How to Start Utilizing Content Marketing!
What is content marketing like in practice?
Let’s explore the main steps to take when building your content marketing strategy:
1. Define Your Goals & Audience
Before creating any content, you need to know two things: your goals and your audience.
Your goals are the specific outcomes you want to achieve with your content marketing.
For example, you might want to increase site traffic by a certain percentage or drive a specific number of leads.
Your audience is the group of people you want your content to reach.
For example, you might want to target small business owners, freelancers, bloggers, or students.
A quick way to find your target audience is to use a tool like One2Target.
Here are some steps you can take to define your goals and audience:
Review your current performance. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What are your opportunities and threats?
Identify your ideal customer persona. Who are they? What are their pain points, needs, and desires? How can you help them?
Conduct a competitor analysis. Who are your main competitors? What are they doing well and poorly? How can you differentiate yourself from them?
Set the right types of goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals make it easy to see whether you’re on track. For example, a SMART goal could be: “Increase organic traffic by 50% in the next six months.”
Choose key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure progress. For example, some common KPIs for content marketing are views, bounce rate, average engagement time, social shares, comments, email subscribers, etc.
By defining your goals and audience, you’ll have a clear direction and focus for your content marketing.
You’ll also be able to create content that resonates with your target audience and helps you achieve your desired results.
2. Determine Appropriate Content Types
You’ve defined your goals and audience. Now, you need to choose the best content types for your content marketing efforts.
Content types are the formats and styles of your content.
Blog posts
Ebooks
Videos
Podcast episodes
Case studies
Don’t know where to start?
A great way is to reverse-engineer your competitors’ content strategies. See what’s working for them and replicate it in a better way.
You can also review your competitors' social media accounts.
Here are some additional tips for deciding which content types to use:
Align content types with your goals. Different content types have different purposes and benefits. For example, blog posts are great for driving traffic, ebooks are great for generating leads, videos are great for increasing engagement, etc.
Align content types with your audience. Some content types appeal to different audiences. For example, some audiences prefer visual content, some prefer audio content, some prefer interactive content, etc.
Experiment and optimize. You don’t need to stick to one content type. Mix and match to see what works best. Track KPIs and adjust accordingly.
3. Set a Content Budget
Next, you need to set a content budget.
Your content budget is the amount of money you’re able to spend on your content marketing as a whole. It includes the costs of creating, distributing, and promoting your content.
But how do you set a content budget that works for your business?
Start here:
Estimate content costs. Do some research to see roughly how much it would cost to produce content.
Estimate distribution costs. These are the costs of getting your content in front of your audience, such as paying for ads, creating sponsored posts, leveraging influencer marketing, etc.
Calculate your predicted return on investment (ROI): The ROI of your digital content marketing is a metric that shows your content revenue relative to your content costs
Adjust your content budget accordingly. Based on your estimated costs and ROI, decide how much you can allocate to different content types and channels
By setting a content budget, you’ll be able to plan and manage your content marketing more efficiently and effectively.
4. Decide on Distribution Channels
Now you need to decide which places to distribute content to. Places where your audience hangs out and consumes content.
How?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on your niche, audience, goals, and resources.
But here are some general tips you can follow:
Start with your own channels. These are channels you control like your website, blog, email list, social media profiles, etc. They’re the easiest and most cost-effective ways to distribute your content and build an audience.
Expand to earned and paid channels. These are the channels you don’t own but can leverage. Like guest posting, podcasting, influencer marketing, media outreach, etc. They can help you reach new audiences, generate backlinks (links from other sites that point to yours), and increase your authority and credibility.
Test and optimize. You don’t need to be everywhere. You need to be where it matters. So, test different channels to see what works best for you. Measure your results and optimize your content and strategy accordingly.
5. Decide on Your Content Schedule
It’s time to decide on the frequency of your content creation and distribution efforts.
For example, you might want to publish a blog post every week, a podcast every month, and a webinar every quarter.
Then, you need to schedule those in a content calendar to see exactly what you’ll create and when you’ll create it.
To start, follow these tips:
Assess your resources and capacity. What does your content budget look like? How many people are involved in your content team? What are their roles and responsibilities?
Balance quality and quantity. You don’t necessarily need to create and distribute content every day. You need to create and distribute content that’s valuable, relevant, and engaging for your audience. Quality beats quantity every time.
Experiment and optimize. You don’t have to stick to one content publishing cadence. Test different frequencies and publication times to see what works best for you. Track your KPIs and optimize accordingly.
6. Create High-Quality Content
You’ve done the hard work involved in planning.
What now?
It’s time to create some high-quality content.
High-quality content is content that’s:
Valuable to your audience
Original and unique
Well-researched and accurate
Well-written and easy to read
Well-designed and visually appealing
Optimized for SEO and conversions
Here are some bonus tips:
Follow a content creation process. This is a systematic and repeatable way of creating content, such as brainstorming, outlining, drafting, editing, proofreading, formatting, etc.
Use content creation tools. These are tools that can help you create better content, such as Grammarly, Hemingway, and the SEO Writing Assistant
Follow SEO writing best practices. These are tips that can help you create more effective content, such as using subheadings, bullet points, images, videos, calls to action, etc.
Experiment and optimize. You don’t need to create perfect content. You need to create content that helps you reach your goals. So, test different content ideas and formats to see what resonates.
7. Monitor and Analyze Results
Your final step is to monitor and analyze your results.
You need to see how your content is performing and whether it’s helping you achieve your goals.
How?
Try following these steps:
Use analytics tools. These are tools that can help you measure and track your content performance, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Semrush
Use feedback tools. These are tools that can help you collect and analyze feedback from your audience, such as SurveyMonkey, Hotjar, and UserTesting
Use reporting tools. These are tools that can help you create and share reports on your content results, such as Google Data Studio, Tableau, or Power BI
Compare results with your goals. See how your content is performing against your SMART goals. Identify what’s working and what’s not.
Make data-driven decisions. Based on your results and analysis, decide what actions you need to take to improve your marketing content. For example, you might want to create more or less content, change your content types or channels, or optimize your content for SEO or conversions.
Invest in Your Future with Content Marketing. Content marketing isn’t only about driving immediate results. It’s also an investment in your business’s future. By creating high-quality, relevant, and valuable content, you can attract and retain customers for years to come.
And the best part about content marketing is you don’t need a huge budget or a large team to get started. You just need clear goals, a solid plan, and a willingness to learn and improve.
Start your content marketing journey today and reap the benefits tomorrow.
Contact us today for a Free Consultation!
