If you’re new to content marketing and looking to get started, this is the right place. In this blog, we’ll provide some practical and actionable steps to help you develop a content marketing strategy and start implementing it quickly.
Before we dive into the steps, let’s first define content marketing. In short, it involves planning, creating, and distributing information to a clearly defined target audience through various channels such as blogs, emails, and social media. It helps communicate who you are as a brand, answers your audience’s questions, improves your organic search visibility and assists in pushing prospects further down the sales funnel. Moreover, content marketing can be cheaper than traditional marketing strategies and, when done effectively, garners great traction and engagement online.
Developing a content marketing strategy isn’t something you should do blindly. Before you start creating and sharing your content with the world, you need to develop a plan of attack to ensure your business gets the most out of the time put in. While it doesn’t have to be a step-by-step roadmap that you follow religiously, taking the time to connect all your content ideas to your audiences and overarching business objectives can help define gaps and spark new ideas. While everyone’s strategy will be unique to their brand, here are some basic steps to help you get started:
Before you start jotting down ideas for how you’re going to conquer TikTok, sit down and go over your business objectives. Ensure you have a clear understanding of what the business is trying to achieve and begin thinking about how content can help the business get there.
Get very clear on the audiences your business is trying to reach and which channels they’re using. Personas are incredibly helpful at this stage to get a better understanding of your audience and dive into what content they want to engage with.
Determine what you’re trying to specifically achieve by delivering content, and how each objective relates to your business objectives. Focus on achieving tangible results for the business as a whole, such as sales or leads.
Define overarching topic areas related to your business and audience needs to guide your content ideas and ensure they meet your objectives. Remember, all good content encourages outcomes, so focus on topics that educate, entertain, intrigue, or empathise.
Determine the channels you’ll use to produce and distribute content to your audience. Use your audience personas, objectives and topic areas to make an informed guess on where your audience is and where they want to hear about your topics.
Determine how often you’ll be posting content, considering the algorithms on certain channels, when your audience wants to hear from you and what you’re trying to achieve. Be realistic about what you can reasonably maintain, and consider who will be responsible for what.
Develop a content style guide that outlines how your brand personality will be expressed through content. Include key brand messages, writing style, tone of voice, any brand rules and a list of do’s and don’ts when it comes to messaging and imagery. A style guide ensures brand consistency, regardless of who creates the content.
Once you have a clear plan in place, it’s time to execute it. Here are the steps:
Brainstorm the most important information your audience needs right now and place it in order of priority. Relate any ideas back to your content strategy.
Set realistic posting deadlines in a central place and assign responsibility. Centralising deadlines and responsibility gives your content strategy a better chance at consistency.
Before you start creating your content, determine the purpose of each piece, the audience persona(s) you’re targeting and the objective it’s related to. This increases the chances of the content connecting with your audience.
Once you’re clear on why you’re creating the content and what will resonate with your audience, pick a format and start creating. Is it going to be a blog? A 15 sec TikTok? An Instagram post? Or all of the above? No matter what you choose, just remember to keep your audience top of mind and focus on encouraging action.
Once you’ve created a piece of content you’re happy to share with the world, it’s time to get it in front of your audience. Remember, your job doesn’t end when the post goes out. It’s important to stay on top of the post engagement and proactively respond to comments and questions. Monitoring the success of the post and refining your strategy is also important. Your content marketing strategy will evolve constantly so remember to stay flexible and adapt as things change or if something doesn’t work out exactly the way it was intended to.
Content doesn’t have to be a daunting, time consuming project. With a solid strategy, good audience understanding and some creative ideas, it can be incredibly beneficial to your marketing and business objectives.
Our team can help.
