How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

What is Content Marketing Strategy?

Simply put, a content marketing strategy is an approach a business takes to ensure that its marketing actions have the effect of attracting, attracting and retaining potential customers. An effective content marketing strategy will help build and maintain brand awareness when it comes to your target audience.

By taking steps like sharing well-curated content like articles and videos, you can ensure your business is remembered when a targeted customer decides on a product or service. To effectively capture your targeted customers, your content marketing approach must be consistent in its execution and ensure that the information you share is relevant and valuable.

Why is Content Marketing Strategy Important?

A content marketing strategy is important at the top of the list because it is considered one of the first touchpoints when a business aims to develop relationships and build trust with a customer.

Once a customer recognizes your brand, the next task of a content marketing strategy is to ensure that the customer is constantly fed with high-quality and relevant information. This is best used for blog posts, newsletters, social media posts, etc. through various channels such as

Along with the creation and retention effects, your content marketing strategy will also impress your customers. It is also important to establish and maintain industry authority for your business among your peers and competitors.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

The first and most important step to creating a content marketing strategy that fits your business needs is to understand the ins and outs of your business and then find the approach that best fits it.

1. Identify Content Gaps

Focusing your marketing campaigns on areas of unsaturated content is an almost surefire way to reach your target audience and drive traffic to your blog. You need to see the whole picture and understand what topics you haven’t covered so far. Better still, analyze your competitors and check for areas they don’t cover so you can drive more traffic.

2. Run Topic and Keyword Research

Doing keyword research in your niche helps you understand what information your target customers are looking for, while allowing you to address the topics that will drive traffic to your blog. With special tools you can automate the research process and find the right keywords.

There are some metrics to consider when choosing keywords. The difficulty score indicates how easy it is to compete for the top results on the SERP for your target keyword. Search volume shows how many users are searching for the keyword each month. You can also combine short-tail and long-tail keywords for better results.

Learn more about how to research and use keywords in your blog posts in our guide.

3. Set Your Goals and KPIs

Having well-articulated and measurable goals is a good way to tell if you’re on the right track. Depending on the stage of the content funnel, your goals might be to educate the audience, engage the user, improve SEO, generate leads or make sales. You can also set key performance indicators that will allow you to understand how you are progressing. You can also use a measurable scoreboard to see how each approach is performing.

4. Analyze Your Audience

Understanding your audience by metrics like age, gender, occupation, interests, and more can help inform your content marketing approach while providing an insight into how different demographics will respond to your strategy. That way, you’ll be sure to create content that resonates with consumers and encourages them to take action.

Eight smart approaches and tools for getting to know your audience can be found in our article.

5. Choose Content Types

When choosing content types, it’s important to consider what works best for the largest percentage of your target audience. To do this, you can diversify your content, see what is performing best, and then make that high-performing content part of your marketing plan.

You can find 19 content types and how to create them in our guide.

6. Write Your Content

Now that you’ve researched keywords, analyzed your target audience, and identified the required content types, you can start creating content for your blog.

If you don’t have the time or skills to write articles yourself, you can always rely on article writing services, whether you need a few articles for your blog or a steady stream of content. You can also try searching for free blog post writers, although the quality of their posts is not the highest.

7. Schedule a Broadcast

Once your content is ready, it’s time to add it to your blog editor and schedule a post. You can publish the post manually or schedule a date and time for automatic publishing. This option is available on WordPress and most modern blogging platforms.

Also, if you’re a social media marketer, consider sharing your newest post on social media so more people can find out. For those who are short on time, we’ve gathered a list of the best social media scheduling tools to automate this task.

8. Build Internal Links

Make sure to build internal linking on your page to improve navigation on your website, motivate readers to stay longer, and send traffic to other posts on your blog. For example, in this post, we link to other related material on our blog and use keywords as link anchors.

Three reasons why internal linking is important for blog promotion:

1. Increase the Authority of Your Blog Posts. The more backlinks and therefore traffic directed to your page, the higher your blog will rank in the SERP. Getting backlinks on third-party websites can be difficult and require some extra work, while internal linking can help boost your rankings in the meantime.
2. Improve Site Navigation. The easier it is for users to discover the content on your site, the longer they stay there. Internal links create links between pages on your blog so readers can seamlessly switch from one post to the next.
3. Increase Site Ranking. In addition to users, search engines will also crawl your blog faster with smart navigation in place, resulting in higher SERP positions and organic traffic growth.

9. Choose Promotional Channels

Once you publish a post, you’re not done. Now, posting on social media, sending newsletter, writing guest posts, executing influencer marketing etc. It’s time to let the world know by taking advantage of the various promotional channels you have access to, such as

Find 14 proven strategies to promote a post after publishing it on our blog.

10. Reach Bloggers

Sharing your post with target audiences of other bloggers can be a great way to drive tons of traffic to your page. It’s important to find bloggers whose followers have similar interests as your target audience and will gladly explore your content.

On our blog, you will find 11 best practices for successful networking. If you don’t know where to start, try these blogger outreach tools to help you connect with the right influencers in your niche.

11. Evaluate Results and Adjust Your Strategy

One of the most important aspects with a dynamic content marketing strategy is to adapt to feedback from approaches you’ve tried before. Be sure to take the time and evaluate how well your strategy is performing and how you can improve it further.

Check out our guide on how to analyze website traffic, where you’ll learn about key metrics that reveal your blog’s performance and tools that can automate the process.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

As with so many other things in life, having a strategy in place is a crucial step towards achieving your goals. It is quite unfortunate for the majority of businesses to operate without a well thought out and documented content marketing plan. With such a vital piece of the puzzle missing, content marketing efforts and thus their success are nothing more than a matter of luck. However, a well thought out content marketing strategy will help keep you moving in the right direction while maintaining full control over your progress.