A content marketing strategy is a type of marketing that involves creating and sharing content relevant to your target audience to achieve business goals. The content needs to be valuable and relatable to the audience to be effective. Reaching the right audience at the right time, with the right message is key to a successful content marketing strategy. It is standard to complete this process every year, but analyzed quarterly to pivot if needed.
Why Have a Content Marketing Strategy?
Having a content marketing strategy helps align your content with business goals, get buy-in from leadership, and streamlines content creation and distribution process. The 3 P’s need to be built into your content strategy: Plan, Publish and Promote! Also, it enables you to analyze and optimize results over time.
How to Create A Content Marketing Strategy:
There are 8 steps to creating a content marketing strategy listed below.
Step 1: Your Mission Statement & Content Marketing Goals
Step 2: Research and Understand Your Ideal Audience
Step 3: Competitive Analysis
Step 4: Brainstorm Content Ideas & Keywords
Step 5: Create a Content Editorial Calendar
Step 6: Create a Distribution Plan
Step 1: Your Mission Statement & Content Marketing Goals
A great starting point for your content strategy plan is to define a mission statement that can be used as messaging throughout all content channels. Each goal then needs to be accompanies by a key performance indicator (KPI) that helps keep you on track to meet busines goals tied to content delivery.
Mission Statement’s need to be very clear and speak directly to your target audience, so ask yourself who do you help, what are the results you want them to walk away with and what is your businesses special method?
Establishing SMART (specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relatable, Timely) Goals with KPIs for each is next best step. For example, “We are aiming for 5% increase in website traffic.” Or “Increase email open rate from X% to X%.” SMART goals are important because they help give clarity and enable you to measure process.
Step 2: Research and Understand Your Target Audience
It is pivotal to understand who you are speaking to before creating a content marketing strategy! Firstly, collecting demographic data, such as age, gender, education and income will help you start to develop a buyer personas. This can be done by reviewing website, social media and email subscriber analytics, as well as collecting feedback from current clients. Asking questions, such as how you feel about the current content – is it helpful? If not, what would be helpful? Rearching online platforms your target market spends time and determine their biggest pain points and reasons they may or may not buy from you.
The research is behind you – now the fun part – create your Buyer Personas!
Or client avatars that describes your ideal client. This will include all details ranging from giving them a name aka Chatty Cathy of DIY Dave to their goals and pain points. This is SO important for long term success when messaging to your ideal client.
Step 3: Competitive Analysis
Just like with any other marketing strategy, its a great idea to check out the competition! This doesnt mean copying their work, only scope out what is working well for them to help you craft your strategy. It helps inspire to get the party started! Spending some time reviewing their websites, social media and current content strategy is a great place to start. This market research will go a long way when working on your strategy!
Step 4: Brainstorm Content Ideas and Keywords
This is my favorite step! Its where the magic happens. It’s when I carve out time to a hit up a coffee shop and get my creative juices flowing! Literally putting all ideas on paper. No ideas are bad – passion really sells. The real sweet spot is tailoring the content with topics your target audience is interested in learning more about!
For SEO purposes, its important to be strategic with your overall content, by using keywords that peak your audiences interest AND easily found by google. Some free keyword search engines I frequent are Ubersuggest and SEMRush. Ideally, it’s important to create a spreadsheet of all keywords with monthly volumes (MV) and Search Difficulties (SD) to ensure your content is discovered online. This is an important step not to be skipped!
Step 5: Create a Content Editorial Calendar
Due to my freakishly organized nature, creating an editorial calendar is oddly satisfying to me! To get started ask yourself the following questions and take note:
- What is the end goal of creating this content? For example, book more clients, obtain email addresses or spark interest in a new product or program offering.
- What formats are you comfortable creating? For example, Long or short form? Youtube videos, podcasts, blogs, infographics, email sequences, webinars or social media.
- What types of content will you produce? For example, informational, curated, personal, aspirational or crowdsourced.
Some people use a spreadsheet, project management system like Asana or a google calendar! Regardless, must haves include:
- Format of piece
- Content piece with catchy titles
- Deadlines
- Responsible parties
- Categories/Keywords
- Call To Action (CTA)
- Links to drafts and live links on website
- Benchmarks to track success of thepiece
Try not to put to much pressure on making your process “perfect” right away, progress over perfection! Try to have fun with it and also use lots of A/B testing of your content too! Isnt marketing fun?
Also, keep in mind communication strategies for better understanding of the material, such as white space, plain clear language, etc. Learn more about ways to improve patient health literacy here.
Step 6: Create a Distribution Plan
Creating content for your website or Youtube channel is one thing, but how will you tell the world about it? It is essential to create a distribution plan for your content and repurpose the heck out of your content. Decide which platforms you or your company wand to utilize. For example, email (always!), Pinterest, Podcast, Instagram, Linkedin? You get the picture. This can feel intimidating because you will want to do all the things, but there is only so much time in the day. Do what makes the most sense in your industry and where your audience will consume more information!
In order to stay on track with your content marketing goals, setting up a strategy for each channel is important. Keep it simple and don’t overthink it. It could be as simple as posting Pinterest 2x a week promoting a new blog post for 2 months then pause to analyze and pivot if needed.
Also, lean into the power of AI and ChatGPT. Not to replace your work, but enhance it and even help you determine catchy SEO friendly titles that align with your content or reel ideas for social media with 10 second video scripts. It’s a powerful tool for your toolkit, in my opinion!
Step 7: Set up Shop. Create Content and Publish!
The planning is over (for now!) If you haven’t already, time to set up your website, social media platforms and email service providers. There is no time is better than now! Oh and also, google analytics. Data and metrics are fun! They tell you what is working and even better…not working!
Now its time to stare creating the content to publish. This is when I put my earbuds in and get in my zone of genius to write my little heart out! The editing process will look different for everyone, but always having another set of eyes on content is so pivotal for its success. More to come on systems to build out for the create to publish system!
A new trend for larger companies that I am loving is headless Content Management System (CMS) like Contentful. A headless CMS allows you to manage content in one place and be able to deploy that content on any digital channel you choose. Separating the frontend from the backend unlocks your content, making it easier for marketers to manage content independently, and for developers to build faster, automate changes, and manage digital at scale
Step 8: Measure Results & Re-evaluate Monthly
Finally. (Finally!), you made it to the last step. Wahoo!
Every month, it’s important to assess the success of your content marketing strategy in various channels. Measure results by returning to your KPIs you set in Step 1 and see whether you are hitting your targets or if a pivot is needed.
Key Takeaways
Overall, all marketing plans need a content marketing strategy to leverage the promotional side of the business. As stated earlier, the content needs to be valuable and relatable to the audience to be effective. With a little bit of strategy and patience to troubleshoot, you CAN reach your content goals. It all comes down to reaching the right audience, with the right clear message at the right time. Happy creating!
Please reach out if you are interested in working with me to assist you in your content marketing needs today! Shoot me an email here.
Amy is a Functional Medicine Registered Dietitian (RDN), as well as a Nutrition & Wellness Communications Consultant with many years of marketing experience and her Master of Public Health degree (MPH). She is passionate about transforming our broken healthcare system and getting to the root cause of symptoms not putting bandaids on them.