It’s that most wonderful time of year again, the time to forward plan your marketing efforts for the new year ahead. A strong, well-thought-out content marketing strategy could be the perfect way to boost your business in 2021 and make your website shine. But what is content marketing and how do you build a content marketing strategy that really works? Take a look at our step-by-step guide to all things content marketing strategy to see how your 2021 content plan could turbo-charge your new year digital marketing.
What is Content Marketing?
If this is your first step into the world of content marketing, content marketing is a type of marketing is the creation and sharing of relevant, valuable and consistent online material such as blogs, videos or social media content. The aim of content marketing is to attract and engage a defined target audience in order to drive customer action such as website visits or purchases. Content marketing aims to add value and give information to solve a problem or answer a question which the customer will hopefully reward with their business.
What is Content Marketing Strategy?
A content strategy, or content marketing strategy, is the planning, creation, management and upkeep of content in order to meet a certain goal. This goal could be something such as building a dedicated audience for your business. So the content marketing strategy could be focussed on creating and publishing relevant and consistent content to educate, inspire or entertain individuals online to create a dedicated following which will hopefully convert into paying customers.
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Creating a content marketing plan contains some key steps to ensure your content is targeted and relevant for your business’ audience. We’ve created our list of steps towards creating a successful content marketing strategy that will take you into 2021 with a bang.
Ask Yourself Some Questions Before Starting your Content Strategy
Some key questions to ask yourself when building a content strategy are things such as, who are your users? What are their needs, their pain points, the questions they have? What platforms do they use to access information? Who are your competitors? What platforms are they seeing success on? Additionally, you should take a moment to think about what you offer to your target customers, what questions can you answer and what services can you supply to meet the needs of your target audience?
The next stage of planning a content marketing strategy should include thinking about the purpose of your content plan. What do you hope to gain from creating and distributing your content marketing? This should be a key element of your content strategy as it will inform the type of content you produce and give it a purpose.
Evaluate your Resources
When planning for creating a content strategy, take a minute to evaluate your business’ capacity to create content. What content do you already have that could be included in your plan or optimised for SEO content marketing? Consider who within your business will be creating and managing the content. If there will be just one person covering all aspects of content marketing, which is often the case in smaller businesses, then the regularity of publishing content may need to be adjusted accordingly.
For example, a very large company or content marketing agency may publish several blogs a week. However, that would be a lot of work for one individual who also has to manage other areas of the business, so perhaps one per month would be more achievable. If you take some time to evaluate the resources available to you for content production and upkeep, this will make it much easier to form and stick to a successful content marketing strategy.
Conduct a Content Audit
If you are planning on ramping up your content marketing strategy for 2021 one of the best places to start is by conducting a content audit of any content you have already produced. Using the questions you have asked in the previous sections, create an inventory of any website content such as landing pages on your website or blog posts and review them to check that they still match with your goals and target audience’s needs. Using analytics tools, take a look at which pieces of content you saw success and engagement with or pieces of content that perhaps fell short and use these learnings to inform future content as well as updating past content to fit with your new content strategy. One of the key things to look out for when reviewing or updating content is whether is it search engine optimised, also known as SEO.
Create an SEO Content Strategy
One of the key ways to optimise both past and future content is to create an SEO content strategy. An SEO content strategy should form part of your content marketing strategy to ensure that any content you produce is capable of ranking in search engine results pages such as Google. Creating ranking content is a great way to generate organic, or unpaid, traffic to your website and can help attract customers looking for your particular product or service. Your SEO content strategy should include things such as topics and keywords you would like to rank for related to these and should be used as an interweaving part of your content plan to ensure success. If you are new to SEO, take a look at our basic SEO checklist as a starting point.
Choose Your Content Marketing Platform
As part of your audience research, you should have taken a look at the types of content marketing platforms used by your target audience. As part of this, it is also a good idea to investigate the types of content marketing platforms used by your competitors and whether these have been successful. By choosing a platform your target audience engages with, you will be able to reach them where they feel comfortable and see more success with your content. Include this information in your content marketing strategy as well as mapping out the types of content you will be publishing on each platform and how often you will be publishing it.
For example, will you be publishing content on social media daily? Will you be blogging weekly? Your content marketing strategy should map out the frequency and type of content you will be producing according to the resources you have available to you.
Need Some Help With your Content Marketing Strategy?
If you are ready to turbo charge your content marketing strategy for 2021, or have any questions about how we can help your digital marketing efforts. Get in touch with the experts at SEM Consultants online or by calling 0121 552 6500.