Strategy is a map along which you or your team moves in a specific direction to achieve a goal. Content is a tool that helps you achieve this goal. For example, lead generation, build brand awareness or drive traffic to a website. The truth is there are no special secrets to creating a content marketing strategy. Instead, we use our 7-step framework as a guide, and today we want to share with you.
Step 1. Set Goals
First of all, you need to answer the question: why do we need this content, and what problems will it solve? See, here are some of the goals you can set.
– Promote New Products or Services
– Lead Generation
– Grow Digital Presence
– Build Brand Awareness
– Retain Existing Customers
– Develop Brand Loyalty
– Increase Sales and/or Revenue
– Expand Into a New Market
– Grow Market Share
To keep your strategy focused and crystal-clear, stick to three to five business goals max and write down them.
And remember: Creating content for content’s sake isn’t your goal.
Step 2. Market Research
The purpose of market research is to look at the market associated with a particular good or service to ascertain how the audience will receive it.
We can advise you on a few resources with proper research: Grand View Research, Investopedia, Nielsen Global Media. Such information helps create in-demand content.
Step 3. Explore Your Product From A to Z
Before you start promoting your product or service, you need to research your product thoroughly.
What makes it unique? How do you stand out from the competition? What problems does your product solve? How can your product or service be used? What’s your unique selling propositions, etc.
Moreover, there are two ways to get to know the product better: by talking to the owner or becoming a secret shopper if you provide marketing services. It helps to find strengths and weaknesses and understand what to focus on in promotion.
Step 4. Know Your Audience
Before you create any content, you need to find out who your target audience is. What do your target customers want to know? What challenges or pain points are keeping them up at night? We’ve already told you how to identify the right target audience for your business. We advise you to read it after reading this article.
Step 5. Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis can help you learn the ins and outs of how your competition works and identify potential opportunities where you can out-perform them.
To make your analysis truly useful, it’s essential to:
– Pick the right competitors to analyze
– Know which aspects of your competitors’ business are worth analyzing
– Know where to look for the data
– Understand how you can use the insights to improve your own business.
So, what to look for:
– where your competitors publish content and what topics they write about
– duplicate posts or make posts unique for each social network
– how their social media pages are designed, what types of content they use
– how they communicate with the audience – tone of voice
– do they hold contests, broadcasts
– how often do they post content
And think about how It can be applied to your brand.
Also, check the advertisements of competitors. You can use the free service Ad Library – Facebook, or look in Instagram: competitor’s account → “Account Information” → “Active Ads.”
Step 6. Define Brand’s Tone of Voice
The tone of voice describes how your brand communicates with the audience and influences how people perceive your messaging.
Your company’s tone of voice represents your brand personality and values. This includes the words you choose and the order you put them and applies to all the content you deliver — website content, social media posts, emails, and any other formats.
We showed how to determine your brand’s one of voice on our social networks. We invite you to study one of our Instagram posts to know how to define your brand’s tone of voice in a simple and creative way (especially Harry Potter fans, lol).
Step 7. Create a Content Calendar and Content Plan
It’s go time! Now that you have a deep understanding of who your target audience is, the content they want and need, it’s time to plan and create your content. We have another helpful article to help you with that – “CONTENTS MATRIX: How to come up with hundreds of ideas.” We’ll help you figure out the content, and you can come up with hundreds of ideas.
How often should you post? When you have something to say. Don’t write text for text’s sake because content has to solve problems.
So, a content strategy must, above all, have a long-term goal. There’s no point posting a few blogs and some social media tweets and expecting the leads to roll in. It doesn’t work like that.
What should be in the strategy:
By monitoring your progress, you’ll be able to tweak your content marketing strategy at regular intervals, so it’s always up to date.
That’s it! Now you know how to create a successful content marketing strategy from beginning to end. But remember that we are ready to help you create a successful content marketing strategy for your business. Don’t hesitate to send us an email to hello@sweetcode.pro.
