The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing Strategy in 2021
2021-05-25
“Success of your ad campaigns, as well as organic productions on digital platforms, depends on your Content Marketing Strategy. If you have a good content & potential virality aspect but lack an efficient marketing strategy, then you should surely give second thoughts, revise or even redesign your Content Marketing Strategy.”
Take an example.
A person found your blog articles about a niche industry on your website.Your writing consisting of INFOTAINMENT could make that person subscribe to your newsletter to receive new and informative articles regularly. Moreover, the individual can find your content entrancing and helpful, compelling them to contact you to get services or buy a product.
So, what made that individual do so? It’s your content and the way you market it.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing concept where content (blogs, articles, videos, posts) is produced and distributed on a digital platform to attract audiences to your products or services. Content Marketing follows Inbound Marketing format.
Reports from
Smart Insights show that 69% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy linked to success. A strong content marketing strategy adopting company performs 54% better than the companies that don’t. With great content, you give out valuable information, and build a strong connection with visitors, consumers, and existing customers. This connection makes them loyal to you and even aid in the expansion of your audience.
Does content marketing strategy matter?
Content Marketing, a type of Digital Marketing, requires 62% less investment than traditional marketing and generates 3 times greater leads (Sources). Conversion rates of websites performing content marketing are six times higher than those that don’t. Reports show that 84% of B2B marketers are outsourcing content creation. The fierce competition to rank better in Search Engines has made digital marketers invest in quality content and gain organic traffic. In fact, 76% of marketers take organic traffic as a measure to check content success.
Marketers dealing with B2B and B2C brands invest in content marketing for better ROI and enhanced sales. Not only that, Content Marketing helps to build trust & loyalty and offers sharing and referral potential. Quite a good amount of time is invested in content creation and, later on, Content Marketing; however, the fruits are worth waiting for.
So, why not opt for a stronger and better Content Marketing Strategy?
For making a stronger Content Marketing Strategy, you must know the essentials of content marketing strategy. These essentials include: Audience insights, Format decisions, Content topics, and Goal Setting & Tracking.
Audience Insights
Audience Insights gives information about the audience, their preferences, and demographic details. These are facts and figures needed for marketers to draft ad ideas and plans. Using facts about your audience and drafting plans is 100% better and effective than making plans based on assumptions.
You can adopt the following measures to gain your audience insight:
Communities and Group for greater data
A Community has a big inspiration to stay together for sharing their ideas, actions, consequences, tips and tricks, hacks, and insights, which are of their niche industry. Joining these communities and groups would provide information about marketing strategies and the latest trends. Moreover, you can get very detailed information about your audiences’ priorities, preferences, and challenges.
However, sometimes it is hard to find a private community. In that case,you can create a Facebook Group and invite people who are new to industry or established names or those who are doing good in the industry.
Read industry publications and competitors’ blogs.
Industry blogs and publications consist of the latest figures about the audience and their online behaviors.These contents actually give the in-depth and latest information. Further, you can get details about your target audience.
Another great way to get inspiration for your content marketing strategy is by analyzing what your competitors write about. For excelling in keyword ranking and improving content marketing strategy, digital agencies and marketers always keep an eye on their competitors. You can find your competitor’s approach to solving the problems of their target audience. It would help if you always get inspired by them and create contents that would surpass your competitor’s content ranking.
Attend virtual events
With the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, programs started taking place on online platforms. Webinars, summits, workshops, and E-conferences allow people to enjoy discussion sessions virtually. Attending these virtual conferences can give you deep insights of industry challenges and solutions, insights, and the latest content marketing strategy trends.
Follow popular social media accounts.
Social Media Marketers are such digital marketing professionals who rely on effective content marketing for greater impressions, leads, and engagements.You can follow popular social media accounts and pages for marketing ideas. Also, keeping up with similar keywords or keyphrases on search bar, you can use popular hashtags used in your niche industry as well as create new hashtags.
Format Decisions
After having insights about your audience, you should work on forming two or three content formats. You can use the ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) method for these formats. Further, you can put scores of 1 to 10 for Impact, Confidence, and Ease for each format. Then you can get a total score for each format. Finally, you can choose the top 2 formats and launch them.
Content Clusters and Content Buckets before Writing
Content cluster, a content strategy, is based on merely inserting keywords in content and incorporating internal linking to improve your users’ experience and boost your search performance. Your content cluster provides a roadmap for your content creation.
You can always start your content with a big concept, which encompasses lots of other subtopics. Thus, you can develop a series of contents and add internal links to your latest content. Smart Right?
Content buckets are the topics that discuss various aspects of one’s business. Each content bucket should be specific and by any means reflect your brand’s message.Content buckets ensure that one’s content is different. Varied content will keep your audience engaged, active, and inspire them to share and bring additional followers.
Goal Setting and Tracking
It is time to set goals after knowing your audience, content formats, and strong research on a content bucket. A content marketing strategy should have content production goals, lead generation goals, and brand awareness goals.
A fixed number of contents to be produced in a given period, the number of qualified leads to be generated from a content in a given time, and the number of impressions, views, or reads of your content should be your ultimate goals.
Effectively and clearly communicating these goals to your team can change the game. Further, after setting goals , you should track and keep records. In a period of time, you will notice improvements in your content marketing strategy. However, adjustments on the metrics based on your insights and results should be made every month.
Your content can be unique and highly entertaining, but if its marketing is not done properly, you can not generate profits. Thus, knowing the latest trend and incorporating your uniqueness in content should focus on drafting content marketing strategies.