The world of content marketing is getting more popular and competitive also. At a certain phase, you may face more competition than before. So, if you have been following the same strategy for content marketing, then you must recheck your content strategy plan and ensure that the plan is up-to-date and innovative. As per the information, 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content this year than the year 2016. The very first approach to this competition is to develop a solid, smart content marketing plan.

Steps to creating an effective content marketing strategy?

 

Determine the objective or goal:

Before developing a content marketing strategy always ask yourself why you need this and what is your aim behind this? First, find out and understand your goal so that you can easily develop the best strategy.

Do some research:

While developing a content marketing strategy, first, you have to understand your target audience and try to know the personality of your buyers. This will be very helpful for those who are new to marketing. Once you can understand your target audience, then you can create valuable content that will attract them to read, and later they will convert as your customers. By re-checking the audience parameters and conducting market research, you can only develop an effective marketing strategy.

Do some content audits:

Most people like to begin with a blog post. But later if you want to expand and try producing other content pieces, then think about which one you need to make.  For example, if you’ve been working on weekly blog posts for a few years, then you can create an e-book that will combine all your blog posts into one ultimate guide.

Content management system:

You must use a system that can effectively manage your content. That is system is known as the content management system. The system can perform various tasks like content creation, content publication, and content analytics. You can use software like HubSpot, CoSchedule, and WordPress.

Develop best content execution plan:

You need to use the customer’s character and conversation to evaluate content modalities. You need to understand When, where, and how do your audiences consume information? Because they need different types of content. So, remember to build a plan accordingly.

Formulate buyer personas:

If you can effectively formulate buyer personas, then that will help you effectively and best content creation. Here are some things that the buyer personas must cover:

• A day in life.
• Problems, for instance, why the objectives haven’t been achieved.
• The orientation means professional behavior.
• Obstacles mean understanding what can create hiccups in forwarding momentum.
• Develop best and most effective content and channel preferences.
• Integration of keywords and phrases.
• Uses of social media.

 

 

Cross-department ideas:

You must understand that, if you are regularly maintaining your editorial calendar, then that will be interesting for both readers and content creators. Apart from that, it will lead to vital content operation. You can achieve this if you can provide a space or interval between other departments.

Diversify the content:

If you can produce diverse types of content, then you can stretch your ideas much further which further can provide more and more value. Remember that, updating your website regularly not only refers to the topics or angle, it also connects with the types of content you are using on your website. Here are some experiments that you can do:

• Long structural blogs.
• E-books.
• Customer reviews or feedback.
• Taking interviews with experts.
• Uses of videos.
• Integrating infographics content.
• Gated content.
• Social media platforms.

Brainstorm content ideas:

As you are now moving ahead, you must have to generate ideas for your next content project. Here are some tools that you can use in generating content ideas:

HubSpot Grader:

HubSpot Grader is a tool that can show you what your position with your marketing is. It grades some major areas of your marketing starting from blogs to social media marketing. Then it gives you a report, and that will help you to optimize and enhance each area. It also helps you to build an SEO-friendly website.

What to Write:

What To Write’s unique content idea generator which will ask you some questions that will help you kickstart you’re brainstorming quality. It also provides varieties of blog post ideas, and you can use those in creative content marketing strategy.

HubSpot Blog Topic Generator:

Just give the tool a topic you want to write about, and it will show you some content related to that topic.

Feedly:

It helps in tracking popular and trendy topics and also offers you effective content ideas about the topics.

Content Forest:

It is a free content generator tool and also includes KeywordKiwi and ContentIdeator. It helps in finding popular content, effective keywords that can be used in the content, and the best content ideas.

Blog Post Headline Analyzer:

It can evaluate the effectiveness of your headlines and titles. After examining that it offers you valuable feedback on length, word choice, grammar, and keyword.

Publish and manage your content:

While developing a marketing plan, always prefer to go beyond the types of content you are using and effectively organize your content. You can use the editorial calendar to find out the best way for publishing an effective, well-balanced, and diversified content library on the website. After that, you can develop a social media content calendar. It will help you to promote and manage your content on different social media platforms.

Many of these ideas will be evergreen which means those ideas will be there even after many years in content marketing strategy.  Keep in mind that you shouldn’t ignore timely topics. Maybe they will not help you that much in your editorial calendar, but they can help in generating huge traffic. Nowadays it has also been seen that most of the organizations are using popular holidays such as New Year’s and Thanksgiving in their marketing efforts, but don’t just stay under it. If any normal holidays can appeal to your audience, you can publish content on your blog or on social media platforms during those holidays.

Content Strategy

Content strategy is known as the component of your marketing plan and development which is also referred to as management of tangible media that you create like written, visual, downloadable and at the end, you get the picture. While developing some content strategy, you can consider some points like:

• For whom are you creating the content strategy?
• Which problem will be solved for the audience or client?
• How will it be unique from other marketing strategies?
• Which format should you follow?
• Selection of proper channel on which it would be published.
• Scheduling and managing creation and publication.
• Why content marketing strategy?

It helps an organization to develop an effective way for reliable and cost-effective sources to increase website traffic. For example, if you can develop a blog post that can acquire a steady amount of organic traffic, then it will generate leads for you in the future. Sources like traffic and lead from your unique content will give you the flexibility to examine and develop some other marketing content like distributed content, social media content, sponsored content, and more. All these content strategies will lead you to generate high revenue. Apart from that, unique content can educate your target prospects and generate the best result in brand awareness.

Does one need to share our content marketing strategy with other teams/departments in the company?

Well, the answer is yes. You can share the content marketing strategy with other departments. In fact, they can help you in creating an effective marketing strategy. You can share the strategies with those who are not directly involved in the content marketing process. If you have a large organization, then you must need to do that. It can help to keep siloed teams on the same page.

It also ensures that everyone is working toward the same goal. For those who are new to the business, sharing the content marketing strategy is also good practice. Their content teams depend upon internal or external subject matter experts to acquire knowledge about the company’s content.

However, how you will communicate the content marketing strategy with your teams depends on the structure and culture of your organization. For example, few companies share full documentation, and for a few, it makes more sense to create targeted summaries for certain stakeholders which will be based on how content marketing strategy can affect their roles, objective,s and business process.

To understand which components of the content marketing strategy are required to share with teams, then you must follow some questions like how can you use the principles of content marketing to sell content marketing in your organization? And what do people care about most?

How often should you update the content marketing strategy?

Some components should not be changed that should stay consistent. For example, the organization’s mission and business goals. But, there are some aspects of content marketing that you can change to get more benefits. However, you must revisit your channel strategy, core topics, and team processes frequently or once a year to make sure that your strategy is offering a better return on investment.