Content marketing strategies are designed to attract and engage customers through the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and consistent content. The goal of content marketing is to drive profitable customer action by creating and curating relevant and valuable content that addresses the needs of your target audience.
Your content marketing strategy should be built on a foundation of three key pillars:
- Your audience: Who are you trying to reach with your content? What are their needs and wants? What problems do they need solving?
- Your brand: How do you want your audience to perceive your brand? What kind of voice will you use in your content?
- Your business goals: What action do you want your audience to take as a result of consuming your content? How will this help you achieve your overall business goals?
Once you have a clear understanding of these three pillars, you can start developing a plan for creating and distributing engaging, valuable content that will attract customers and help grow your business.
Brand identity guidelines
These are a set of rules or guidelines that define how a company’s brand should be used. They usually cover topics such as logo usage, color palette, typography, and other visual elements.
A strong brand identity is essential for any company looking to build a lasting relationship with its customers. These guidelines help ensure that the company’s visual representation is consistent across all channels and touchpoints.
An effective brand identity system should be easy to understand and use by both employees and customers. It should be flexible enough to allow for some creativity, but also provide clear boundaries so that the brand is not diluted or misrepresented.
Other posts of interest:
A well-designed set of brand identity guidelines will help create a strong and recognizable brand that can be easily communicated to both internal and external audiences.
Target audience profiles and journey
As your business begins to plan its content marketing strategy, one of the first things you’ll need to do is define your target audience. This can be a difficult task, especially if you sell products or services that appeal to a wide range of people. However, it’s important to take the time to identify your target audience so that you can create content that resonates with them and helps you achieve your business goals.
Once you’ve defined your target audience, the next step is to create a content marketing strategy that will help you reach them. To do this, you’ll need to understand their buyer journey – the path they take from awareness of your product or service all the way through to purchase. By mapping out this journey, you’ll be able to better understand what type of content will resonate at each stage and how best to reach your target audience.
If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to defining your target audience or creating a buyer journey map, don’t worry – we’ve got you covered. In this article, we’ll take a look at both topics in detail so that by the end, you’ll have everything you need to get started with developing an effective content marketing strategy for your business.
Documented goals and objectives
Setting goals and objectives for your content marketing strategy is essential to ensure that your team is on the same page and working towards the same objectives. Having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your content marketing will help you create more targeted and effective content.
Some key elements when setting goals and objectives for your content marketing strategy include:
- What business objectives do you hope to achieve with your content marketing?
- Who is your target audience?
- What type of content will resonate most with your target audience?
- What are some specific topics or themes you would like to cover in your content?
- How often do you plan on producing new content?
An optimized content production process
Once you know who your target audience is, you can tailor your content accordingly. What do you hope to achieve with your content? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive traffic to your website? Generate leads? Once you know what your goals are, you can develop a strategy for achieving them.
“If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy.” -Michael Hyatt
A content calendar and schedule
When creating a content calendar, start by determining the topics you want to cover and when you want to publish them. Then, create an editorial calendar that outlines what goes into each piece of content, including blog posts, articles, e-books, infographics, etc. Once you have a clear plan for your content strategy mapped out, it will be easier to produce quality content on a regular basis.
If you’re not sure where to start or what kind of schedule to follow, consider using a tool like CoSchedule’s Content Calendar Template. This template includes everything you need to get started with your own content calendar, including suggested topics for each month and tips on how often to publish new content.
Different types of quality content
There are certain characteristics that most people would agree make up good quality content. This includes content that is:
Relevant to your target audience
The first step to creating quality content is understanding who your target audience is and what they want to see from you. Write down a persona for your ideal customer and keep this in mind when creating new pieces of content. Are they looking for helpful tips or interesting stories? What topics are they interested in? Make sure your content speaks directly to their needs and interests.
Engaging and well-written
Once you know what sort of thing your target audience wants to see, it’s time to make sure the actual writing is up to par. Good quality content is engaging, interesting, and well-written. It should flow smoothly and be easy for readers to follow along with. Pay attention to spelling and grammar errors, as these can turn people off from reading further.
Unique and original
In today’s online world, it’s more important than ever before to create unique content that stands out from the rest. With so much information available at our fingertips, it can be tempting to copy/paste or borrow ideas from other sources, but this will only hurt you in the long run.
Google penalizes duplicate content, so it’s essential that everything you publish on your site is 100% original. This doesn’t mean you can never mention another website or blog post- just be sure to give credit where it’s due and add your own spin on things.