Content Marketing Strategy Essentials

Fundamentals of content marketing state that the concept is not all that complicated - one needs to consistently provide something of relevant value to their target audience in the hope it will create trust and loyalty. Startups to even medium businesses today recognize the value of content marketing but it is only achievable through an optimized content strategy. Hence the creation of an optimized content strategy designed to support your brand objectives and comprehensive marketing plans is vital for your business.

A content marketing strategy (not to be confused with a content strategy) looks at how content marketing can be used in a strategic way and with other marketing, customer and sales strategies. The power of a content marketing strategy is to bring in new customers, drive revenue, educate new users and help build a powerful brand for any business.

Serving the needs of your audience with high-quality, valuable content consistently is an admirable goal for any company. But of course, all your efforts will be wasted if your content doesn’t trigger the audience behaviors that would help your company achieve its business goals. In order to get the desired results, every content marketing leader should be prepared to answer a few questions:

Who specifically should your content be most relevant to?
What distinctive and desirable content experience can you consistently deliver?
What benefits will your audience receive from consuming your content?

Why do you need a content marketing strategy?

Your company should certainly have a content strategy – a strategic plan for all its content usage across the enterprise. Often content marketers benefit from having a strategic road map that focuses exclusively on using content to attract, acquire, and engage prospective customers.

Content marketing strategists determine what content will build the customer base by helping the audience make decisions or solve problems at crucial points in their experience with the brand.

The main reason you need a content marketing strategy is that content marketing is not an island. Without a content marketing strategy, you risk focusing on the content itself, not on the overall goals anymore. In fact, this is one of the most crucial and deadly mistakes in content marketing. Unfortunately, this disconnected view on content marketing happens very often and leads to focusing on the wrong things.

What’s in a content marketing strategy?

Your strategy should define your customer needs and key business areas, as well as how your content efforts address them. While no two strategies are exactly alike, they all should detail a few essential components:

Your purpose and goals – What do you want your audience to do once they’ve read your content? What value do you expect their actions would provide for your business?
Your audience – Defining the characteristics of the audience that will benefit most from your content, their current user state, and an estimate of how their needs and goals may evolve.
Your mission – your company’s unique perspectives and approach to creating content and how that distinguishes your content from your competitors.

Steps to build a content marketing strategy?

A content strategy involves various components.

Let’s detail the content marketing strategy a bit more with a quick to-do list.

1. Define Your Content Marketing Goal

Every content marketing strategy needs to start with a clear goal and true purpose.

How are you going to measure the success of your online campaigns? Is it with traffic? App downloads? New subscribers? Social shares and engagement? Conversions? Video views? Sales?

Understanding your goal early on will guide other important decisions as you proceed to develop your content marketing strategy. Such as, what are we making? And where are we going to distribute our content? One of your goals could be to attract new readers through clever blog posts and then converting them into email subscribers who can later be converted into paying customers.

2. Research and Understand Your Audience

Who you create your content for is equally important as what you create.

Once you have clear guidelines of why you are making content, the next step in your strategy is to define the audience. You need to understand exactly who is going to view, read, or watch the content you create.

Effective content is only produced with the direction, involvement, and feedback of your audience. The best content marketing strategy is designed to answer the most pressing questions your target audience has - to educate and transform them. The most important step is to understand the demographics (age, gender, location, job title) and psychographics (attitudes, belief systems, values, and interests) of your ideal audience.

3. Creating Your Audience Personas

It is all about buyer personas - the fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.

Developing a clear understanding of who your target audience is, will help immensely in crafting the right messaging in your content marketing efforts.

For each of the audience personas you create, write out their (demographic and psychographic) attributes on a bulleted list. This will give you info like whether they are searching on Google or are heavy Facebook users or use community sites like Quora/Reddit to source answers and ideas.

4. Set Up Your Blog

This is the technical part of your content marketing strategy.

You need to find a place to host the content you’re going to create, now is the time. Do you want to build your own blog on a WordPress-powered platform?
You can opt for a ready-to-go content management system like Squarespace, or you can simply host your content on an external domain like YouTube, Medium or Apple.

5. Update Your Current Content

You need to know exactly what kind of content ‘types’ you plan to produce.

If you are already in the process of writing or creating other types of content, now it is a great time to align your published content with your new content marketing strategy. Which topics are you going to create on a consistent basis?

