STOP! Wait! It is not too late to change your content marketing strategy for 2022. Unless you have put these strategies together before you might want to take a peek below to ensure you’re capturing everything you need to in order to put together the best content marketing strategy.
The first thing to note is that everyone thinks a content marketing strategy needs to be set in stone. that is flat out false. It’s outlandish. Your strategy needs to be flexible and fluid throughout the year as the market dictates. However, you will need to deploy the tactics below in order to come up with an effective content marketing strategy.
What is Your Goal?
We start with what your goal is on purpose so that we can work backwards. It’s extremely important to understand your end goal in order to create the tactical procedures and processes needed to excel beyond that goal. so, as you are looking to put your strategy together you must understand your end goal. sounds pretty simple, right!
Here’s the issue. so many organizations and brands out there think that their end goal needs to be delivering leads and driving revenue based off of the content that’s being created. That’s great and ultimately that should be one of the goals, but it should not be your complete end goal.
Here’s why. If everything you are writing and producing is to create leads and generate revenue all of your content is going to come off very salesy instead of coming off as valuable thought leadership content. Now if you were your customer would you want to read is something that is very salesy or something that’s going to deliver value to you and help you to learn something as you are reading it.
I think we all know the answer to that rhetorical question.
In your goals, understand content marketing is part of the long game. It is not a 3-month, 6 months, or 12-month goal. It will take 1-2 years before you become a true thought leader in your space and that will help to drive demand to your brand, delivering trust and revenue.
Who is Your Audience?
Do you actually know who your audience is? Have you put together a persona of your ideal customer profile? Now this is not me saying that you should lock everybody into this persona, but you can have multiple personas in which your content can deliver value to.
I’ll be the first one to admit it took me years to understand the value of persona marketing. In fact, during many conference sessions, I would object that forcing individuals into a bucket was severely limiting how we could market. I stand corrected solely for the reason that persona marketing has evolved to the point where it can now be delivered as hyper-personalized marketing. Hyper-personalized marketing can be a topic in and of itself, but it is the future of all content creation. Let’s not go on a tangent and get back to understanding if you understand who your audience actually is.
You’re probably asking why this is important. If you are asking this, we have another conversation to have because it means you are mass blasting emails and delivering content that has no purpose or value to any specific person or at least one that you can identify. That is a problem, a problem you should not have.
So as you look to define your audience you can choose to place them into persona buckets, or you can also choose to go the route of industry categories that you serve in order to help ideate content ideas for the monthly themes.
To go about understanding who your audience is, is by analyzing your current audience and figuring out from your sales team who is the best person is from their point of view that is helping to drive the decisions for your product or service.
Yes, that is right, I did say that marketing needs to align and collaborate with sales.
Audit and Re-Purpose Previous Content
We now have a goal, and you now understand who your audience is. Can you clearly say that all of your previous content is aligned and speaks specifically to your end goal and your audience?
Most of the time, so you don’t feel alone, the answer to this is no. And that is OK. not every piece of content you’re going to put out there is going to drive towards your end goal end towards your ideal customer profile. But know that 95% of your content should.
With this new information you can go back and audit your previous content to help drive towards this new goal and this new understanding of who your audience is. This is the best way as it’s content that is already written and needs a slight adjustment which takes less time than developing new content. It’s the same old adage that it is easier to upsell a current customer than it is to bring in new customers.
The second point of auditing and repurposing your previous content is to understand if all of it was distributed effectively. Distribution is going to be key for your content strategy moving forward. It is also our February’s monthly theme on tips and tricks to best effectively distribute your content.
Develop Monthly Content Themes
We are now at the point where we can come up with monthly themes to our content to help us deliver the best value possible to our audience. Sometimes coming up with these themes can be daunting. Sometimes they can flow easily. The best trick that I have always found is to reach out to your current customers and ask them what knowledge or value they are seeking to learn. what questions are they wanting answered. Always remember that everything you do does not have to be all done by you.
There’s always a way to find a little spark of creativity outside of your own mind. So, let’s all not be afraid to ask for a little help every once in a while.
As you are asking your customers about the content, they wish to consume you could also ask them how they wish to consume the content. This will help you when you begin to diversify your content into multiple mediums.
The additional reason that I like monthly content themes is you can put teasers into your current content so that it entices them to come back and read your new content. You can clearly see that I have done that multiple times here not only for what the next article that will be coming out within the month of January but also what our content theme is for the month of February.
The last reason I prefer monthly content themes is because not every one of your customers is going to be interested in one specific theme and so as you begin to layout your themes for the year, they will see the content that is relevant for them, and it will draw them back in to your brand. This sounds ridiculous because every brand wants all of their customers and prospects reading every single piece of their content, but we all need to face reality and understand that is never going to be the case. Every piece of your content that is created should resonate with one individual person and that is why defining your audience is one of the first steps of creating your content marketing strategy.
Diversify Your Content
To diversify your content means to create your content in multiple mediums. What is a medium? It means that your customers consume content in various ways and no one customer is alike. Unfortunately for you this means that it’s additional work that you need to take on in order to ensure you’re resonating with your audience. So, as I’m writing this article, I have scheduled time this week to convert it into a video. That video could be of me talking, could be of me narrating this entire article, or it could be an animated video or a typography video. There are multiple ways to present this written content, visually.
What I will say is what resonates the most with individuals is an actual person talking about the high-level points of the article. People like to see people, it’s plain and simple and if somebody is up there on video discussing the high-level points, it will help entice them to digest the content but also drive them back to the written article for more detailed information.
Distribute Your Content Effectively
This part of the article is most likely going to be the biggest tease of all time as our February theme is all about distributing your content effectively. so as not to be a massive tease what I will say is there is a wrong way to distribute and a right way to distribute your content.
The first thing that you need to understand is posting your content once out on all of your channels is the wrong way. in February we will go over the correct way to effectively distribute your content.
Analyze Your Metrics
The last part of your content marketing strategy is to develop the metrics you wish to collect and analyze. The simplest way of going about this is to figure out what metrics you will need to see if you’re reaching your ultimate end goal. This is why the end goal is the first step in your content marketing strategy.
To effectively collect your analytics there are automation systems that can help you drive it all to one centralized location. however not everybody has an extremely large budget and if this is the case you will have to aggregate your metrics from across the platforms you are distributing your content end of course from your cream to understand if your content is driving revenue as well.
Here are a few key metrics you should think about collecting to help understand if your content marketing is being as effective as it can be.
Website traffic. From your website traffic it’s understanding where they are coming, the session duration, if they are new or returning visitors.
Social media engagement. Are you getting more shares and comments and likes on your content? Aggregate all of this so you can fully understand which content, and which forms of that content is resonating the most.
Keyword ranking. This is important because as you understand your audience you will understand the keywords, they are searching for in order to gain the knowledge they are seeking. You can use tools like Google search console or SEMrush to help understand if you are ranking effectively with your keywords.
Conversions into booked meetings and ultimately sales. This is more difficult to track when it comes to content marketing, but you can put together different forms within your content that will help track it effectively.
Conclusion
In the beginning of this article, we mentioned your strategy needs to be fluid and that is still the case. As you put together your strategy and start analyzing your metrics from the content you are producing and distributing, understand at any given moment your strategy could completely change and you could end up producing wildly different content to a wildly different audience using wildly different keywords based on what the market is telling you.
The last part that I want to reiterate is content marketing is a long game strategy. It is to help you become a thought leader within your space. It is to help you drive value to your audience which ultimately drives demand to your brand.
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