How to create a successful strategy for content marketing

“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenues.” – Andrew Davis, Marketing Speaker & Bestselling Author.

This quote by Andrew Davis perfectly sums up the essence of content marketing. Content marketing should be used to provide valuable information on the product, rather than trying to create a new demand for it. When users read any form of content online, they are smart enough to understand whether it is adding any value to their life or it’s just another run-of-the-mill article trying to pitch the product to them. If they detect the former, it helps in developing a long term relationship with the users, based on trust.

For example, good content on a brand’s blog will lead to multiple hits on the page and the audience will revisit the blog for similar content. This in turn generates revenue for the brand. Thus, this entire process is based on one of the fundamental truths of the online world – educate your audience.

In order to create content that educates your audience, you need a content strategy. It helps you in identifying your target audience and their needs, thus allowing you to provide them with valuable information.

However, a successful content strategy isn’t implemented overnight. It not only requires time to be worked on but you also need to consider certain factors that will help you attain the following for your brand through your content:

• Generating leads
• Expansion of the consumer base
• Increase online sales
• Increase brand awareness
• Engage with an online community of users

Let’s take a look at the factors that contribute to creating a good content strategy:

1. Understanding your audience

In content marketing, the content is created with a target audience in mind. This is done to make sure that the audience identifies with the content and in turn, resonates with the brand and its products.

But how do you understand your audience? The correct approach to this is by thinking out of the box. Of course you will need data for basic factors like age, gender, income etc, but you can know only so much with this information. To understand the preferences of the audience, you would need answers to questions like:

• What type of content can provide solutions to your audiences problems?
• Does the current content help in solving these problems?

These questions can be answered after researching the audience that is currently interacting with your brand online. Or, you can prepare interactive surveys which will give you an idea about the preferences of your audience. With this information in hand, you can create a ‘buyer’s persona’, which will give you a general idea about the content that your audience can identify with.

2. Keyword research

Content marketing will work like a charm if the content posted ranks high on the search engine ranking page (SERP). To make this happen, it is important to know the keywords that your audience uses. These keywords can then be integrated in your content which will help you achieve the following:

• Generate organic traffic
• Influence the viewpoint of your audience
• Make you an authority in that field

3. Find the effective mediums to post

As a brand, you have to know which content works best on which medium. If it’s a video, there is no better medium than YouTube. If it’s an infographic, a photo-sharing app like Instagram is the perfect place for it. If it answers a very general doubt amongst the audience, Quora helps you do that.

Trying the ‘square pegs in round holes’ approach here would mean your content won’t get the traction it deserves. Identify your mediums and create content accordingly.

4. Be consistent

Consistency can become a big issue in content marketing. If you have posted content that has been well received by the audience, but could not continue with posting more, you lose all the organic momentum that you had generated. Thus, be consistent with your content. Follow your schedule so that the content strategy you created with so much effort doesn’t turn out to be ineffective.

5. Use metrics to analyse results

Every social media platform provides basic metrics such as likes, retweets, comments, shares and views. This helps you to gauge the performance of your content and also gives you a fair idea on how to improve the performance of future posts.

For advanced metrics, there are other tools like Google Analytics, SEMRush, Adobe Analytics, etc. which will tell you how your content performed demographically, geographically and how much traffic did it receive.  

This effective content marketing strategy, on being implemented by you or a digital marketing company, will help your content touch numbers beyond your expectation. It will increase the traffic on your website and create a positive awareness about your brand.