The digital marketing landscape is ever-changing, and one of the cornerstones of digital marketing strategy is content marketing. So if you are just starting out or have been trying out the same content marketing strategies for some time, you should think about changing things up.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with you trying to make sure it’s up-to-date, innovative, and engaging for your prospects and customers regardless of when or how they intend to buy. However, if you want to beat your competition and actively engage your audience, having a solid, innovative content marketing plan is necessary.
At Freelancers Hub, we specialize in creating top-notch digital content marketing strategies, and we know all there is to know about making the perfect one that caters to all the needs. In the following passages, you will find things like what content strategy is, why your business needs a content marketing plan, and what steps you will need to make to create the perfect content marketing strategy. So without further delay, let’s begin!
What Is Content Marketing Strategy?
The main purpose of a content marketing strategy is to take your business goals then use the content as the primary mode to achieve those goals. For example, if your goal is to create brand awareness, you would need to implement a digital content marketing strategy that focuses on SEO to increase your website’s visibility on the SERPs and drive traffic to your products and services.
We know plenty of new business owners who thought a content strategy is nice, but not when you are starting out. However, it would help if you understood that producing high-quality content to meet business needs will help companies build trust with new audiences ensure sustainable success.
According to marketing experts, 70% of marketers actively invest in content strategy, and it often is vital to develop a good content strategy if you want to compete in your niche. Here are some content marketing ideas you need to think about when creating your strategy!
Who Will Read Your Content?
When choosing your content marketing ideas, you have to know who will read your content. Also, find out for how many audiences are you creating content. Remember, just like your buyers, your audience, too, will vary.
So make sure your content strategy caters to more than one type of reader or viewer. Make sure you use different content types and channels to help you deliver different content to every kind of audience. Also, don’t forget to engage with people in your niche through your content.
What Problem Are You Solving For Your Audience?
Now, the product or service you have should solve a problem for your target audience. The content you create should coach and educate your audience through the problem your product or service solves while they begin to identify and address it.
Any good content marketing strategy will address people on both sides of your product. The first is the people who are still figuring out the main challenges, and the second are the people who are already using your product to overcome these challenges. You have to make sure that your content reinforces the solutions you offer while also making your customers more qualified users of the product.
What’s So Unique About You?
Now, the odds are you aren’t the only one in your niche, which means your competitors have products similar to yours. That means your customers need to know what makes your products better or at least different, and that’s where your content comes in. The trick is to create content that shows why you’re worth buying from and why you’re worth listening to.
Which Contents Will You Focus On?
It would help if you defined the content formats clearly on your content marketing strategy. Once you have identified the topics you want to take on, you must determine the content formats. Make sure you decide whether or not you will use infographics, videos, or blog posts to tackle the subject that best expresses your take on the topic.
What Are Your Publishing Channels?
Only creating highly engaging content in different formats won’t complete your content marketing strategy. You will also need to know the other channels you can publish to. Our channels should include your owned properties, such as your website and blog. However, it should also have social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. So make sure you find your publishing channels.
How To Manage Content Creation & Publication?
Now, you may think that creating and publishing content can be a daunting task. However, it is vital to define who’s creating what, where it’s being published, and when it’s going live if you want your content marketing strategy to succeed.
In addition, you have to make sure that there is no clutter by managing content from a topic standpoint. Make sure you have a content editorial calendar around topics so that you can easily visualize your message and assert yourself as an authority in your niche as time goes on.
Why Do You Need A Content Marketing Strategy?
A good content marketing strategy will help you prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads. As long as you create at least one blog post that gets a steady amount of traffic, you can integrate an embedded link to an ebook or free tool, and that will keep generating leads for you as time goes on long after you’ve published the content. Once you have evergreen content up, you will have a reliable source of traffic and leads.
In addition, it will ensure you have the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue. Things like sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content are all viable lead-generating tools. Besides, it isn’t only a lead-generating tool. It also helps educate your target prospects and generate awareness for your brand.
How To Create A Content Marketing Strategy?
As you can see, an excellent digital marketing content strategy is essential to establishing your business. So, now that you know its importance, let’s learn the specifics of how to create a content marketing plan; let’s check out the tactical list of creating a content marketing strategy!
