Building a community is one of the major goals for all businesses in 2021. But you need a proper digital content marketing strategy to build a community in the competitive digital space.
Content marketing was here even before the internet. Not in the form of content, but in another form. Storytelling.
Content marketing is all about storytelling. And humans have been telling stories since the beginning of time!
According to HubSpot, 70% of businesses are investing in content marketing in 2020. Because now it’s more than ever necessary to tell stories about brands.
Because, in the digital world, brands have a decent opportunity to build relationships with their audience. And NO BRAND can afford to miss the opportunity.
But to execute content marketing correctly, you need a proper strategy. A strategy that will guide you through the way.
In this post, we will be talking about what is content marketing and how to set up a digital content marketing strategy.
So, without further ado, let’s get into it:
What is a content marketing strategy?
Content marketing is a strategic process of creating and distributing relevant, helpful, valuable, and consistent content to a clearly defined audience. Content marketing helps to build relationships and trust among the ideal audience.
Building a relationship with your audience is crucial because customers are more likely to buy from brands they trust and know.
Businesses are spending billions of dollars on building a relationship with their audience. However, spending money is not enough. Businesses need a well-planned content strategy to build relationships and trust with their customers.
If done right, content marketing is very cost-effective and can bring high-quality traffic to your website. Later you can convert them as paid customers.
Content strategy is part of your marketing plan where you demonstrate who you are, what your expertise and how you can help your industry. When businesses create content marketing strategies for digital platforms, it’s called a digital content marketing strategy.
Video, written, and anything you create or own can be part of your digital content marketing strategy. You can and should also answer the questions of your customers.
This will increase trust in your customer’s mind and make you an authority on the topic.
Define Your Goal And KPIs
Before starting content marketing, the first thing you need to do is to define your content marketing goal. What is your content marketing goal? What do you want to achieve?
You can follow the SMART goal setting strategy to set up the goal. SMART stands for Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, Timebound. SMART is a well-established formula to achieve a goal.
Specific: Your goal needs to be specific. If your goal is not specific, you will have a hard time focusing on your goal.
Imagine you want to get more traffic on your website. There are a lot of ways to increase traffic. Among those ways, you decide you want to use content marketing to increase website traffic. So your specific goal can be “I want to use content marketing to increase my website traffic.”
Measurable: Your goal must be measurable. So that you can track your progress and measure your success.
For example, getting more traffic is not actually measurable. But if you say, “I will use content marketing to increase my website traffic by 20%,” then it is measurable.
Because now you know the amount of traffic you need from your content marketing effort. Suppose now you are getting 1000 traffic per month, and a 20% increase in traffic means 1200 traffic per month—which is measurable.
Attainable: While it’s great to target big. But it’s important to make your goal realistic. If you are historically getting a 5% increase in traffic per month, then it’s dramatic to target a 50% increase in traffic in the next month.
But targeting a 10% increase in traffic is realistic. Don’t discourage yourself by setting a huge goal that is not attainable.
Relevant: It’s important to know why you are doing something and how it’s aligned with your business goal. Set a goal. This is relevant to your business. Targeting irrelevant goals will demotivate you because you don’t have a reason to do it.
Timebound: Having a time limit is one of the most important parts of the SMART goal setting. Because when you set a time-bound, you can track your progress.
You can break your time frame into small parts. Then you can analyze your progress compared to time. If you don’t have a time limit, it’s hard to track progress.
So your goal can be “I will increase my website traffic by 20% in 3 months using content marketing because the traffic is highly qualified.”
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. It is essential to identify KPIs at the initial stage.
KPIs are highly dependent on the business. KPIs can be signup, increase search engine ranking, new email subscribers, etc.
By indicating KPIs, you can measure whether your business is making progress or not.
Create Content for Your Idea Buyer
Based on your service or product, you should have a buyer persona. If you don’t have one, then create one.
What is the age of your ideal customer? What is their struggle? What is their desire? How much do they earn per month? Where are they in the buyer’s journey? You need to know about your customer in detail.
Where does your ideal buyer spend most of their time? Are they spending most of their time on Facebook, Instagram, or Reddit? Do thorough research. It will help you find the most valuable platform to do content marketing.
When you find out the right platform, you can plan based on the platform. Content marketing is not the same for all platforms.
When you have details about your ideal customer, you will know where they are in the buyer’s journey. This will help you to create highly personalized content.
Publish Ideal Content
You need to create different kinds of content for different stages of the buyer funnel.
Creating content for people who are in the awareness stage in the funnel is different from creating content for people who are in the purchase stage of the funnel.
So it would help if you kept that in mind when you are making a content marketing strategy. You should optimize your content for all stages of the buyer.
Run a thorough content audit. See what you have been doing in the past year. If you have been only publishing blog posts, why not consider publishing video content? Figure out what is working and identify what you need to improve.
Take a look at your competitor’s content and see what is working for them. What is working for them will most probably work for you.
Experiment with a different kind of content type. Blog, video, infographics, etc work great. You should find what works best for your business.
Find out the gap in your content. What are you not sharing about your brand? Do some keyword research, and check what topic you should cover. Ask your existing audience what they would like to know.
This way, you will have some amazing content ideas to publish.
When you find the ideal content type for your business, it will help you with your company’s growth.
You can do keyword research, check your business-related forum, or subreddit to generate content ideas. You can visit Answerthepublic.com to see what kind of questions your audiences have. Then you can answer them.
Following hashtags on Twitter and LinkedIn can also help you generate some awesome content ideas.
Plan a Content Calendar
Publishing content regularly without having a content calendar is hard. A content calendar will make your life easier as a content marketer and will keep your brain fresh.
When you make a content strategy, you need to know when you will publish those content. If you don’t have a planned content calendar, there is a huge chance of making a mistake.
However, your content calendar doesn’t have to be fancy. You can use google calendar to plan your content.
If you plan a lot of content, you can use paid tools to plan your content calendar.
Create Content and Distribute
Having tons of content ideas is not enough. You need to create those content and distribute them.
You should share your content with your email subscriber to get an instant boost. Make posts on social media platforms. And let your customers know about your latest content.
Choose a content management system (CMS). WordPress is a very popular platform. There are many other options also.
You can create and publish your content in WordPress. SEO, optimized content can bring tons of traffic from Google and other search engines.
Track Progress and Measure Success
After publishing content, it’s time to go back to KPIs. Use those KPIs to measure the success of your content.
You can check your engagement on social platforms and google analytics reports to analyze your content. You can use google alerts to notify yourself when your content is mentioned and shared.
You can track new email sign up through email software.
You can check your Facebook page insight to see your content performance.
By monitoring your content performance, you can learn and update them if necessary.
This will also help you to make better content for your audience.
Conclusion
You don’t need a huge budget to be benefited from content marketing.
Now anyone can take the advantages of content marketing and use it in their favor. But you need to do it right.
The world is getting noisier with the increasing number of content day by day. So to win the content game, you need to be authentic and tell good stories.
Now, it’s your turn to make a plan and tell your story. So what is your story?
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