer, and you can understand the information and their requirements. Then organise those needs one by one and create a map with all the significant contents. Avoid creating data and statistics because a real business understands their consumers through interactions.

Develop a content execution plan

A content execution plan can be determined by customer conversations and the finest content writing strategies. Depending on the various stages of your business, your customers will need different types of content. Develop a plan that demonstrates what type of content you will create daily, weekly or monthly. Create a call-to-action plan and define a content that motivates your customers to take their next step towards your business.

Define a content management system

When you are already planning to implement a content marketing strategy, all you need is a good content management system. A content management system (CMS) lets you create and modify a digital content and comes as a computer application. It can support multiple users who can work in a combined atmosphere and can organise their content as per schedule. Few of the popular content management systems are WordPress, CoSchedule, Wix, Drupal, Zoho, Yola, Joomla, Contentful, ClubRunner, Populr, etc.

Innovate new content ideas

Writing the content might be easy, but getting new ideas about your next content is truly brainstorming. So to help you out with this, there are a few tools those can bring some fresh ideas for your content, such as WhatToWrite. WhatToWrite is a content idea generator that asks you several questions to quick start your brainstorming session. The tool generates a number of blog post ideas after you answer the questions and those ideas can be implemented to start writing your next content. Another tool is Feedly which is a popular RSS feed that helps you keep track of the trending and new topics around the web and meanwhile, delivers fresh content ideas. Similarly, Content Forest works as a content research tool that lets you type a keyword, and the tool generates relevant content ideas to it.

Different Content Marketing Strategies for a business to follow

In the above paragraphs, I have discussed the initial plans to start with content marketing, and now I will tell you about the next steps to take your business to the succeeding level.

Determine the current scenario of your business

Before stepping into the content marketing part, you need to analyse your business products and services and what benefit do they provide your customers that make it unique. Targeting a specific niche of the audience has become specialised, so it’s very necessary to understand your niche market. Besides understanding your products, you should have a clear knowledge about what your competitors are offering, and that will help you analyse what better value your product carries. Analysing your business situation will help you detect the strengths, weakness, and the hurdles that your company might face. It gives you a clear understanding of the characteristic of your business and helps you determine if your products are worth their value or comprehensiveness. When you are done with this, determine the additional opportunities to expand the reach of your products.

Define your marketing strategies and goals

It’s very necessary to comprehend what you want your plan to accomplish. So it’s better to write down your marketing goals point by point and make them calculable. When you fulfil a goal, you can mark it down. For instance, if you are expecting a 40% sale of your product in the first year, then list down what strategies you are using to accomplish it.

Set your marketing budget

When you plan to step into marketing, you’d need to donate a percentage of your sales as your annual marketing budget. Acquiring a business means financing for it in order to achieve your goals. Marketing is an essential step for a business, and with a wide variety of content marketing techniques, you need to stick to a certain budget. You might also need to exceed your budget with the newest available tactics unless you accomplish your target. Just make sure you can afford them because it is one of the crucial parts of our business.

Get stakeholders’ support

Content marketing is not just a temporary affair, but it’s a long-term commitment that requires engagement and teamwork. You might need to sell your idea to a certain department of your company and require a backing fund to source a content strategy. Focusing on your stakeholder’s goals and their systems is even essential because content marketing is truly an effective way for them to derive better results.

Take a customer-centric approach

It’s very important to learn what your customers expect from your business. Equally, it’s important to research on their needs. So there are a few steps that can help you go ahead with this. First, you need to study your website analysis where your website visitors leave hints about their needs and interests. You can find them from the keyword presentation, internal search data, and bounce rates. Secondly, you need to study the social media pages and specific forums where people discuss similar businesses like yours. You can collect data from the conversations and discussions and topic where people interact about your products and services. Stepping forward to the industry research would also help you obtain huge data. You can research the studies published previously and get relevant search results to get some insights. And lastly, don’t forget to conduct a survey to our customers and ask when they are interested in and what features they require. Collecting this information will give you a decent idea about your customers and their needs.

Analyse and identify the right content strategy

Content marketing all about resolving your customer’s issues and delivering something informative to your readers. This is why your content requires being interactive and shall be able to generate a discussion among influencers and decision makers and give them the belief to proceed to the next step. If your content is not actionable, then it will certainly fail to generate leads. So you need to develop

content that your customer wants. Most companies commit a blunder of creating marketing messages rather providing any information to users. Secondly, learn what kind of content your customers prefer reading. Maintain a particular format that your readers find it easier to understand. You can consider the formats used in blogs, social media articles, webinars, etc. Lastly, don’t forget to curate the content by fetching the best contents from around the web.

Make your content SEO-friendly

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the heart of a content. If you do not maintain SEO in your content, then it will probably remain unrecognised and shall be hardly read because the search engines won’t be able to fetch your content. Today, every company optimises their content with SEO and keyword research that helps them derive better results and keep their content at the top of the search engines. You should stay updated with the latest Google algorithms because they create a huge impact on your content every time they alter. To implement the right SEO on your content, you need to perform keyword research. Target one keyword per page which is relevant or appropriate to your article. Include that keyword in your copy so that it can be easily found in search engines when users search for contents with that keyword. Develop a minimum page length for your content. A minimum of 300 words length is good to maintain the quality of the page, but it should not be a filler content. Try to deliver some crucial information to your users.

Plan the content for a long term benefit

Creating a content adds fuel to your business. So make sure whatever you write stands for a long-term relationship with your customers. Try to write the same content in different ways so that all looks dissimilar, yet, related in some ways. Make the goal to expand the lifecycle of your content in distinctive ways and to distribute it everywhere. Create a strategy to differentiate the format of the content putting some time and effort. For instance, use the same content like a video or webinar or break them into a separate series of blog posts. This will make your content look unique and increase its life. Maximise the chance to spread the content by inserting social media sharing links and optimise it with SEO.

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Refs: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2017_B2B_Research_FINAL.pdf

https://www.act-on.com/whitepaper/6-best-practices-for-creating-a-content-marketing-strategy/

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241953