A successful content strategy is the key to building your online internet reputation. The goal here is to increase customer engagement, solve business challenges, and help prospects make a decision along their buyer journey. Although the end goal is to convert leads into customers, there are several hurdles you must cross in order to reach that destination. Let’s get started.
Content marketing strategy in a nutshell
1. Brand Guidelines – Explaining your brand’s core principles to prospects.
2. Marketing Objectives – Setting guidelines to help you along the way.
3. Customer research – Understanding the needs of your prospects.
4. Content production – An optimized content creation process for constant engagement.
5. Customer Journey map – To help guide the costumes at every step of the way.
6. Content Calendar – To schedule future content releases.
7. Data and Analysis – To determine what works and repeat it.
Brand Guidelines
Creating guidelines can help you answer questions and point out important aspects of your brand’s identity. They provide guidance on how the content will look and feel. Here are a few steps you can follow to create your brand guidelines:
1. Generate a style guide that highlights your brand’s visuals, such as color scheme, fonts, art style, etc. so that everything you create is consistent with your brand principles.
2. Make a list of rules that everyone on your team should follow, such as excluding certain keywords while writing content.
3. Determine how your brand connects with the customer, such as an emotional, intellectual, or visual connection.
You can create a strong motto and connect emotionally with your audience, like Harley Davidson. Or you can take a different political stance in contrast to the status quo and attract users that way. Finally, you can simply attract attention because you look good.
Determining this is important because the very essence of your brand will be reflected in the content. Knowing your brand on an empirical scale will help you create content that clearly represents your core beliefs and attracts the most loyal customers in the market.
Marketing Objectives
Marketing objectives take your brand identity and convert them into easy-to-achieve goals/targets and break them down into small chunks that you can gradually work toward the end goal without getting overwhelmed.
The key to success lies in aligning the content creation process with your customers’ needs. Most people follow the SMART framework to create tangible goals that are:
1. Specific – Exactly state what you want to accomplish.
2. Measurable – Determining how you want to measure your success (most use key performance indicators or KPI)
3. Achievable – Make challenging and attainable goals.
4. Relevant – Most goals should be relevant in the immediate promotion and growth of your brand with one or two long-term objectives.
5. Time-Bound – Set a reasonable time period for every goal.
Customer Research
A customer person helps you understand your target audience and create a content strategy that addresses their exact requirements. You can base your research on the following:
1. Determine the age, sex, job, ethnicity, nationality, neighborhood, etc. The more info you have the better.
2. Recreational activities.
3. A particular problem your customers face and something that will make that problem go away and make their lives easier.
4. Goals, objectives, and ambitions.
Content Production
A well-structured optimized content production team pumps out high-quality content consistently and even repurposes old content whenever possible. Here is what a typical content production team looks like:
1. Chief Content Officer – The main authority responsible for overseeing the entire content marketing strategy.
2. Community Manager – Responsible for overseeing social media platforms, maintaining positive communication and internet reputation with the community, and voicing their demands and feedback to the content team and vice versa.
3. Managing Editor – They have the best understanding of the customer’s requirements. They are responsible for managing the calendar, daily production, distribution, and screening everything before it’s finally published.
4. In-house Contributors – Individuals that work for the company and create content.
5. External Contributors – Some tasks, like designing pictures and infographics, are outsourced because there is no house team for the job.
Customer Journey Map
A customer’s journey consists of five phases. You should have enough content to address each phase of the journey. They are:
1. Awareness – The customer is searching for an answer to his problem and stumbles upon your brand.
2. Consideration – They observe multiple options and compare their pros and cons against your service/product.
3. Decision/Purchase – They finally purchase your product.
4. Retention – You’re trying to engage the customer through various after-sales services such as offers, emails, loyalty programs, etc.
5. Advocacy – A satisfied customer will spread the word about your brand to their friends and family.
Content Calendar
The key to creating an everlasting online presence is consistency, and the best way to achieve it is via a content calendar. The calendar lists every project that’s either completed, in progress, or planned for a future date. Everyone within your content management team will have access to the calendar and must adhere to the upload schedule.
The calendar format varies across different companies, and no two are the same. You can download a format from the internet and adjust it according to your needs. But mostly, a calendar contains the following elements:
1. Project List
2. Status
3. Due date
4. Person Responsible for creating and editing the content.
5. Social media platforms where the content will be uploaded.
Data Analysis
Possibly the most important step of a content marketing strategy is data and analysis. The strategy only works if you know what works and what doesn’t. Data analysis helps you figure out the viability of every piece of content, such as,
1. Content that’s not generating any leads should be stopped.
2. Content that’s not very popular and should be the least of your priorities.
3. Popular content that you should focus on.
4. Possible new content that you have not explored yet but can prove to be useful.
Conclusion
A good internet reputation is the backbone of every online business. And. a solid content marketing strategy is a must-have in this day and age if you want to ensure the future growth of your organization. Hopefully, this guide has helped you understand the basics of a content marketing strategy and its importance to the future prosperity of your company.