Content marketing with meaning

Randomly creating content for whatever type of channel is like shooting in the dark. You will almost always miss your target. Strategizing your content, knowing your target group, where they are, and which place they have in your buying cycle is the way to go. By utilizing the right strategy for your content, you will reach your target group at the right place at the right moment. Do you want to learn everything about creating the right content strategy? Keep on reading; I’ll explain everything step by step.

Why do I need a content marketing strategy?

An all-encompassing content marketing strategy involves setting feasible objectives and creating the conditions to execute effective content marketing. You gain useful insights when evaluating and optimizing your strategy by measuring your efforts. How else would you know if your content focus is correct and achieved success at all?

Ideally, the result of such a strategy is a synergy-based combination of online and offline marketing efforts, including content for solely branding purposes. Your strategic content path should contribute to valuable and mutually appreciated customer relationships. Ultimately, it should be clear what it is all about: achieving your brand’s and company’s most important goals within a predetermined period.

Where to start, you might think? Just starting with more coordinated online content efforts is already beneficial for many people trying their best at content marketing. This is precisely what I’m trying to achieve with this article: providing you with tips and tricks on strategizing your content marketing to ensure you achieve the desired results. Remember: any strategy or well-thought-through-content – is better than nothing.

What can you get out of content marketing?

Content marketing is not something you invest in once but is an ongoing and long-term process. This means that you continuously bring content to the attention that helps the target group answer questions in the phase. By doing this, you generate more leads, the number of website visitors increases through SEO-optimized content, you get a higher ranking in Google. Eventually, you reach your ultimate goal of increasing your sales and revenue. Moreover, you take the opportunity to engage with your target audience, definitely worth the work you put in.

Some Content Marketing facts

• It takes on about six to 12 days to create quality content. By only having it live in the blog section of your website, it won’t attract so many readers. Distribution here is vital. Take a look at your content and find ways to distribute it via different channels. The more readers you reach, the more potential customers you attract.
• People’s attention span is short. 55% of your visitors will spend less than 15 seconds on your website. This is another reason why it is essential to share your content in different formats and optimize it for curious readers.
• People generally don’t like ads. They are pushy and ask them to spend their money. And spending money hurts. Research shows that the same part of the brain lits up when people experience pain sensation as they do when spending money. This is also why 70% of consumers would rather get to know a company through articles than advertisements. Creating good content makes a difference.

The world of Google

One of the great benefits of content marketing is improving your findability in Google. To take full advantage of this, it’s helpful to know how search engines work. Google is by far the biggest and most important search engine. With a worldwide market share of 92.47%, it dominates the search market, leaving all the others very far behind. Google’s search function is a complex algorithm. It tries to help the user find relevant results for the entered query as best as possible.

Google does this by indexing the internet through robots that they call crawlers. These crawlers are non-stop assessing the HTML versions of web pages, checking them according to over 200 factors on quality and content. When the assessment is done, the search engine gives a page a spot on the search results page, also called the SERP.

Google and online marketers are constantly in a cat-and-mouse game. Google tries to make the search results unaffected. And marketers try to figure out the tricks to influence search results. By updating the algorithms regularly, the search engine giant tries to be one step ahead of the marketers who try to figure out how to optimize their pages to rank better than their competitors. This game is also called SEO.

SEO as part of your content strategy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the result of your website so that you are found better in the search results. SEO is the way to drive more traffic to your website. Ranking high in Google is getting more complicated as more and more companies see the advantage of SEO and invest heavily in this form of marketing. Google sees through the tricks that marketers used back in the day to outsmart the search engine. Trying to optimize your website through these schemes is called black hat SEO.

With Black Hat SEO, the website is optimized with only Google in mind. This means that the robots can easily find and crawl the website, but human visitors don’t get any value. If Google finds out that your website is optimized like this, Google will drop your rankings like it’s hot! The biggest search engine doesn’t want to be manipulated and punishes whoever tries by not showing them in the search engines, sometimes for life.

The opposite of black hat is white hat. The type of optimization strategies Google agrees with. You apply white hat strategies by having relevant websites link to yours, including the right keywords, having content that brings value to your visitors, and much more. By creating a natural way of content creation and working according to the likings of Google, you may end up on the first page of the search results.

Parts of a winning content marketing strategy

1. Set your content marketing goal.

When thinking about setting a goal for your content marketing strategy, you don’t want to think too generic. Of course, the ultimate goal is to increase your revenue. Still, by developing this goal further, you understand how content marketing can have a share in this. Check the turnover target for the year and look at the different channels used to achieve that goal. Once you have that clear, it is time to think about what’s next for you to succeed. How can you transcend that goal into something bigger and better?

To make your goals as tangible as possible, write them following the SMART formula. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable, and time-specific. This formula forces you to be precise and helps you set achievable goals within a certain period. It gives you the framework to set goals that you can actually achieve and help you grow.

Examples of SMART goals for your content marketing strategy:

• Through writing blogs and generic backlinks, I want to increase the number of visitors to my website by 20% (from 5000 to 6000 visitors per month) within six months
• I want to increase the conversion rate of purchases from 2% to 5% for the upcoming quarter through email marketing campaigns.
• By deploying an Instagram strategy, posting at least three stories and reels per week, I want 500 extra followers on Instagram within four weeks.
• By sending at least ten carefully crafted messages a day to potential clients, I want at least three appointments per week via LinkedIn before the end of March.

