What is Your Content Marketing Strategy?

A Content marketing strategy is an approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.  Effective marketing is impossible without great content.  Regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, content marketing should be part of your process, not something separate from it. Quality content is integral of all forms of marketing.

With content now a cornerstone of inbound marketing, it’s vital that the material you post on your and other’s sites reaches the right people.

It’s often said that the tighter your niche, the more successful your marketing will be – after all, you don’t need millions of customers, do you? You just need enough of the right ones!

So the smaller and more focused the group that you are speaking to, the more targeted your content is likely to be. That doesn’t happen by accident; it happens by developing a targeted content strategy aimed at reaching precisely the customers you want.

• Why are you utilizing content marketing as a strategy?
• Who are you trying to reach with our content?
• What are you hoping to accomplish?
• How does this fit into your overall marketing strategy?
• How will you measure success?

If you start with these questions in mind, the actual pieces of your content marketing strategy should come easily. In fact, each of the following components of your strategy should help you clearly answer those questions and hold you accountable.

Have you developed any target audience personas? Before you create any content or develop any distribution plan, you have to know who you’re trying to reach.

Once you know why you’re creating content and for whom, you can determine what type to create. Taking advantage of content creation tools will make your job easier, or partnering with an agency such as us to help may be a better solution.

Consistency is key in content marketing. It’s your opportunity to build trust with your audience members, nurture them, and become a resource for them. Once you know what kinds of content you need to create, it’s time to develop a calendar or schedule to make sure you deliver on your promises.

Your editorial calendar should detail how often you need to publish to keep your audience engaged and when you’ll distribute your published content. It’s all about getting your content to the right people at the right time. That can mean publishing articles in blogs your target audience members are already reading, using a paid distribution plan, on social media networks to attract readers to your videos, or simply including your content in your email newsletters.

Finally you’re going to need to determine how you’re going to measure the success of your content marketing strategy efforts. What metrics will you use?

What to do next?  Tell us about your project