How to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

You’ve likely heard the term “content marketing” thrown around. Perhaps your team is even engaging in it… but do you really know what it is and how it helps your business?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

The Institute goes on to say that great content is necessary in order to succeed in marketing your business online. Easy for them to say! So how do you create an effective content marketing strategy that works? Start with these 5 steps.

5 Steps to Creating a Content Marketing Strategy that Works

1.    Define Your Goals and Objectives

You need to determine how your content marketing plan will help you achieve your overall goals. Maybe you want to increase organic traffic to your website or to generate more leads.

If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, it’s going to be really hard to create content that’s successful. You’ve got to start here. Solidify your goals and objectives before you just start cranking out content.

2.    Create Buyer Personas.

A buyer persona defines your ideal customer. What characteristics does your target audience have? Where do they hang out online? What are their pain points?

There are many factors to consider in buyer personas, including:

• Profile (name, role, geographic location, education, etc.)
• Priority Initiative (decisions impacting purchases)
• Success Factors (expected outcomes)
• Perceived Barriers (concerns preventing purchases)
• Decision Criteria (evaluation and comparisons of alternatives)
• Buyer’s Journey (buyer’s role in decision-making; resources used)

3.    Develop a Content Calendar

One thing we know for sure about content is it’s never-ending. To execute a solid content strategy, you have to continually create new content that’s relevant. Planning is paramount.

Pull out a calendar and take a look at key days, upcoming events, product and service launches, and start working backwards. What content do you need to create leading up to those important milestones? Working with a calendar allows you to visualize how your content will be distributed throughout the year.

4.    Write Great Content

It’s that simple!

Of course not… but if you do have topics in mind (hello, content calendar), you can research ahead of time and come up with some great ideas.

Make the content your own. Write in your own voice, but keep it simple. Unless you’re targeting an audience strictly with doctorate degrees, your content should be straightforward and conversational. Don’t use technical or industry terms that will not be understood by your readers.

Don’t be afraid of using others’ content. As Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” There are great articles and blogs on almost every topic, so use information, research and statistics already written and published elsewhere. That doesn’t mean copying word for word. If you do include something directly from another source, give credit where it’s due.

Bake keywords into your content. Knowing what keywords improve your SEO is critical to getting found and ranked higher in search engines. But keyword-stuffing is a no-no! Google will know if you try to do that. There’s a fine line between writing for the reader, while including enough keywords to be SEO-effective.

5.    Monitor and Measure Success

There are a number of tools–Google Analytics is one of the more popular—that you can use to measure your content marketing effectiveness, but you’ll need to determine what the ROI and measurement of success really is. Some factors to consider:

• This includes unique visits to your website, geographic influence (where your audience actually is), and delivery (how it’s being read; e.g., via mobile devices).
• Factors like bounce rates and time spent on your site are important. If your bounce rate is high, your readers aren’t finding what they’re looking for, at least quickly enough to meet their expectations and generate leads. You can also create heat maps that show what sections of your web pages are getting the most views.
• Measuring how your viewers feel about your content can be accomplished in the form of comments made on blogs or posts, and how many times your content is shared. Even negative sentiment can be useful to you in improving your online presence. Making it easy to share your content will encourage more of it.

Las Vegas SEO for Growth Can Help You Develop a Great Content Marketing Strategy

Las Vegas SEO for Growth has the tools and resources to assist you in developing and executing a successful content marketing strategy for your business. Contact us today to learn how we can help improve your online presence!