2. Reach the right target audience with your content

Knowing your target audience and where they are within the buying cycle is essential for your content marketing strategy. Your buyer travels through different stages. From getting to know your product to buying something and eventually returning to your brand to buy more. You don’t want to send transactional content to people who have never heard of your products or services. You want to persuade them by offering more information, a free trial, or maybe inviting them to a webinar.

Immerse yourself in your current customers and research their online actions and where they take them. By mapping this out well, you get to know your customers better and better, and you can respond to their needs.

What kind of questions does your target audience have?

What problem do they have, and how do they express it themselves? Use that approach to create different kinds of content like videos or blogs in which you delve deeper into that specific problem and offer them the first solution they can use. Through this approach, prospects with this problem will find their way to you, and you immediately give them a lot of value. If they ultimately can’t solve their problem themselves, you have planted the seed of being the help they need, and they will turn to you easier.

3. What are you promising your customer through your Value Proposition?

A value proposition is your promise to your clients. Ask yourself this question; how does your product or service respond to your customer’s problems and dreams? You don’t answer this by summarizing your offerings, but it needs to be a story, vision, sharing advice, and practical stories from and about your customers’ world. It should be concrete, not too long, and most importantly, you should implement it in some way in all your communications. Your proposition tells the story of why your company exists in the first place.

Proposition versus positioning

Although the terms proposition and positioning are used interchangeably, they are different. When creating your proposition, you think about your customer’s pain points and how your product or service solves their problems. Your positioning statement focuses on the market in which you operate. It answers the question about your position in the market compared to your competitors.

Your clients’ fears and dreams

Responding to pain is one of the best triggers to reach your customer. It gives them a reason and a sense of urgency to choose your product or service. Think of new laws and regulations that are implemented, immersing trends that you play a significant role in, or price in or decrease through seasonality. Another thing that works really well is tapping into your clients’ biggest dreams. Create an appealing perspective in which their world is brighter, calmer, and more beautiful.

4. What channels are you going to use for your content marketing?

If you don’t choose, you lose! Some might think that you have to work with all available channels. Besides that, this brings a lot of work; it can actually work to your advantage over your competition if you focus on the number of channels. Dare to select specific channels on which you find your target audience. Some channels you can publish your content marketing efforts are:

Your website

Creating content on your website is usually the first step in a content marketing strategy focusing on owned channels. It is perhaps the most common and best-known form of content marketing. Creating content on your website creates a platform to tell your story over which you have complete ownership. It is not linked to algorithms that decide who gets to see your content, and you can determine how it will look.

Social media

An essential part of your content marketing strategy is social media. Social media is not considered owned media, although you can choose what to publish. Some of the most important channels you can choose from are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok. Each of them requires a different approach as they serve different audiences. It is necessary to make an adapted social media plan for each channel. You have to think of tone, content, and the size of the images.

When creating your strategy, you must consider what kind of content you will make. Nowadays, video is becoming more and more critical. ​It lets you be concise and capture your viewers’ interest in just a few seconds.​ Research shows that in 2020 93% of marketers landed a new client by posting videos on their social media channel(s). It is not surprising because people who watch a video often stay longer than when they read a text. So if you really want to get your content strategy right, the video should be essential.

Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the best ways to reach your target audience. Once you have a new piece of content you want to share, you can put it on your website and hope visitors will come. Or you can post it on your social media, which will be shown according to its algorithms. Email is the way to go if you want to crank your reach. Besides that, your email lands in the inbox of the people you want to reach. And you have complete control over when they will hear from you and how you present the content.

Podcast

Another channel that is gaining traction is podcasts. A podcast is an audio fragment such as a conversation, an interview, an explanation about a topic, a monologue, a group conversation, or a mini-documentary that you can listen to. People listen to podcasts to learn something and be entertained simultaneously.

Podcasts can cover a wide variety of topics. Whatever the specialization of your business, there are certainly opportunities to record an exciting podcast. By creating a podcast, you can increase the credibility of your brand and business. It allows you to create a community, make great announcements, increase your sales and revenue, and much more. A great thing about podcasts is that they are easy to create and won’t break the bank.

5. Organize your content in your content calendar

A content calendar is a crucial part of your content marketing strategy. It is where everything comes together and where you organize your content and plan it accordingly. A content calendar contains all types of content you want to publish on your chosen channels. Whether these are social media posts, mailings, blogs, or podcasts, you can keep track of it all here.

In your calendar, you put when you want to discuss specific topics and what kind of content you will create around them. This way, you will never again overlook important opportunities such as newsjacking, holidays, or new launches. An easy way to use a content calendar is by implementing back planning. You start with planning a launch date; from there, you map out matching content in the months or weeks before that. It works perfectly to keep track of the work that needs to be done.

Extra tips for an incredible content marketing strategy

Content creation is a marathon, not a sprint. Creating content, you feel good about and having fun while you do it is important. Write naturally with the visitor of the page or channel in mind. Not the search engine. Of course, you can create content optimized for Google, but this should not be your only goal.

Why outsource content marketing?

You want to have an online presence and attract your customers online, but are you going to do it yourself, or do you want to outsource the online marketing? After all, you want to lead the way and seize the endless online possibilities with both hands. But at the same time, you want to focus on the day-to-day business activities without losing the overview. Therefore, you are faced with an important choice: is it kept in-house, or is outsourcing content marketing a lot more effective?

Depending on the amount of time you have and experience creating a content strategy and the content itself, it is sometimes good to give these types of work to experts. They know how to translate your company vision into pieces of content that will reach the right audience, increase your brand awareness and boost your profit.

Are you ready to outsource your content marketing to an expert? Let’s talk!