Digital Content Marketing– Your Guide to Success
A common question asked by today’s marketer is, ‘Is it important for me to have a content marketing strategy for my business?’ More often than not, the answer is, ‘YES, definitely!’. In today’s blog post below, we will explore more on the what, the why & the how: ‘What is a content marketing strategy’, ‘Why it’s important’ and ‘How you can go about implementing an effective strategy’.
Now more than ever, audience engagement has started to play an extremely important role for all businesses for two reasons:
- Engaged customers are more likely to trust your brand and build loyalty
- Online marketing platforms have made it super easy for brands to stay connected with their customers, hence the market has become a competitive landscape wherein everyone is fighting to catch and sustain the attention of their audience.
This brings us to our first topic of discussion, ‘What is a content marketing strategy’
Your content marketing strategy defines the approach that allows you to attract and engage with your target audience. This strategy is evidently a detailed plan for how you will use content to address your outlined business goals in a manner that fulfills your customers’ needs.
Why is content marketing important you ask?
Having a good content strategy is often the reason why a customer gets attracted to your product/service in the first stages of their buyers’ journey. Apart from reaching out to new prospective customers, a content strategy is also used to enable sales and customer satisfaction.
Here is a mini step-by-step guide on how you can draft a successful content marketing strategy:
- Analyse the state of your current content: What kind of content engages best your audience? What content performs and delivers the best results? What content needs to be improved?
- Define your goals: Identify your long-term strategic goals that are based on the vision of your business. Ensure all your content plans build up toward eventually meeting these goals.
- Identify your audience: Outline who your audience is, who are the people interested in your product / service, regardless of whether or not they have made a purchase in the past. Once you’ve established who exactly your audience is, create content pieces that will interest / attract them.
- Develop a content plan: Plan our exactly what pieces of content will be going out on which platforms in order to map out an effective streamlined process. Map out an organized calendar that will clearly define your communication across channels and allow you to monitor progress.
- Optimize content distribution: ensure you are maximizing all relevant media channels at your disposal; paid (display ads, search ads, social media ads), owned (organic social media, website, etc) and earned (shares, mentions on external publications)
- Re-analyse content performance: once you make changes and try new content directions its essential for you to analyse the performance of these new pieces to check if they are delivering as expected, metrics of measurement would include: user behaviour, engagement, traffic, leads, conversions, etc.
If you are looking for support on your content marketing strategy, we can help! Drop us a message at talk2us@flc-me.com
