How to Create A Content Marketing Strategy

So... what is content marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic approach to marketing, focusing on creating and distributing valuable content to attract your target customers, and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer actions. 

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Like the name suggests, it encompasses a myriad of forms of content - from blogposts to e-books, to free templates (e.g. a free sales pipeline template), infographics and consumer research. Videos, podcasts, social media posts and Slideshares are also considered content marketing.

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Why do we need a content marketing strategy?

1. Building reputation and trust

Great content helps to build rapport with potential customers. Valuable and engaging content keeps your target audience engaged, helps you understand your brand values, and keeps your brand top-of-mind.

2. It boosts conversions

According to ABG Essentials, content marketing provides conversion rates up to 6 times higher than other digital marketing methods. There is a caveat though - the one thing to remember is that there should always be a clear Call-to-Action (CTA) embedded within your blog so that you can guide your potential customers to the next stage of sales funnel.  

3. It helps SEO

By incorporating relevant keywords for your business/service within your content marketing, such as your blogs, you can make your website more relevant to search engines. Valuable content also leads to virality - and when other websites or channels share your content and link into your website, this also helps boost your rankings on search engines.

How do we get started with our content marketing strategy?

‍1. Understand your target audience

• Build your customer personas to better understanding who your target audiences are. What are your audience's interests and values? What are their ages, gender, location of residences and income level? What other channels or content would your audience enjoy? On which channels do your customers usually consume content - is it Facebook or Instagram, through the web or through mobile, or otherwise?

• By having a clear understanding of who your target customers are, you will know what kind of content to produce (funny/humorous, light-hearted/memes, formal/research-based etc.), on which formats to produce it on (blogs, videos, gifs, research papers, toolkits), and on which channels to produce it for (social media channels, mobile/desktops, websites).

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2. Brainstorm content ideas

• Get ideas for your content marketing and get creative. Here are some sources of inspiration, depending on the type of business you are and the kind of content your audience would like.

• ‍Medium.com: Medium is a fantastic resource for content marketers to get inspired, with various verticals ranging from business and startups, to spirituality and self-improvement. Read the latest articles or sign up to relevant digests for top-articles to learn the latest trends. Mostly relevant for: B2B startups, Professional services, SaaS

• CoSchedule’s headline analyser: Analyzes headlines and titles, provide feedback on word choice, grammar and sentiment analysis.

• Social media platforms: Be it Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and/or TikTok, find the key influencers for your industry/sector on these platforms and follow them for inspiration.

3. Decide on your content formats

Here are some popular content marketing formats: 

• Type: Blogposts, content for social media platforms
• Lead magnets: Adding value with Ebooks, Templates, Infographics, Trends Reports, Slideshares and Guides
• Nature of content: Video, audio (podcasts) static images, dynamic images (gifs), or simply pure text

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It’s particularly worth noting that ebooks are a popular lead generation tool, especially for SaaS and B2B startups. These usually require a significant investment in time and effort, but if these ebooks provide sufficient value to customers, it has inbuilt virality which helps SEO, builds rapport with customers by providing value as well as brand equity. The clincher is also the ability to request for customers' contact information as a pre-requisite to sending out your ebook.

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4. Measure the performance of your content

There are numerous tools you can use to track and analyze the performance of your content.

Buzzsumo helps analyze which content of yours performs better on various social media platforms, whilst Google Analytics will give an overview of your metrics on your web-based content, such as blogs and toolkits.

Metrics to keep in mind are consumption metrics (the number of views, visits, downloads, shares, etc., as well as lead and sales metrics.

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5. Creating a content calendar 

A centralized content calendar is a shareable resource for each member of the team to plan, schedule, and organize your content across all your marketing channels. It provides:

• A high-level overview of your overall strategy.
• Reminders of important holidays so you can plan your content around key events. Get inspired by Freepik’s calendar of festivities to create your own calendar.
• A better content creation workflow.

6. Repurpose and reproduce more content 

One of the biggest problems in content marketing is the churn of continuous production of relevant articles. Here are some tips you can use to power your content marketing engine over time.

• User-generated content: On social channels such as Twitter and Instagram, you can engage customers by re-tweeting or re-posting relevant user-generated content. 

• Breaking a piece down: Repurpose your content for various channels. For example, you can unbundle a blog-post full of ideas into a multitude of tweets/Facebook posts, simplifying concepts and provide singular insights with each post.undefined

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Content marketing is an important component of every startup/company's marketing mix. Whether you are a B2C fashion company, or a B2B SaaS startup, your content marketing strategy is important as a complement to your paid marketing strategies.

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Once you have crafted a stellar content marketing strategy, if you'd like a digital marketing specialist to help run, execute and plan for your SEO and/or paid ads strategy, Traktion.ai is here to help with our top network of pre-vetted digital marketing experts.

Find your marketer here.