Defining The Goal
The first step of creating a digital marketing content strategy is to know what you want from it. Next, find out what the aim of the strategy is? Why do you want to create content and create a content marketing plan? Find out what your goals are before you begin planning so that you’ll have an easier time determining the best strategy for you.
Conducting Persona Research
Whenever you create a digital content marketing strategy, you have to define the target audience or buyer persona clearly. Conducting buyer persona research is especially important for those who are starting out or are new to marketing.
When you know your target audience, you will be able to produce relevant and valuable content that people will read and convert on now if you’ve had experience with content marketing and see that your target may have changed. Or want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market. Or maybe you want to keep the same target audience.
Well, to do that, you should be revisiting your audience parameters by conducting market research each year. Make sure you do that every year if you want to see growth.
Running Content Audits
While most people start with blog posts, there is no reason for you to limit yourself to them. You can begin to experiment with producing other content pieces that might be of interest to you. For example, if you’ve been writing blogs, you can try creating an ebook that distills all your blog posts into one ultimate guide. It’s another way to offer information in a different format. Now, ebooks aren’t the only type of content. There are several different types of content but more on that later.
If you’ve been posting content for some time, you should review your content marketing efforts and the results by conducting a thorough content audit. Find out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals. The objective here should align your team’s goals with the rest of your organization’s goals.
Choosing A Content Management System
If you want your content marketing strategy to succeed, you will need a system to create, manage, and track your content. To ensure that happens smoothly, you will need the best content management system. Any good CMS will handle the vital aspects of content management that include content creation, content publication, and content analytics.
Make sure the one that you have ensures you can plan, produce, publish, and measure your results all in one place. WordPress is another popular CMS worldwide that has features like free web forms, live chat, CRM access, email marketing, and analytics.
Brainstorming Content Ideas
So now that you know your goals know whom to target and have the perfect CMS, the next step is to start coming up with ideas for your next content project. To help you with your content marketing ideas, you can use tools like:
- HubSpot’s Website Grader
- blog about
- HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator
- Feedly
- BuzzSumo
- CoSchedule’s Blog Post Headline Analyzer
You can use these tools with your team to generate brilliant content for your digital content marketing strategy.
Determining The Types Of Content
When it comes to content for digital marketing, there are various options for you to choose from. First, you can select the most popular content formats that marketers create for your content marketing strategy, including some tools and templates to get you started.
Publishing & Managing Content
The marketing plan you are going to create should go beyond the types of content you create. Your goal should also be about organizing your content. Make sure you have an editorial calendar to be on the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website.
Make sure you also have a social media content calendar to promote and manage your content on other sites. So that’s about it for creating a content marketing strategy. Now that you know how to create a content marketing strategy, let’s dive into discussing the different types of content you can make!
What Are The Types Of Content You Can Create?
Whenever you create content, you have to understand that most of it will be evergreen, and it will be just as relevant months from now as they are today. However, it would be best if you didn’t ignore timely topics. Now, these contents might not be the bulk of your editorial calendar, but they can help you generate traffic spikes.
While incorporating popular holidays such as New Year’s and Thanksgiving is a great place to start, you shouldn’t limit yourself to only these important marketing dates. Instead, try incorporating content around niche holidays that your audience is interested in.
If you do it right then, it will be worth publishing your blog or social media content. So, what type of content should you create? Well, that’s what you will find out. In the following passages, you will find eight of the most popular types of content marketing you can create for your readers and customers. So let’s check them out!
Blog Posts
Now, if you are reading this, then you already blogs are essential. Regularly posting blog posts on a live website is vital to attracting new visitors. Your blogs should provide valuable content for your audience and make them share posts on social media and across other websites.
We recommend you post blogs with around 1,000 and 2,000 words, but you should try to find out if your audience prefers longer or shorter reads. Try writing blogs like how-tos, listicles, curation, SlideShare presentation, and newsjacking posts on your blog.
Ebooks
Ebooks are a great type of content that is known to generate leads. Your potential clients can download it once they submit a lead form with their contact information. These are longer, more in-depth, and published less frequently than blog posts, and are written to attract visitors to a website.
