- Define your content marketing goal: Think about the content you’re going to make and what you want to achieve from it – are you looking to increase sales, increase traffic to your website, or increase the number of downloads of your app? By setting goals you will find it easier to create appropriate content.
- Research and understand your audience: Now you need to think about who will see your content, consider the demographics, and psychographics of your audience. This will help you to create your audience personas, which is a fictional representation of who your ideal customers would be. By understanding your audience, you can ask them what they would like to see and avoid wasting time on creating content they’re not interested in.
- Update current content: If you’ve only just decided to create a content marketing strategy, now is a good time to review your current content to help you understand what is and isn’t working.
- Begin building an email list: Email is a great way to reach out to your customers as you’re communicating directly to them, and they are likely to take time to read your content. There are tools out there, that make it easy to send out emails to your consumers.
- Email Service Provider: Send emails, build and maintain subscriber lists and analyse how your campaigns are doing. Check out: Mailerlite, MailChimp, Active Campaign and ConvertKit. After choosing an email service provider you need to think about what content will be in the email, it might be about general campaigns and newsletters, targeted communication, or automated messaging.
- Brainstorm and do keyword research: Here you should think about what your target audience are interested in and the type of things they are likely to look up on the internet, by writing down key topics. You could use a keyword search tool such as Google Keyword Planner to help you eventually expand and refine your key words. Using the established keywords will help with your SEO and optimise where you are ranked on web browsers.
- Decide the format of content you want to produce: There are endless forms of content that you could produce and now is the time to decide what you’re going to use. It could be a blog, video or podcast just to name a few.
- Decide what tactics you’re going to experiment with: With businesses facing increased competition, give yourself some time to experiment with different forms of content and what would work best for your target market. The content that you produce should be unique to stand out from competition.
- Use social media to promote your content: So many people use social media these days that it would be silly not to use it to promote your content. Social media allows you to reach out people and receive instant responses. It’s important that you don’t force people to engage with your content, but instead build rapport and educate your audience.
- Use paid ads to reach out to more people: Although this is not essential, consider putting aside some money into paid ads on sites like Facebook. Define your goals, decide who you want to target, set a budget, and then put your ad together by creating visuals to go alongside the ad (consider emotion, the key messages, what action you want to be taken, and where you want to place your ads).
For more information on how to create a content marketing strategy, visit: https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/how-to-create-great-content-a-step-by-step-guide-to-content-marketing-that-delivers-real-results.html
https://neilpatel.com/blog/small-business-content-marketing/
https://theoruby.com/ph20-content/
For information on the best types of content to create, check out:
https://mailchimp.com/en-gb/resources/top-12-types-of-social-media-content-to-create/
