Content marketing strategy has five basic steps that should be followed to create a great strategy for your company.
Goals
Creating a great content marketing strategy can be done by asking yourself a few questions. What will make your campaign successful? How will you state the goals in a way that's easy to understand and quantifiable? How will you be able: at the end of the day, to say, " Hey, I'm happy we did this"? Content marketing is a slower organic process than paid advertising; generally, it can take up to a year to start showing results.
Remember part of your goal should be to educate your superiors on the length that content marketing can take to start showing results. - Govin
Audience
Who is your target audience? I remember doing an ad campaign for a client in three major cities in California. The campaign focused on pedestrian traffic and targeted affluent Asians between the ages of 25 and 35. I spent a week driving up and down a half-mile-by-mile stretch in all three cities. Data showed that this was the most popular area for this demographic. The company had good data and got great results, but what if we hadn't spent the time defining our target audience? I would have developed a campaign all over the cities with poor results. Several factors create a target audience. The criteria a marketer should define for a target audience are:
Age
Gender
Ethnicity
Education
Occupation
Income
Family Status
Once you decide your target audience; and who will benefit from your product, you can strategize how to tell your brand's story in a way that will best attract your target audience.
Brand/Story
What is your brand's story? How are you going to integrate it into your marketing content strategy plan? Is your brand's story consistent across all your marketing channels, social media, blog, and email lists? I have heard stories of consultants asking company executives to write down a definition of a company's brand identity. The consultants got ten different answers. Have a concrete understanding of what your company stands for, then decide on what channels will best reach your defined target audience and fulfill your goals.
Marketing Channel
How are you going to reach your potential customers using different marketing channels? What are marketing channels? Marketing channels - are different ways in which an organization can reach potential customers, examples are social media, email, blogs, and tradeshows. Different marketing channels offer different ways to engage a potential consumer. Each channel has drawbacks, an example is Linkedin, a great channel for reaching B2B customers, but it's probably not the best way to sell a pair of jeans. Content marketing strategy takes time, and different channels can produce results quicker than others. Keep in mind that you need to be able to measure your marketing results.
Measurements
How are you going to measure your marketing content strategy results? There are several ways to see how your marketing has done: you can use things like ROI through year-over-year sales, how many LinkedIn followers you have, and how much revenue or leads your tradeshow brings in. I ran a small organic farm for several years where we would post videos during planting season. Did it increase our revenue? I honestly don't know, but it increased customer retention and engagement. Customers would always mention the videos and ask specific things. We were happy with the results because we created a more informed and loyal customer base.
Remember the most important thing for creating a great content marketing strategy; create specific goals targeted at a specific audience that can be us through the correct marketing channels to develop your brand's story.