8 Steps to Create a Content Marketing Strategy (& Why You Should)

Every business needs to invest in marketing so they can succeed. Without it, they wouldn’t create brand awareness, generate leads, or bring in as much revenue as they’d like. As an entrepreneur, you’ll already know that. You’ll even know about the many marketing strategies you can use.

One of the most effective is content marketing. Once you create a content marketing strategy, you should see more and more success.

As effective as it can be, you’ll need to know what you’re doing to see the results it offers. This is where many budding entrepreneurs struggle. It’s easy to see why, especially if they’re not well-versed in marketing in the first place.

It’s far from impossible, though. Let’s dive into what content marketing is, and how you can create a content marketing strategy that practically ensures success.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the process of developing and distributing content that provides value to potential customers. This content should be relevant to the products or services you offer and provide actionable insights to your area.

In time, this drives profitable actions on your customers’ behalf, fueling your sales and revenues. Content marketing can be integrated into multiple areas to bring them to the next level:

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
2. Email marketing
3. Social media marketing
4. Inbound marketing
5. Public relations

In fact, content marketing – as a process and strategy – can be an essential component for many of these. It’s hard to implement an SEO strategy without a solid approach to content marketing, for example.

Even by focusing on content marketing on its own, you’ll see multiple benefits:

• Establishing Your Expertise – You’ll be well-versed in everything about your industry, but what’s the point if almost nobody knows about it? Using content marketing helps establish your business as an industry expert, making it more appealing to potential customers. This is especially beneficial in the business to business world.
• Boosting Your Brand Awareness – Content marketing is one of the best strategies you can use to improve your brand awareness among your target market. While all marketing strategies focus on this, content marketing can be one of the more effective, especially long-term. Your business will create more and more of a well-known brand in time.
• Being an Affordable Strategy – All marketing strategies cost money to implement, and this is always a great investment. Some cost less than others while still offering quality, and long-term, results. Content marketing is one of the more notable of these, making it one of the more cost-effective strategies to use.
• Increasing Conversions and Revenue – One of your main goals with any marketing strategy is to increase your sales and revenue. In the long-term, this is an area where content marketing excels. The better your content marketing strategy is, the more results you’ll see. While some of this will be in the long-term, it’s still an effective approach.

To see these, you’ll need to create a content marketing strategy that actually works for your business. That’s often easier said than done. With the right approach, you shouldn’t have much to worry about.

Eight steps help you with this, and they can all be vital to putting your content marketing strategy together.

Create a Content Marketing Strategy: 8 Essential Steps to Take

1. Set Goals & KPIs

As with any other marketing strategy, you’ll need to have goals and KPIs from the outset. Your goals are what you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy. Your KPIs – key performance indicators – are what you’ll measure the success of your marketing strategy against.

Have both of these in place before you start marketing. KPIs can include website visits, conversions, new followers, and similar areas. Your goals could be generating a specific number of sales, increasing your website traffic by a certain amount, and related achievements. Have these in place so you can plan for them accordingly.

2. Understand Your Audience

You’ll need to keep your target audience in mind when you’re creating a marketing strategy. This is vital for content marketing, as you’ll base your content around their needs and pain points. You’ll need to spend some time researching your target audience so you can figure out these needs and pain points.

You can base a lot of this on the followings you have on social media, as well as your website visitors. Using Google Analytics and similar tools helps you collect actionable data you can then use to inform your content marketing strategy, as well as other strategies.

3. Assess Your Current Position

You’ll already have a certain amount of content on your website and similar channels. Before you create a content marketing strategy, take stock of what you already have. It’s worth asking yourself a few questions when you’re doing this. Is the content already giving you results, or can it be improved?

Based on the answers, you can take your current content into your content marketing strategy. You could need to make various improvements to the content you already have, or it might even need to be replaced entirely. You’ll only know that by assessing what you already have. This could be part of your business plan.

4. Determine the Best Channels

It’s always worth considering the channels you’ll publish your content on with your content marketing. While you’ll naturally publish most of your content on your company website, this is far from the only area to focus on. You’ll also need to push it out through social media and newsletters.

Take the time to figure out which ones you should focus on. Research your target market and find out which ones they use most. Once you do, you’ll know exactly where to focus with your content, and you’ll see better results because of it. Google Analytics is great at helping with this.

5. Develop Your Content

You’ll naturally need content for your content marketing strategy to work. As obvious as this is, it can be one of the more complicated areas to sort out. Your content will need to be high-quality, actionable, and relevant to your industry. Then, you’ll need to consider SEO and multiple other factors.

It’s easy for this part of the process to feel a little overwhelming. That’s why content writing services are worth investing in. With the right provider, you’ll make sure the content you get is perfectly tailored to your overall content marketing strategy. It’ll even take less time and cause less stress than doing it yourself.

6. Create a Content Calendar

Planning makes a vital difference in how successful your content marketing strategy is. Without it, you mightn’t see nearly as much success as you could. Part of this means creating a content calendar. This outlines exactly when each piece of content will be published, which can affect how much engagement you get.

If you’re not creating a lot of content, then this could play a major role in how much engagement you get. Don’t just think of when you’ll publish the content. Also include when it’ll be pushed out to your social media and newsletters. Don’t forget republishing your content on other platforms later on.

7. Distribute Your Content

Once you’ve created your content, you’ll need to start promoting and distributing it. It’ll be vital to getting eyeballs on your content. While SEO plays a role in search engines, you’ll also have to take a proactive approach on top of this. That means using specific content channels to promote it.

The best approaches to take with this are social media and email, as they both offer results. They’re also quite affordable, even when you’re investing in paid ads. Use tools to help you with this. They’ll let you automate your distribution and make the entire process easier.

8. Measure Your Results

You’ll eventually need to figure out whether your content marketing strategy was successful. Having a specific timeframe to start measuring your results is recommended. Then, you’ll have to actually measure them. Focus on the KPIs you’ve chosen when you’re doing this. They’re vital specifically because of this.

Thankfully, measuring your content marketing results isn’t complicated. You’ll have multiple tools to pick from, like Google Analytics. Go with the option you’re most comfortable with and that offers detailed tracking and reports. It makes measuring your results a lot easier. Once you’ve measured your results, figure out what needs to change and what you can do better.

Create a Content Marketing Strategy: Wrapping Up

Content marketing is one of the more effective marketing strategies you can use. It’s a natural area to invest in to achieve sustainable, and cost-effective, growth. You’ll see the results more and more as time goes on.

To actually see these, you’ll need to create a content marketing strategy that works for your business. Countless entrepreneurs struggle with this and often fall at the first hurdle.

With how complicated content marketing – and marketing in general – can seem, it’s easy to see why. It’s a craft in itself and needs to be worked on consistently long-term. By investing in it, though, there’s no reason your business shouldn’t see more and more growth.