If you have content already published, check if it fits into your new content marketing strategy. Does it speak to your audience and work towards your goals? If not, you can start updating it.

6. Start Building an Email List

Content marketing is useless if you are not getting in front of the right person. Your email marketing goals should relate back to core business objectives.

Let us discuss the most important piece of your content distribution puzzle: emails.

Email lets you communicate directly to your subscribers and gets you into their inboxes - where so many of us spend countless hours each week. Starting early with list-building is a great way to amplify the content you’re creating. Some of the most popular ones for marketers are - MailChimp, ConvertKit, Campaign Monitor, AWeber, ActiveCampaign.

7. Brainstorm Content Ideas and Use Keyword Research to Find What Your Audience is Looking For

Here we talk about the actual content.

For your content marketing strategy to be successful, you need to make sure you stay strategic in what you’re creating and apply the principles of content marketing into your plan.

Firstly brainstorm topics and note down blog posts ideas your audiences might be interested in. It would be good to involve end uses like customer service or sales guys. Secondly use a keyword research tool to gather information like Google’s Keyword Planner, Moz, keywordtool.io etc. Thirdly, outline your SEO-friendly content that will serve your goals, the user’s needs, and the keyword targeting.

8. Decide on the Format of the Content You Want to Produce

Blogging is essential to content marketing because it has a low barrier to entry and high returns.

Blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics - they all have their place in your content strategy and it is your discretion to use them.

Blog posts or pages are a great place to start with your content marketing strategy as they have the lowest barrier to entry, by far. You do not need design software or special tools. Just start writing and you’re ready to go.

9. Use Social Media to Promote Your Content

Content marketing is a long term investment in your audience but pays massive dividends

It’s pretty much impossible in recent times to separate your content marketing strategy from your social media strategy. Social media plays an integral part in getting your content in front of the right people. Generating platform-specific content should be a part of your strategy as every platform has its pros and cons.

Final Thoughts on Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

These tips should be everything you need to plan and execute a killer content marketing strategy. Everyone today wants to produce more great content, whether that means articles, videos, ebooks, podcasts, blogging or even social media content that is engineered to get lots of shares. A content marketing strategy is a roadmap that not only tells you what you are going to create, but how you are going to develop it, and ultimately use it to attract, retain, and convert readers into customers.

Why SEO Is Actually All About Content Marketing

Content marketing is still a buzzword. And with this buzzword, every company has its own definition - which leads to confusion.

SEO companies were the first to jump into Content Marketing as links and content are intrinsically linked to more traffic, but there are lots more to it than SEO. In doing your research, there are several questions you might come across:

Do SEO and content marketing fit together? Are they at odds with each other?
Is it possible to force them together?

Yes, they do for together. SEO is actually about content marketing and vice versa.

SEO (search engine optimization) refers to the technical process of increasing the quality of traffic and attracting maximum visitors to your website. SEO without content marketing is like a body without a soul. In other words, SEO is actually strategized around content marketing since every website needs words, articles, substance, keywords, etc.

So to start, SEO refers to every action you take on the website to make it rank higher for keywords in search engines like Google. These tactics work together to help certain pages on your website rank well when users search words or phrases related to your industry or service.

SEO encompasses quite a few different strategies:

Optimizing on-page elements
Using local keywords
Building high-quality links
Improving user experience
Maintaining a social media presence

How SEO and Content Marketing Work Together

SEO and content marketing have a mutual relationship. There is a good bit of overlap between the two. Another way to look at it is like this: SEO makes demands. Content marketing fulfills those demands.

Your content should include highly searched keywords in your industry or niche that helps your website rank better in search engines, meaning it will attract more traffic. Hence your content is more effective in reaching your marketing goals.

Adding strong content to your site will improve its domain authority which will, in turn, give an extra boost to your overall SEO.
In short, the better your SEO, the better your content will perform and vice versa.

SEO demands keywords. Content marketing means using keywords.

One important feature of SEO: Keywords. Keywords are the fundamental component of SEO - researching them, utilizing them and tracking rank on Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). SEO requires keywords to perform properly. Content cannot perform without keywords.

How does one apply the use of keywords? How is all the research funnelled into its practical application? This is what content marketing is. The only way you can use your keywords is to be employing them strategically throughout your content. This means you have to research, track and utilize the keywords to rank your website at the top of search results. Through the use of articles, blogs and other online content, you can use more keywords relevant to what your site is about and what people are searching for. On the other hand, you need to avoid overstuffing your content with keywords - a tactic search engines now penalize.

