If you want to create content, then having a content marketing strategy in place is very important.
Most people create content but are unaware of how to make money from it. If you are creating content for a business or even for yourself, you must always keep in mind that your efforts should bring in revenue.
I am going to talk about how you must create a content marketing strategy step by step. How you can become both the publisher and the advertiser. I.e Do not depend on advertisements of other people. Build your audience and advertise your products and services.
1. Content Marketing Strategy formula
First, you must understand that great content means a great audience and a great audience means a high chance of advertising which means revenue.
You must aim for working like a media company. For eg: Grab specific attention of a specific market segment at a specific time. Now you can sell anything because you have the attention of your audience.
Harley Davidson is a media company. For example, in the future, if Harley Davidson decides to sell anything other than motorcycles, even then people will buy it.
2. Create your customer avatar
What is a customer avatar? It is nothing but knowing your customer in and out. Answer a few of these questions like what is the biggest problem your ideal customer is facing? what is his or her age range? what do they typically do in a day?
You can take a look at this photo above and fill it properly. Use your own understanding or post a survey form in relevant Facebook groups, talk to people who might be your customer.
3. Build your products
Most importantly if you know your customer now. Build products or services or modify your current products to match the requirements of your customer based on your customer avatar.
You must have something to sell. It can be anything like merchandise or a digital product etc
4. Create Content for Funnel
Now you are ready for the most important step. NOw when you start creating content, create it according to the different stages of your marketing funnel.
Your funnel has 3 parts. Top of the Funnel (TOFU), Middle of the Funnel (MOFU), Bottom of the funnel(BOFU).
Take a look at the photo above to understand what are the different types of content for different stages of the funnel. After creating content for the different stages of marketing, you must measure the metrics after each stage of the funnel.
For example in the TOFU stage measure metrics like engagement rate, amount of traffic you got, and your brand awareness using google search console.
In the MOFU stage measure your lead magnet conversion rate and email open rates
In the BOFU stage measure the number of sales from leads, retention rate, retargeting list growth, buyer frequency, and average customer value.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand these terms. I will explain it in another blog post.
5. Repurpose your content
Now that you have your content sorted for different stages of marketing, you have to republish your old content. You can add some more information to it.
Also, each blog post take out outlines that can become your twitter posts. A few paragraphs which explain a particular topic in your blog post along with a photo can become your Facebook post.
Similarly, drive traffic to it using either organic or paid methods. This brings me to the last step of content distribution.
6. Content distribution
You have worked hard to create content. Now, don’t you want it to reach maximum people?
Distributing your content can be done through paid or organic methods. I am going to talk about organic methods here. Because, when we are a small business, we should look to make the most out of minimum resources. Running ads is always an option.
Organically you get a lot of traffic from
Email marketing
This is the best one according to me because it is fully under your control. Remember, if you are sending 5 emails to your prospect, 3 to 4 should be just pure value emails and the remaining one for your promotion.
Email marketing will increase your trust with your prospects and eventually your sales.
I will talk more about traffic from email marketing in another blog post.
SEO
With respect to SEO apart from your regular on-page SEO using Yoast plugin, you must check for the following things in your blog post or your website.
- Search console for any issues
- Google indexing of your post/website
- Broken links on your website
- If your robots.txt file shows too many or too little website pages.
Social media marketing
Pick 2 to 3 social media channels and focus on those. Share your content on the channels and see how the audience responds. Experiment.
Conclusion
This the step by step content marketing strategy that you should follow. You have to go step by step and you will start seeing results.
I hope this article helped you. Comment below what do you think.
Also read:
https://marketingscholars.com/how-to-become-a-content-writer-in-6-easy-steps-best-career-option/
