Effective content marketing starts with a good content strategy.
It doesn’t happen by chance.
Content marketers who drives results that contribute to a company’s bottom line know this.
If you’re “just” writing content, without a plan birthed from strategic insights, you’re simply playing the lottery with your company’s growth. It’s time for a change.
If you’re yet to start, congratulations. You’ll do it right.
Market research
Good content strategy starts with market research.
You need data-backed insights to set goals, key performance indicators, and guide your content marketing efforts.
Key things to discover are your
– market size
– buyer demographics
– buyer pain points and expectations
– buyer behavior across the internet
– your competitors.
Create buyer personas
A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer.
Information from research, current customers, and team members will help me create personas representing your ideal audience.
Customer journey mapping
This looks at how your ideal buyers go from not knowing about a product/service, to buying it and sticking with it as the first-choice solution to the problem they’re trying to solve.
Define core messaging
With the background work done, it’s time to state your core message.
What is the one thing your product/service will do to solve your buyer’s problem and improve their life.
Why should they care?
Content gap analysis
I’ll look at the buyer’s journey map to determine the kind of content needed along each stage.
You may already have content assets that fit into your customer’s journey.
My assessment will point out areas where you lack content.
Keyword research
Keywords help people find things online. Whether it’s via Google, AI tools, or social media.
It’s important to ensure your web pages, blog articles, social media profiles, and posts are optimized for the keywords your target buyers use to search for things related to the solution you provide.
Competitive analysis
Only after the previous steps do I look at your competitors.
Copying your competitors is not a good content strategy.
The aim here is to spot opportunities so I can prioritize what would yield maximum returns on investment.
Set goals
With a solid foundation, we (you and I) can set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
No castles in the air. No unrealistic expectations.
Only clear goals guided by market realities, buyer needs, and your company’s aim.
Create content marketing plan
The end result of doing content strategy is coming up with a plan of action that will guide your content marketing campaign.
The plan shows what to do first, the topics and types of content to create, and how to promote them.
