10 Actionable Steps To Create Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing strategy is the management of any written, visual, downloadable content. Content marketing strategy helps you to demonstrate your expertise to your industry. According to the research from Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, 63% of businesses don’t have a documented content strategy. 

In a recent survey by SEMrush conducted across 39 countries covering all major sectors in business, 91% of respondents said they employ some kind of content marketing strategy. However, only 9% of them are pleased with it. Let’s dive into the factors associated with this contradiction.

How to do Content Marketing?

1. Define your goals

Why are you creating this content marketing plan? What are you trying to achieve with this content marketing? What is the end result and how soon you want to achieve it? Defining your goals will help you to focus right on that direction. The goals include what you are planning to achieve in terms of traffic, purchase, revenue, etc. 

Examples:

Reach 1 Million traffic within a year 

Improve ranking of your product page to increase clicks

Increase email new subscribers by 50% 

Increase your lead signups by X% within 3 months

2. Persona Research

Without knowing your end users, you can’t create an effective content marketing strategy. You know to know about their demographics, qualification, income, online behavior, etc to create relevant content to target their various buying cycle. Regularly updating your persona is crucial to growing your audience. With proper designed persona research, you will have an understanding of the type of content your audience likes, how it will help them, what will make them care about it. 

Read: Future Scope of Content Marketing

3. Analyze the existing content

Before you create any content, analyse the type the content you have, what type of content works for you and what doesn’t. Do a little competitor research and identify what type of content works for your primary competitors. This will give you a idea about what type of content you want to create to attract your readers. 

4. Brainstorm Content Ideas

There are a few ways you can brainstorm content ideas:

1. Discuss with your team to come up with new content ideas. 
2. Use online tools such as Hubspot Blog Idea Generator to collect new ideas. 
3. Use online forums and QnA sites to identify users’ queries. 
4. Participate in relevant online communities to understand your target users’ questions. 

5. Find out where you want to publish

Once you understand your target audience, you must be aware of where your audiences are roaming online. So, you have to make a plan for your primary channels to lure them to your website. For example, you have to find out the type of social media channels your audiences use, types of blogs they visit, etc. 

Also Read: How to become a content marketing specialist?

6. Find the type of content you want to make

Content is not limited to the blog post. It can be Video, Infographic, Gifographic, Images, Memes, E-Books, Podcasts, etc. You have to decide what type of content you are going to create based on your business, persona, and platforms you want to publish. 

7. Allocating Resources

You have the strategy ready. You are ready to rock now. Now its time to allocate resource to execute the part. Execution is as important as planning as a bad execution can kill a very well strategy easily. You have to find out who is going to create the content, List of tools needed to complete the task, are you going to internally create and maintaining the content or outsourcing it? 

8. Create a Realistic Calendar

If you don’t plan and create a realistic calendar, things will derail very easily. You need to understand the various steps, your resource, and publishing numbers and make a realistic calendar and once created, need to be followed religiously. Excel or Google sheet can be used to simply create a content calender or you can employ calendar tools. 

9. Now, Create Content

By now, you know exactly what to create, how to create it in a way to create maximum engagement and where and when to distribute it. Do in-depth research to start creating a content, get more ideas, do some original research if applicable to create content that can benefit both your readers and yourself. 

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10. Distribute Your Content & Measure Your Results

Distributing your content will get you the results you want if handled properly. 

1. Share the content on your social media channels – when your readers are available. 
2. Share the content through email marketing – implement email marketing best practices to get better results. 

No. The work is not stopped here. 

To understand how this content worked for you, you need to analyse the results you gained. You need to compare the results with the goal you created. By monitoring and measuring you can tweak your content regularly to get better results. Also, it will help you plan your future content. 

Conclusion

By now, you must know something about how to create content marketing effectively. Follow these actionable steps to start your content marketing plan. Let me know your opinion in the comment section. If you want to learn more about any specific topic, please share it in the comments as well.

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upGrad’s digital marketing course duration is 6.5 months. The course is fragmented into various modules consisting of theory, case studies, and live industry projects on topics like SEO, SEM, social media/content/email marketing, marketing analytics, campaign management, and marketing strategy, among other things.

The upGrad and MICA PG Certification in Digital Marketing & Communication course take on a holistic approach to digital marketing. By the time you finish with us, one thing is for sure – your horizon of knowledge will expand significantly and you’ll learn to think and act like a true digital marketer. With so many perks and benefits, why should you go someplace else?