SEO demands consistent output. Content marketing requires consistency.

Google likes fresh content, and they have for a long time. It is a fact that fresh content gets rapidly indexed and registers higher in the SERPs than older low-value content.

When fresh content is updated on a website with high domain authority, you can be sure that it is going to offer a SERP boost. Good SEO, then, means a consistent output of content. Consistent output means that you’re doing content marketing, and you're publishing often. This is the best solution. Content marketing is an ongoing process, so think of it as a regular investment.

SEO demands backlinks. Content marketing encourages backlinks.

Over the years, backlinks remain one of the most powerful Google ranking factors. If you want to substantially boost your site's SEO and improve your Google rankings, link building is one of the best ways to do it. Link building activities should try to get as many links to the target page as possible.

But the best way to build links is by publishing killer content and letting sites link back to it. This is the real way to continual SEO success.

Otherwise, you can build links by contracting with link building agencies. Guest blogging and infographics can also be good for link building.

SEO demands content. Content marketing is content.

Content is king. There is no such thing as SEO without content. We do not need to argue about that anymore. It’s a truism of the SEO industry. Content content content is everywhere.

And what is content marketing all about? It’s about content - as the name would suggest. The practical application of SEO is the very substance of content marketing. When SEO shouts, “We need more content!” content marketing responds, “We're on it!”

SEO demands onsite technical optimization. Content marketing needs great UX.

SEO is not just content, articles, blogs, keywords and backlinks. SEO is more about optimizing the robots.txt, utilizing tags, enhancing metadata, and constructing a strategic sitemap. This technical checklist includes meta tags, breadcrumbs, meta descriptions, call-to-action, headers, and responsive design.

These technical optimizations are for the benefit of users when they are searching, selecting, or reading content. Their enhancements are required from a user experience (UX) perspective. SEO and UX go hand-in-hand in creating a successful website experience. SEO components like metadata, site map, robots.txt are present to serve the user better and promote your content.

The elements of great user experience have been rolled into SEO best practices.

Why do you want a good sitemap? So people can easily find and access your content. Why do you want an optimized robots.txt? So search engines can better crawl your site, and so readers can see the content. Why do you want the right tags in the right places? So your content can get indexed fast, resulting in accurate search results, and more readers of your content. Again, it all comes back to content.

The Difference Between SEO and Content Marketing

Now that we’ve established the relationship between the two, it is time for us to dig into what precisely separates content marketing from SEO. And while they have points of differentiation, you still can not separate the two entirely.

One key contrast: SEO is narrower and more technical whereas content marketing is broader and more holistic.

1) Audience

Any type of content should always be created with your target audience in mind - this is an elementary rule. This means that your writeup, graphics, and formats should be designed to suit your viewers best. Always try optimizing the pages you host your content on, but do so in a way that doesn’t detract from the content that you post.

SEO, on the other hand, requires in-depth knowledge about search engines and their crawlers. In fact, search engines weigh keywords, title tags, headers, and other code-related elements much more heavily than your average visitor.

2) Approach

As a result of these different audiences or end-users, the approaches taken toward content marketing and SEO are slightly different. When doing SEO for your site, you should take an analytical approach to all changes you commit to the website. Use tools like Google Analytics to dig into the hard data, and research keywords to determine new opportunities for growing your traffic and rankings. You need to concentrate on a data-based strategy when it comes to SEO.

There’s no proven formula for success with content marketing, in other words, there are no hard data and facts available to work as a baseline. But if you are a creative individual, it could be a great opportunity to experiment with new topics and formats.

3) Value

This should come as no surprise, but content marketing and SEO each have their own way of adding value to your website and marketing strategy. SEO primarily attracts qualified traffic to your website and relates to the ways in which you reach new visitors. Whereas content marketing has more to do with keeping those visitors engaged and interested once they arrive on your website, and moving them closer to becoming customers.

Wrapping up

Overall, it is essential to keep up with Google’s latest updates and ensure your website is relevant to both Google and your customers. Though there are frequent search algorithm changes every year, the bottom line is that valuable, authentic content always wins. You create content to meet your content marketing objectives. As content marketing is becoming increasingly relevant, it is vital for a website to provide quality, informational content regularly. And SEO is intimately tied to content marketing. Remember a simple formula