A content marketing strategy it is a necessity.
Building a content marketing strategy will help you ensure that all your time, energy, and money are focused on achieving a particular goal that helps your business grow. Focusing on this goal will prevent you from creating irrelevant pieces of content that get in the way of attracting new visitors and listening to the needs of existing customers or clients.
Additionally, a content marketing strategy will help you reach a much broader audience and distribute your content more effectively to professionals, bloggers, and journalists.
A smart content marketing strategy will also help drive more organic traffic to your website on a daily basis. There is no better traffic source than organic search because it provides relevant traffic with little to no additional investment required.
So how to build a marketing strategy? Here's a five-step process to create a content marketing strategy that works.
1.- Define your goals
This is the most important step. It will put you on a path towards building the winning strategy.
Although defining your goals may seem easy, this is not always the case. You need to think about how you want content marketing to help you and what goals you will achieve once it is integrated into your work schedule.
Your goals could include increases in:
- Organic traffic.
- Unique page views.
- Sales generation.
Sometimes, misguided by an ill-defined strategy and questionable goals, we have this kind of tunnel vision that prevents us from seizing the moment. These questionable goals, or rather, performance indicators are useless, they are tangential to attracting new visitors, generating more leads and reaching new customers.
Here are some examples of bad performance indicators:
Post Frequency. This indicator focuses more on quantity when you should focus on what comes out of your content marketing. Wasting your potential by creating endless posts that provide zero value will not appeal to readers and will backfire on your marketing strategy because the investment required to create all those posts will be extensive.
Brand awareness. This indicator is incredibly difficult to measure through any channel. Understanding how recognizable your brand is to a particular audience will require complex and expensive research. Instead, consider much simpler metrics to measure brand awareness, such as direct traffic growth and search queries for brand keywords.
2.- Investigate the competitive landscape
Find out what type of content your competitors and other industry leaders have produced and how this content is performing.
You can use BuzzSumo to analyze specific posts and articles created by your rivals and industry experts. Not only will this tool tell you everything about your social signals like likes and shares, but it will also tell you your number of links.
The only thing BuzzSumo doesn't offer is organic traffic analysis. Fortunately, there are tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. I prefer to use the Ahrefs Analysis tool, which allows you to process up to 200 URLs at a time.
3.- Find out what content has worked best for you
When some people hear someone say “Use Google Analytics,” they often feel chills down their spines. But it's really not that complicated.
El google support forum He typically explains everything step by step. So, go to Google Analytics and check which of your articles get the most views:
Find out which pages generate the most organic traffic. To do this, consult the “Search Analysis” report in Google Search Console:
After this, analyze your content performance with BuzzSumo.
4.- Know the interests and needs of your audience
Tune in to what your users are telling you using their keyboards. See what your target audience is searching for on Google using a tool called “Reply Audience.” This tool crawls Google suggestion search queries.
Human beings are curious by nature. We are always asking questions.
What questions do your users ask on Reddit or Quora? Use this search term to find topics for your future articles: site: quora.com “your keyword”.
Twitter Audience Insights is another great source of information to understand your users better. This will give you an idea of what type of content is highly regarded in your industry.
5.- Create an amplification plan
During this stage, you need to deliver a detailed plan on exactly how to distribute your content and expose it to a wider audience. This is an action plan that you can use to better promote your content and, as a result, generate more traffic, attract more leads, and increase your sales.
Use paid ads on Facebook
If your budget allows, run some ads on Facebook. Plus, video ads on Facebook cost less, so if you can summarize a creative message into a 20-second video for your ads, don't hesitate. You will pay less to reach more users.
Pay attention when setting up your ad and selecting different audience interests. Use the brands that your audience also likes. For example, if I were creating an ad for the digital marketing industry, then for an ad about “content marketing,” I would add the key phrase “digital marketing industry” as one of my audience's interests.
I would also select an additional interest for my target audience. Let's say for the purpose of this example it's Canva. Adjusting these details gives me confidence that users who come across my message are interested in the topic.
Targeting the right audience also allows you to reach users who are already familiar with your product. If you have 10,000 emails in your user database, then your best option is to create a custom audience.
If you don't have many users, Facebook will charge you more for an ad like this. The smaller your audience, the more you will have to pay for a targeted ad, so it is not always profitable.
Use the Power of Reach
This part requires a little work. Start by making a list of sites and bloggers you're planning to contact beforehand. This will help you speed things up and give you a decent number of links and social shares, and as a result, constant traffic and new leads.
Typically, you want to search for articles related to yours. You can find them with the help of BuzzSumo. On top of that, you can get a list of referring domains (where your backlinks come from) using BuzzSumo, Ahrefs, or Majestic.
Once you have a list of sites you want to connect with, next comes the most terrifying part: you need to figure out how you are going to get to them. There are a couple of ways to do that, and I want to go over the pros and cons of each of them:
Fill out the contact forms on the websites
You'll find these on most blogger sites. Gather a list of URLs with contact forms. One of the advantages is that it doesn't take long to do this process, but the response rate could be zero.
Send emails
This is my favorite method of promoting content. Yes, you need to spend a horrendous amount of time finding these email addresses. But with the help of tools like Hunter.io, Findthatlead.com, or Slik.ai, you can save time and enjoy your latte or watch your favorite show in peace.
Another cool thing about sending emails is that you can check whether the email you sent was opened or not, and track the conversation when necessary. Tools like Yesware, Mixmax, Mailtrack or Mailchimp will help you determine if your email has been opened and read.
Use of social networks
In case you decide to use social media to contact an expert, I would not use Facebook to send messages because people rarely use this social network for work purposes. However, Facebook groups, especially closed groups, are the right place to do it. You will be able to reach your target audience and effectively promote your content.
The same goes for LinkedIn groups. The only thing you should keep in mind is to never share a link to your article without writing a short introduction to your content. That would seem abrupt and spammy. Ideally, you need to write a different introduction for each group you're publishing your content for, and so it's a time-consuming task.
Another option would be to connect with industry professionals and content producers on LinkedIn. This tactic has proven to be very effective, and can be used in conjunction with email outreach.
We also cannot forget Twitter. Using BuzzSumo, you can find a list of users who have previously shared similar content. Those will be the people you want to talk to.
Combined Reach: Emails and Social Media
You can dramatically increase your email response and open rates by connecting with people on LinkedIn first (before you send them). Yes, it takes extra time, but it's always nice to know that you've made meaningful and potentially strong connections. People who have heard your name before will be more likely to respond to your emails.
Conclusion
Now you know how you can build a powerful content marketing strategy from scratch.
Sure, you can simply write content, post it on your site or elsewhere, and do a couple of social media distributions. But that won't bring the traffic and sales you want in the long term.
You need to know exactly what type of messages resonate best with your audience and have a strategy about your outreach plan.
