How To Plan Your Content Marketing Strategy

It goes without saying that success in content marketing requires a proper strategy. Most organizations that enter content marketing without a plan tend to fail because of no clear goals. On the flip side, organizations that continuously refine their content marketing develop a proper system that leads to success in the long term.

If you invest time, money and effort into your content marketing strategy you can have better ROI, make content marketing decisions easier, and on the whole, have a far more effective content marketing campaign.

Think you need a content audit? Start with your website content…

What are your Content Marketing Goals?

In a recent conversation, I had with a colleague about social media marketing, he said that the only important metric worth looking at is numbers. As a brand, you have to ask yourself if numbers are everything. You may want to raise brand awareness or engage with your customers a lot more, or improve website traffic. At the end of the day, whatever your goals are, ensure you have a reliable analytics suite to track your content marketing. You can establish quarterly goals for your content team based on your metrics and data. HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is a great marketing suite for all your content marketing needs.

From Target Audience to Buyer Personas!

Content needs to be made for a specific audience. Once you know who’s buying your products and what kind of content they enjoy, produce that type of content for them, so they keep coming back for more! We use the Make My Persona tool by HubSpot to build buyer personas! The more data you have on your audience the more accurate you can be with your content.

Learn from the Competition (and crush them!)

Your competition might be doing a lot of things right. They might be producing amazing blogs or great instructional videos. Learn from their content, especially since you may share buyer personas. SEO is your howitzer when dealing with competition. Outbid their ads if you can, or outrank their keywords. Create content that they haven’t created yet. The key is to be relentless with content that will eventually make you a thought leader in your field.

The Buyer Journey

The buyer journey is a really crucial part of the content marketing strategy. A typical buyer journey has three phases: Awareness, Consideration and Decision. In the Awareness phase, your content educates and informs potential buyers. You will provide them with confidence and solutions. You can do this by creating blogs, videos, and podcasts. In the Consideration phase, you will provide potential customers with more specific solutions, ebooks, white papers and case studies, to strengthen their decisions. Finally, in the Decision phase, you will try to convert these leads into buying customers. Here, the content will be in the form of case studies, demos and product trials.

Manage and Track Your Content Better

At BlueOshan, we use topic clusters to manage our blogs. We’ve found them to be useful to manage the content and help with search engine optimization. Use data analytics suites to provide you with statistics on how content is performing. Periodically, doing a content audit to edit, update or remove content on your website is recommended. 

Posting content consistently is key. Especially once you start to grow a following, you don’t want to disappoint them by not producing content. We have written a few guides on five types of posts that you can write for your business blog. It’s a good place to start if you get a little saturated. Good luck with your content marketing efforts, and remember, where there is a plan, there is success!