Have you been attempting to lift the company's content but finding it difficult to grasp the best results? Nobody likes to fail but it always happens.
According to Neilpatel, 94% of B2B small businesses use content marketing. But are they successful in their marketing plan? Of course not! Only 9% of B2B marketers rate their organization as “very effective” at content marketing.
Probably you are one among the 91%of marketers left, who are not effective in their content marketing. Don’t panic! Failure is success if we learn from it.
To generate leads, increasing sales, and building your brand with content, you need to develop a content marketing strategy. 31.8% of companies with a content strategy achieve 27.1% higher win rates than those without a content strategy.
To overcome the failure, you have to know its causes. There are a variety of factors that contribute to the failure of content marketing campaigns. And the major cause is the lack of an effective content marketing strategy.
The goal of content strategy is to determine what content will assist your audience and encourage them to take actions that will benefit your brand. To do so effectively, you'll need to combine a few moving pieces. To name just a few, you have to set targets, study your audience, and map out how consumers can engage what you provide.
In the end, the way you create your marketing plan would be special to your situation. There is no one-size-fits-all solution that will triple a company's sales.
A well-executed marketing strategy will help you generate new leads, increase sales, and build your brand as an expert in your field. Learn more about How can content marketing improves sales in your business.
Also, well-researched content increases your brand reputation and improves your search engine ranking. Of course, content marketing is the best marketing strategy in digital marketing. You may learn more about Why and How Content Marketing is the best digital marketing strategy. However, Content Marketing is more than creating and distributing materials. It's a complete strategy to attract and engage a specific audience and producing profitable consumer action.
What is the content marketing strategy?
Content marketing strategy and content strategy Do these words differ?Yes! They differ in meaning, though they are both important in digital marketing.
According to HubSpot, A content strategy is a strategy that takes your business goals and then uses content as a primary means to achieve those goals.
A content strategy is a blueprint for all your content marketing activities, of how to produce, manage, archive, and update the content.
A content marketing strategy is a plan for building an audience by publishing, maintaining, and spreading frequent and consistent materials that educate, entertain, or inspires to turn strangers into fans and fans into customers.
Your strategy acts as a road map for creating useful, engaging, and attracts the right audience to become customers. Does your company have a content marketing strategy? If no, Bridging Technologies advise you to have one for keeping your business on the right track.
Why you need content marketing strategy for your business
You need a map for the directions during your journey when you are lost. Thanks to Google map you can travel anywhere with the map on your phone. In digital marketing, you can determine the direction of your marketing campaign by marketing strategy.
A strategic plan gives your content a reason to exist as a template for achieving your marketing objectives. Without a plan, success or failure is purely a matter of chance, and you risk wasting all your efforts.
You may belong in a small company with few workers, and you may think that there is no need for documented marketing strategy. Having the strategy is not enough, you better have the documented marketing strategy.
63% of all marketers don’t have a well-documented content marketing strategy. This is not only a bad practice but also associated with a high risk of misallocation of resources.
Steps to build effective content marketing strategy
1. Define your goals, mission, and KPIs
Setting out a mission is a good place to start when planning your strategy. You may build up a statement of your mission to what you aim for, in your marketing campaign. This enhances to concentrate on what's critical when creating material and ensure that your marketing plan remains on track. To be effective, a marketing plan must be focused on well-defined objectives.
These goals differ based on the company's needs; for example, you may want to raise awareness for a new blog series on Brand Story Building. Perhaps you aim to increase lead generation through an eBook reading download. Lead generation will support you in building your brand reputation.
It is advisable to have a SMART goal. This means the goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. For the goal to be specific and measurable you have to set the KPIs. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will guide you to know if you have achieved your objectives. An example of KPI is the number of people who download the eBook. This number will give you a clear picture of how your marketing campaign is performing.
2. Know your audience
Whatever industry you're in, the brand would need to interact with a specific target audience.
Of course, the desires and pain points of each of these groups are different. This is where a buyer persona comes in handy.
Before you can own your audience, you must first describe it. Distinguish your target audience based on their demographics, preferences, and geographic position.
If you're not sure who your buyer persona is, ask your sales team for support. The sales team is usually the one that answers customer questions, knows their needs, and has demographic information.
Look at who you're already interacting with after you've decided which audience you want to target. When building a content marketing plan, a buyer persona will benefit you in the creation of content that resonates with the user.
3. Perform Content auditing
Most people begin with blog content, but if you want to reach out and try other types you have to think about which one you want to create.
If you've already written various types of posts, you'll need to review them to see how well they achieve and what you can do to strengthen them. This is an examination and assessment of your current performance to identify the differences between your current state of business and where you’d like to be. This answers the questions like -where are we now? Where would we like to be? How are we going to close the gap? This provides a road to where you are going to start.
You will have to know what kind of post is needed by your persona at a particular time. You can know this by researching the published post and what people need. This is known as content gap analysis.