One great thing about ebooks is that it’s versatile and you can use it for different purposes depending on your team’s goals. It’s the next step in the inbound marketing process where the audience, after reading a blog post, your audience may need more information, and that’s where it comes in.
Here is where calls-to-action (CTAs) come in to direct people to a landing page where they can submit their contact information and download an ebook to learn more valuable information for their business. That way, the ebook is generating new leads for the sales team to contact.
Case Studies
Case studies are one of the most impactful types of content you can create. These are content where you tell the story of another customer who solved a problem by working with you. Case studies are one of the most versatile types of content marketing because they can take many different forms like blog posts, ebooks, podcasts, and infographics.
The goal of case studies is to show the people considering your product and that your solution is the right one. When creating a case study content, make sure you determine which testimonial form will take and the area of your business to which you’re trying to drive value.
Templates
Templates are a fantastic content format that can generate leads for you while providing tremendous value to your audience. The formula is simple if you provide your audience with template tools that save them time and help them succeed, then they are more likely to keep engaging with your content in the future.
Infographics
In recent years infographics have risen to prominence because it organizes and visualizes data more compellingly than simple text. If you’re trying to share a lot of data in a straightforward way to understand, then there is no other content better suited to it than infographics.
Videos
Video is booming. It’s a highly engaging content medium and is shareable across social media platforms and websites alike. However, you have to keep in mind that videos come with a more significant investment of time and resources than written content but with videos being 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content.
So make sure you explore the medium because it can be worth its weight in gold. One HubSpot research found out that video is the most preferred type of content online. It would be best to keep in mind that video captures people’s attention more than any other content format.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a fantastic content format, and they can help your brand if your audience doesn’t have time or interest in reading content every day. Podcast listeners are growing in number with each passing year. In 2021, 41 percent of U.S. adults had listened to a podcast within the last month. So you can try out podcasts as a viable medium of content creation. Try finding interesting people to interview or conversations to host, and you will be on your way.
Social Media
You have to make sure you keep posting content regularly, and once you have been doing it for a while, you should start thinking about distributing your content on other sites. That may mean you could repurposing content into new formats and publishing them on your blog, creating original content specifically for external sites, or publishing website content on various social networks.
You have to remember that posting on social media is pivotal to amplifying your brand’s reach and delivering your content to your customers where you know they spend their time. Here are some of the most popular social media sites:
- Snapchat
- YouTube
Whenever you post on any social media channel, you should know that it’s essential to post the type of content your followers expect to see. For example, your Instagram posts should be about photos, videos, and graphics that reflect current events, show off user-generated content or even go behind the scenes of your organization.
For Facebook, your choice of posts is a bit more open. You can share blog posts and website content along with native Facebook videos, product promotions, and original memes that resonate with your customers. You will also have the opportunity to interact with other businesses with a similar audience as your own. Social media sites like Instagram or Snapchat helps you connect more intimately with your audience.
The goal on platforms like Facebook and Twitter is to expand that audience, drive traffic toward your website, and start conversations in your industry. You should conduct primary market research to discover which platforms your buyers are on and mold your content to their expectations. So make sure you keep social media marketing in mind when creating your digital content marketing strategy.
Creating The Perfect Content Marketing Strategy
So there you go, that’s how you can develop a content marketing strategy for your business. Once you start generating more ideas, you will find various content types to diversify your content marketing. Remember, it will take time, organization, and creativity to grow a successful content marketing strategy.
If you want to set up your content marketing strategy and start building the foundation of your content marketing plan to add tools to manage your content better, then following these steps will get you there without any hassle. So make sure you check out the resources provided here when looking for content marketing ideas.
Now, we understand that running a business and coming up with killer content marketing strategies can leave you a bit stretched, and that’s where Freelancers Hub can help you out. Our team of qualified experts and years of experience allows us to create customized content marketing strategies for businesses from all over the world.
So if you need a custom content marketing strategy, contact us, and we will take care of it for you. Also, if you have any other questions regarding content marketing or digital marketing in general, drop them in the comments below or hit us up on our socials, and we will answer them for you. And with that being said, that’s about all we have for you today. We will come back with something new for you soon. Until then, see ya!