How to Create a Highly Effective Content Marketing Strategy
What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
It is important to constantly improve your content marketing 
efforts in today’s digital age.
Whether a veteran or novice, there are many important aspects of digital marketing strategies that often get overlooked. Thanks to the internet, 60% of the traditional sales cycle now takes place before your sales team even makes contact with a potential customer.
If that doesn’t motivate you to leverage your content on the web, maybe this will. Your closest competitors are using content marketing objectives. According to the latest research from the Content Marketing Institute, 86% of B2B marketers have a content marketing strategy. But more importantly, of those with a strategy, only 38% consider themselves to have an effective content marketing strategy. Take a look at what the 38% of the effective content market strategy group is doing that drives their success.
Forming Your Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Write for Your Buyer Persona
Product-market fit is an essential building block for scaling your business. You could spend the entire marketing budget trying to sell disinterested leads on your product or service. Tweaking your value proposition to meet the needs of an existing customer market will remove all barriers to success. Once you have identified who your buyers will be (called the niche market), make sure that your content speaks to them. Create a detailed buyer persona. Write content that will serve that persona in every stage of their journey to purchasing what your company has to offer.
Speak to Your Buyer Persona’s Lifecycle Stage
Now that you know the type of person that you’re speaking to, take one more step and make sure that they are interested in listening to what you have offer.
For example, knowing that your message will be read by a CMO doesn’t mean that you should follow your greeting with a marketing automation offer. Your goal is not to lead with an offer, but to lead to an offer. Do this by progressing your visitors through an appropriate inbound marketing funnel. This type of funnel includes three stages. These are:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
This type of marketing also allows you to build credibility and rapport with your buyers. In turn, this leads to you approaching them with your offer in a meaningful, powerful manner. In order to do this, determining marketing objectives before even beginning to create content of any kind is essential.
Identify Your Key Performance Indicators
In order to determine if your current content marketing approach is successful, you must know what metrics to track. Identify these metrics before you create any content. Ask yourself “Will this content increase my company’s measurable performance?” during content development.
Commonly useful metrics include impressions, clicks, and impression-to-lead conversions.
However, it is important to realize that not every metric will indicate advance. Some of the most common KPIs contribute only to the illusion of success. Make sure that a thoughtful analysis of your KPIs takes place vertically throughout your company. Using smart marketing objectives and frequently updating them is the best practice. Each of these indicators tells you where you need to focus, and what needs to change.
Make Your Content SEO Friendly
When setting your marketing objectives, having a clear and defined plan is necessary. These marketing plans and strategies extend past the way that the business is run, too.
One of the areas that needs the most focus is on SEO and content creation.
If a search engine can’t connect you with your prospective buyers, then your content serves no purpose except to create undue strain on your marketing budget. Focus each piece of content around a single long-tail keyword. However, you should refrain from the excessive use of that exact keyword to avoid ranking penalization. Instead, use the keyword and relevant synonyms to convey your meaning and educate your readers.
To learn more about different types of marketing goals and objectives, as well as the importance of a marketing plan, visit this blog post.
Be careful.
It is easy to get into the habit of writing content that is optimized for search engines but provides little value for human readers. You must strike a balance between the technical and valuable benefits of your content. Having a good set of marketing goals and objectives will help you to focus (and diversify) keywords. Even though you need unique content, linking things (blog posts, pages, social media posts) together for continuity is recommended.
It is important to know that your effective digital content marketing strategy will never be fully complete. Growth, change and evolution of businesses is necessary to keep them relevant. The best way for a business to grow is to keep up with changes in the industry, as well as to ensure that you’re constantly educating yourself. Being truly successful is about staying successful.
There is always room for improvement, and it is possible that changes in your buyer persona will dictate changes in your content strategy as well. There are countless tools available for your business to gauge the effectiveness of its content efforts. Make sure you take advantage of any opportunity to improve!
