Content Marketing is the El Dorado for your business if you do it correctly and with some foresight. One of the worst pitfalls is trying to do everything and be present on every social media platform. It is much better to focus your attention on valuable and useful content on a few channels rather than spreading it far and wide across lots of different social media platforms. Let’s take a look at what your Content Marketing Strategy needs to consider in 2021...

What does Content Marketing give to Businesses?

Content Marketing needs to be plain and simple in its intentions:

1. It is all about increasing visits to your business website and social media with the intention of ascending those visitors into buyers.
   
   
2. In giving free and valuable content to your target audience you build the authority and reputation of your business. The more trust your brand has for being expert in your field, the more likely people are to buy from you and stay on as a loyal customer. 

The crux of the matter is that your business content needs to be strategic in approach so that you attract and engage with the correct audiences. Subsequently, those engaged audiences will hopefully lead to paying customers. Nevertheless, it is not just about creating content, it is also about placing and distributing valuable content to enhance the reputation of your brand. 

The Five Key Elements of Content Marketing Strategy

Fifth Element? Bruce Willis and surreal 90s sci-fi movies spring to mind. No, not the Fifth Element, but five elements. So what are they? Let’s find out...

1. Positioning Your Brand in the Market

• Consistency is the secret source in marketing. You need to make your brand clear as to what it is and what it represents. If you can have consistency of purpose with your branding and create the correct image for it, then you are likely to experience great success. 
• To achieve this you need to take into consideration a few different factors right at the beginning. Ask yourself the following questions:
• Who are your existing and potential customers?
• What consumer experience are they seeking?
• Who are your competitors?
• What is unique about your brand that makes it stand out from the crowd?
• What are the key aspects of your brand personality?
• What customer problems are your products or services solving?
  
  

2. Owned Media Value Proposition

• Sounds like a mouthful! It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue as an expression. What it means is that you should establish yourself as a credible publisher by designing the owned media value proposition. You can do this by:
• Researching your audience by identifying the type of information they want. 
• Analysing the content strategies used by your competitors.
• Once you develop owned media, you have to consider all content published in your sector as potential competitors. 

3. Set out your Business Case

It is not about firing out content willy nilly. No siree! You need a focused, well-thought out and comprehensive content plan. As said before, you need to deliver value to your audiences and that takes some thought and planning. 

However, beware of vanity metrics on social media; likes, comments and shares are not important on their own unless they co-relate with an increase in sales. Your content should be set to drive your business forward in a strategic manner. How do you do this? 

Well, you need to:

• Start by identifying the goals of the business and how content marketing can help you get closer to those goals. 
• By having a documented business case, you will be able to understand the costs, risks, and benefits of implementing the content marketing strategy.

Make sure that you can measure the KPIs of your content to your business goals to evaluate how successful your content strategy is. 

4. Implementing Your Strategic Content Plan

Once you have set your business goals, you need to focus on how you will implement your Content Strategy, step by step. You should plan ahead with your content, at least 3 months in advance. Consider the types of content you will create, how you will deliver the content to your target audience and how to measure the success of your content. Remember it is sales and revenue that matter most, not just shares and likes. 

5. Social Media and Other Channels

It is better to choose 2 or 3 social media channels to promote your content and do those 2 or 3 platforms well. The biggest mistake businesses make is trying to be everywhere on every social media platform. You will end up with half-finished bridges, to quote the leading DigitalMarketer CEO, Ryan Deiss. 

Eight Steps For Creating and Implementing a Content Strategy and Content Plan

Remember that a successful Content Strategy requires purposeful planning and consideration. It should also be aligned with your company goals, anticipate challenges and allocate your resources in the most efficient way. 

If you take the following 8 steps, you will be well on your way to a successful content marketing that strengthens your business:

Audit your Existing Content:

Look at existing content if you have any and analyse it to understand the quality of your content. Also, discover the types of content that attract the target audience you want and that generate leads and sales. If you are a new business jump to Step 2. 

Analyse your Competitors’ Content:

Look at your competitors and the type of content that performs very well and in relation to high sales of products and services. The trick is to emulate the success of your competition because there is no point in reinventing the wheel. Notice the techniques and approaches that they use and apply them to your own marketing. But obviously change the content, so it is not a carbon copy as otherwise you will be breaking copyright laws. 

Set Your Content Goals:

In order to have clear goals for your content strategy, you need to sit down and write out what it is that the content is trying to achieve in relation to your business plan. 

Identify Your Target Audience:

It is essential that you know your audience and what their problems, needs, aspirations, lifestyles etc are. Use a Customer Avatar Template to guide you in this process. It can be the basis of your Content planning and you may have more than one customer avatar depending on your type of business. Download the template in the blue link and always use a Customer Avatar before you create any content. This is best practice for Content Marketers. 

Create a Content Plan:

Using an Excel sheet or similar, write a plan for at least 3 months in advance. But be sure to tweak and add to it to reflect changing trends in the markets or to leverage the power of trending topics. Your editorial team should use the plan to allocate resources and staff in the most effective manner. Also, you can set deadlines for when content needs to be created by and scheduled to post. 

Plan the content production:

Consider carefully the purpose of each piece of content and make sure that you cover all parts of what is called the Customer Value Journey.  The CVJ and Customer Avatar are two of the most valuable nuggets of information that every marketer needs to know and understand to maximise their leads and sales and build a strong brand with their content.

Content Distribution Planning:

Your channels of distribution will obviously include your website and then 2 to 3 social media channels too. You can also consider Content Distribution networks where you pay to promote your content. 

There is also the scope to publish press releases and be featured in the media and also to use paid advertising to promote your best content. It is all about staying in front of your prospects’ mind and attention, so they don’t forget your brand. That way you can build brand awareness and loyalty. 

Content Analytics and Performance- It is vital that you understand what types of content your audience connects with and to analyse its performance through certain metrics. Most social media platforms have built in analytics to show you how well your content is doing in terms of views, impressions, likes, shares etc. 

You can also use content metrics like user behaviour, SEO results, company revenue, dwell time on page, clicks on links and so forth to measure performance. Tools such as Google Analytics give a deeper insight into performance. 

Looking Forward!

So there we have it, we have covered the five elements of a successful content strategy and also the 8 steps that you can take. The key takeaways are to make your content purposeful and aligned with your business goals. To have content plan or editorial plan for at least every three months. To consider the types of target audiences and what works best. To monitor and analyse the performance of your content through metrics and analytics and that way the best performing can be used and emulated again and again. Oh and don’t forget, look at what the competition are doing in terms of content and emulate their best content and strategies! 

Last but not least, to save you time and to schedule content weeks and months in advance, you need to use a Content Tool. Blam Social is one of the easiest and user friendly Content Tools on the market today. We use it with all of our customers. 

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