According to CoSchedule content gap analysis is the process of finding the content pieces and topics your audience wants, but are missing on your site. This will help you to develop new ideas to fill the gap you observe. Knowing the content that you have produced and what people need, will assist you in idea generation and in updating the previous posts.
The task of generating ideas is an ongoing process, neither beginner nor another writer should ignore it. You’ll always need fresh content for your audience and you will be responsible to provide something unique and valuable.
4. Select the best content channels
Knowing where your target customers spend their time, will help you to know where you will find them. There are different digital channels where you can publish your content. Choosing the right channel for the right audience will help you to reach the target audience at the right place.
Each channel works best with different kinds of material. For Example, there are different channels of social media for different purposes and different groups of people. For example, if you are doing B2B marketing then Facebook is not the right channel for your marketing post. Because Facebook is there serving other purposes like image sharing.
You can’t upload the video to the YouTube channel while your audience is on social media like Instagram. Don’t follow a large number of people just follow your target persona.
5. Decide on the content type
Determine which type of content you want to create. Some of them are
· EBook
· Video
· Infographic
· Webinar
Many successful content marketing strategies depend on providing content on a website that you can repurpose and post on other sites.
As a result, blog posts are an important part of the strategy, and they continue to produce excellent results. Your blog posts should ideally be actionable, valuable, and shareable, and they should cover a variety of topics.
Of course, building a content marketing plan entails more than just staring at your own website's statistics. It's also about looking for a successful piece of information that you can use as inspiration.
Apart from written materials, you can include other types of content in your plan to increase interaction. Each minute, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded across 56 countries and in 16 languages. Video marketing should be an integral part of every marketing strategy. As it has been shown to attract customers, keep them on-site longer, increase lead generation, and minimize abandonment.
6. Create a content calendar
You are more likely to finish something if you write it down, so put pen to paper and schedule posting time.
By putting together, a rough outline of an editorial calendar for the next three to six months, you won't have to go searching for new things. Since you'll already have a list of things to write.
When it comes time to produce the content, having a plan makes it much simpler because you'll know exactly what to write and what you need to finish it.
You'll need to know exactly when you want to publish your post on each of the platforms you want to use as a part of your strategy. Since a lack of preparation is a common marketing mistake, it is essential to using a calendar to schedule all of the content.
This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. You can use Google calendar to set up the due dates, and there are some digital marketing tools for time schedules like Trello. In digital marketing, the use of paperwork is highly reduced.
7. Create a content
You have to compel your writing skills in the proper ways of communication. Have the marketing tone that will make the audience a valuable person. Solve the customer's pain points, not your own, address them at each stop along the way as you want to help.
When creating the content remember to map into the customer journey. Mapping the buyer’s journey adds an extra layer to your buyer persona. It helps you align your ideas with the questions an audience has through each distinct stage of the customer journey. These stages are awareness, consideration, and decision.
Failing to map content with the buyer's journey you will find creating the sales content to the new lead, which is not a proper way of creating the content.
🔥🔥 Tip: Companies that provide content marketing services in Tanzania are so many, they create and market the content. Rather than looking at the price, you better consider the quality services based on what your organization needs. 🔥🔥
8. Distribute and market the content
The final move is to distribute and share your concepts with the largest possible audience. The distribution strategy establishes how, when, and where to distribute them. From a marketing perspective, high-quality content can be ignored if it does not reach its target audience.
One of the most common misunderstandings about content marketing is that good stories can stand alone. Marketers simply post an article on a blog and hope that everyone reads it. That isn't a plan; it's all wishful thinking.
Content distribution necessitates the same amount of foresight and preparation as its development. As a part of your customers' research should be where they spend their time should be a part of your audience research.
✔️✔️ Lucky! Bridging Technologies is always there for you, we provide free consultation on how to distribute your content to reach the target. Let us help you. 💪💪
9. Measure your result
Finally, evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. To do so, go back to the KPIs you set when you were building a content marketing plan. Assess what has changed and whether you are on track to meet your goals.
You'll be able to tweak your marketing plan at regular intervals by tracking your success, ensuring it's all up to date. And if you didn’t achieve the desired goals you set, review your strategy to see which thing was not on track.
We all know that successfulpeople don’t fear failure but understand that it’s necessary to learn and grow from it.You may choose content, as your savior, but if you fail to develop a content marketing strategy, you will always be in the failure loop.
You have to build the road for your success, you can’t dream about success while you don’t have the plan on how you are going to become successful.
To develop a content marketing strategy requires time, organization, and creativity. Since the world is changing also the customers need always change. This means the documented strategy will also evolve from time to time based on the market need.
This is why marketing research is a critical part of running the business. Failure in research can give you hundreds of reasons to close the business. The research will provide insight into the market, customers and assist you in developing new ideas.
Content marketing competition is big, you have to speed up your content marketing. The good news is, there is no need of doing all these by yourself in this digital world. Us, Bridging Technologies we provide quality content marketing services in Tanzania. We don’t provide you a tool, we do it for you.
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A content writer filled with a desire to create engaging online content for innovative brands.
