Do you know that almost 70% of businesses are actively investing in content marketing in 2020. (HubSpot)
Solid content marketing strategy can keep the entire team involved in content marketing in the same page.
Marketing experts says that content marketing without content strategy is like a car without an engine.
Do you know that 63% of businesses don’t have a documented content marketing strategy?
It is believed that content marketing strategy and content strategy are two different things.
These are the job roles you can find on Content Marketing and Content Marketing Strategy.
You have business goals in your company and you have a target audience for your business. So you can plan, create and publish content, which resonates with your business goal to the target audience. This process is known as content marketing.
I other words Content strategy is the process that ends in publishing effective content.
Now we will see a couple of definitions for content marketing strategy according to industry-leading companies related to content marketing.
Content strategy, according to Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, involves the planning, creation, governance, and maintenance of content, whereas content marketing strategy focuses on the narrow discipline of marketing content.
A content marketing strategy is a plan for consistently creating high-quality content designed to turn strangers into customers.
Do you have framework for content strategy?
Why do you need to do content marketing?
You can say bring more traffic and so that I can get more conversions. But this is not the correct answer to this question
Target audience of your content is called buyer persona. If you are in the business for a long time you know your target audience but if you just start your website recently for your business it is bit difficult to understand your audience.
Identifying the audience is very important because you should bring your piece of contents in front of them to get some leads from them.
This will help you to answer the following two questions
What kind of content should I show to them?
How do I do that?
You can run a content audit to evaluate the performance of your existing content of your business. This includes your website and social media profile, and email marketing stuffs.
To run a content audit you have to use tools like
Google Search Console
SEMrush
Ahref
In addition to those tools you can analyze the traffic and engagement coming from social media, YouTube and Pinterest.
If you run PPC campaign you can use the conversion data to this audit report
So this is just a overview of your existing content. If you can find the dollar amount you spent to bring one user to your website then you are on the winning side.
Download Content Audit Templates
When you building your content strategy another important thing is to generate idea for contents.
We can use the following methods
Best thing is to study how your competitors do the content marketing. You can check their blog and social media. If they have YouTube channel watch the video to get idea about what do.
You can note down the idea for content creation.
Always look for new content to match your buyer persona. Try to reach them through different channels.
Sometime you can read several sources and write new article contain all the important points from all other sources.
When we develop content strategy for our website techiecontent.com we follow simple strategy to generate content idea. Since we mostly do technical related content first we find idea to develop Pillar Post (This is like ultimate guide).
Sometimes I called them ultimate guide.
This provides the comprehensive overview of the topic
If you want to create Topic Authority then you have to create content cluster
How to find a topic to create a content cluster?
Finding the idea for a pillar post is very simple for technical content when you surf the Internet. So ourt pillar post has about 2000-4000 words and next we develop several supportive contents, which is having internal links to the pillar post.
When you build topic cluster you have to answer the related query to build the content cluster.
So we have link juice coming to the pillar post and finally you have content silo
If you have set of idea for content creation there are several tools you can use to generate nice heading and content outline etc.
Coshedule has a nice Headline Analyzer to analyze headlines and titles and provides feedback on length, word choice, grammar, and keyword search volume. You can try this tool and check that fits your needs. There are similar tools when
WordPress is the ideal CMS (content management system) to publish your contents. Because WP allows you to create, edit and publish contents easily. In addition to that, you can track the traffic and conversion easily with plug-ins.
You have Yoast and Rankmath SEO plug-in to do on-page analysis of the contents.
There are lot more things you can do with WordPress. Now, there are more than 50000 free plug-ins available to do anything with the WP
When we make your content strategy we use following steps
How are we going to reach people?
We use blog and YouTube to rich people
We do keyword research and find out the pain problems of the users
We build the contents to solve this issue
We apply the SEO practices to get higher ranking on Google and bring more traffic to our website
There should be way to measure the performance of your content marketing strategy. So it is better to have a written plan for your content marketing strategy.
You need to have the right tool set to execute the content marketing strategy properly. You can use these tools to analyze, create, promote and measure the content plan.
Average business uses more than 90 tools to execute content marketing plan
Analytics platforms
Before developing any content plan you have to analyze your business and your competitor’s business.
Using analytics tool you can measure the key matrics in organic search, PPC and social media.
Google Analytic is a good tool to analyze your existing business.