Content Marketing – Tips for Building an Effective Strategy

As part of your general marketing plan you should have a strategy that involves content marketing. Your content should be well planned with a clear, firm meaning. Things to consider when thinking about your content marketing strategy are;
– Why your business exists
– Who your target audience is
– What problems your business solves for your target audience
– What is your unique selling point
– What formats do you want to focus on
– What channels are relevant to your customers
– How will you manage your content

Once you have answered these questions you can begin to formulate a plan, we have listed 6 steps below that we believe will help your content marketing strategy work best.

List your objectives
In order to create an effective plan or any kind you need to have a clear idea of what your goals are, what you want to achieve from the plan. We asked some of our customers what their goals were to help you get started, the most common were; to increase brand awareness, grow online conversions, to streamline the sales process and to create a stronger, more consistent marketing message.

Define your target audience
This is an important step for any kind of marketing strategy. Who your target audience is will be the leading force behind your content marketing, it helps you decide what kind of content will be most effective, what platforms your content should be on and where it’s worth spending more money or more time to help you achieve your goals. It’s easier to produce a focused message when you know who your message is for.

Brand story
Having a brand story will enable you to focus your strategy around what kinds of messages and ideas you want to communicate to your audience. Sharing your brand’s journey and how you differ from your competition will help build trust and loyalty between your business and your customers/potential customers.

Content management system
We recommend using WordPress as your content management system for a website, it allows you to plan, produce and publish content easily. WordPress is very user friendly and you don’t need to know how to code or build websites to use it. For social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, we recommend using Hootsuite or buffer to help you schedule posts. Without a content management system you will find it difficult to get your message out and keep it up to date and relevant.

Brainstorm
Brainstorming is essentially a brain dump – get any and all ideas you might have out of your head, this will help you approach each idea and figure out if it is something that will move you towards your goals. Some things to consider here; blogs – blog topics, creating a video – to raise brand awareness and showcase what you do/offer, campaign ideas for social media and what keywords are important to you and your business.

Plan, publish and manage
This is where you turn your ideas into real activities. Creating a calendar or spreadsheet may help you when it comes to regularly creating content.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions about content marketing or would be interested in any of the content marketing services we provide.