What an effective content marketing strategy looks like

These days, the world is driven by content. With production and consumption of content at an all-time high, it’s harder than ever for businesses to attract the attention of their audience. No matter how good the products or services are, there will always be hefty competition gunning for your customers.

The best way to start connecting with your customers is to forget about the opposition and work on building a strong relationship with your consumers.

This can be achieved with an effective content marketing strategy. A content strategy uses the content that your organisation creates to achieve any particular business goals that you have in place. Whether it’s driving brand awareness and engagement or pushing a new product. In this blog, we discuss how to develop an effective content marketing strategy to achieve your business goals.

Define Your Goals

The first step is for you to define exactly why you will be developing content for your business. It is essential for your content to be purpose driven. Without a purpose, it will fail to target the right customers. By answering a lot of the why questions, you will begin to define and establish a goal for your content marketing strategy.

Research Your Audience

After defining what you hope to achieve with your content marketing strategy, you must clearly define your content’s target audience, also known as the buyer persona. The buyer persona will be a fictionalised version of your best customer. When you know your target audience, it will be easier to conceptualise topics and put them in terms that your audience will understand.

Decide The Content You Will Create

In any content marketing strategy it is essential to outline the type of content you wish to build. Once you’re aware of your target audience, you should decide what content is right to communicate with them.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most popular types of content:

Blogs

The blog is as traditional as it gets in the digital era. However, it’s important to understand how effective blogs can be for lead generation and brand recognition for your organisation.

Videos

With new technology, video production has never been more accessible or more cost-effective. Video content is a great tool for simplifying complex topics and driving engagement and brand awareness.

E-Books

E-books are a long-form content piece, and a great way to get very specific about different aspects of your organisation. E-books are great for services, and products.

White Papers

White papers are a great resource for your audience when it comes to generating content about your industry as a whole. Use statistics and pull quotes to support your copy.

Email Campaigns

Email campaigns allow you to drive your audience directly to the website. You can keep your audience informed on the latest advances in your industry as well as any new innovations from your company.

Publish and Manage Content

Finally, once you’ve decided the content and medium, you need to set up a publishing cadence for all your content. Blogs are a weekly contribution, so it’s important to keep to the cadence that you set up. As for any other pieces of content, trial your pieces with A/B testing to figure out what works best.

At the end of the day, finding a process that fits your business is more important than maintaining some sort of industry-wide consistency.

By Vedika Nair