The 3 Pillars of Content Marketing Strategy
The new decade is on the rise, and with many technological advancements happening in the world in every aspect of businesses, content marketing has taken a new turn too. In the context of marketing, measuring results can be complicated. Where some campaigns can be very predictable and easily show whether it is going to be a success or a failure. There can be many that can get confusing and induce unaccountability of its results. Therefore, it takes thorough practice and learning to create reputational marketing strategies.
Content marketing is a business aspect that is more heavily weighted toward the latter.Although many companies tend to consider their investment in content marketing, they still do feel that it works most of the time. However, according to recent researches, 63% of businesses don’t have an official content marketing strategy. Without which, success or failure becomes more of a factor based on luck than a guaranteed prediction of results.
Therefore, in order to come up with successful strategies, one first needs to understand that content marketing is like putting a means to an end. Your effort will eventually pay off, and for that, you need to know that the three pillars on which all stands are to be practiced.
3 Pillars of content marketing
Here’s a detailed breakdown as to how these pillars are the most crucial elements to directly have an impact on the success of a content marketing strategy.
Engage
Engagement with your target audience is crucial. It can be a make or break factor for how your customers interact with your product or service and respond accordingly to it. You must understand your target audience responsiveness to your content by asking three basic questions to yourself:
– How they respond
– To what they respond
– What outcomes it creates
You have to check if your content aligns with your audience’s interests or sparks a reaction out of them. Buyer reactions can vary depending on many factors like the age, gender, demographics, and the education or awareness they have of the product or service you are offering.
Educate
As mentioned above, buyer reactions can vary depending on many factors. One of which is how educated or aware your audience is of your product. It all depends on what type of business, service, or product you offer and what external factor impacts it like social media can be very important for creating content marketing strategy. By educating your audience as an initial step on the buying journey is really helpful in making a content marketing strategy successful. Providing the correct information is necessary to help your customers better understand their options. Some corporate leaders will say that maybe it works against your business because giving options to choose from deliberately puts you in the position of getting rejected by the customer for your competitor’s product. However, if you are offering a unique product and targeting a market niche where there is a preexisting gap, then you must educate your audience beforehand to garner sufficient engagement and responses.
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Empower
There is no denial in the fact that lastly, what a successful content marketing strategy should be based on is customer empowerment. The internet today serves many different purposes and is not restricted to serving just a single purpose. Where there is a chance of misinformation spreading, there is an equal chance of positive product empowerment. A digital marketing strategy should focus upon providing the internet audience the confidence they need to make an informed decision about the product they are going to buy. A successful content marketing strategist would always consider the available options to positively impact their target audience through whatever strategy they design and implement.
How to Guarantee Successful Content Marketing
Now you know what three bases you need to set in order to ensure a successful content marketing strategy. Thus, here is an easy to follow 10-step guide for you to follow for developing and implementing a successful content marketing strategy without wasting your company’s resources.
Step 1: Set Your Mission and Goals
Any viral content marketing strategy plan would first and foremost require a starting point, which has to be to set your goals straight. And this can easily be done by mutually agreeing upon what is the core objective of the strategy being created. Because it is basically a trial and error procedure more than anything, therefore it requires a set objective to understand what can be the possible outcome of the strategy being implemented. An official mission statement that covers the content, the audience, and the benefit they will get can successfully set the tone for the plan to gain momentum.
Step 2: Establish Your Key Performance Indicators
As mentioned in the step above, a content marketing strategy has specific goals that can be measured for their performance. It requires the setting of key performance indicators. The KPIs help you keep track of your digital marketing journey and provide the critical points that you can check off the list as you surpass them successfully. It will include all business aspects as they are impacted, like revenue, sales, SEO, traffic, and other parts of a digital marketing strategy plan that plays a significant role in it. Usually, KPIs are specific and have targeted numbers to accomplish that set the indicator. For example, generating a set number of leads after the strategy is in place.
Step 3: Know Your Audience
As I mentioned above, knowing your audience is crucial. Understanding what they want, their needs, demands and perspective is extremely important to understand where your digital marketing strategy is headed. The internet is full of people from all over the world and from all walks of life. Targeting a specific through your content can be challenging. However, gradual results should make it successful in time. A specific group of audience would have marked their territory of the product gap you are trying to fulfill. Therefore, it is important to not predict getting favorable results right from the get go. And wait for them to grow over time.
Step 4: Assess Your Current Position
As a content marketing strategist, you firstly need to know your position in the market. Carving out a niche means starting from the bottom and growing as you go up. However, entering a preexisting market with many competitors, means starting from a middle ground or higher and then working to make your place. Similarly, starting out in a preexisting market where the industry is not doing as well and does not have that big of a competition can be fairly easy to make your mark if you come up with a successful and unique idea.
Step 5: Figure out the Best Content Channels
Now that you have set your base on the three pillars, set a definite objective, and established your key performance indicators, you require a content channel. Figuring out which content medium is the best one for you is not that big of a deal. If you understand your target audience well and you know where you will get the most responses and hits, then you already have this step covered. But just to be sure and not have all your efforts go to waste, utilize Google Analytics for your advantage and keep track of your audience engagement.
Step 6: Decide on Content Types
The radical next step is to decide on the content type that you would want to create. Certain digital marketing strategies would encompass every kind of content, whereas some medium would require an individually focused approach. Many successful content marketing strategies have a centrally focused core plan that ensures any type of content it might be, would link back to the company’s website or home page. It is why mainly blogs are still considered the number one content marketing tool as they not only deliver strong results but can be actionable, valuable, and shareable and create an excessive online presence.
Step 7: Identify and Allocate Resources
By this step, your content strategy planning team would be all set and just require a good to go signal. But it is also essential to make sure that the amount of effort that went into creating the strategy to setting goals, visions, KPIs, the content channel, type, and medium to share it on, all doesn’t go to waste. Thus, it is better if you identify and allocate your resources to the right idea. It will require you to answer questions like:
– Who are your content creators?
– Are they in-house content writers, videographers, or experts at web designing?
– Are you going to hire remote workers or freelancers?
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These questions should help you better allocate your resources, so your company goes through little to no revenue and expense waste.
Step 8: Create a Content Calendar
Keeping a schedule and following a proper calendar as to when which content needs to be put out is an essential strategy tactic. But it only deems profitable when strictly followed. Therefore, your team needs to understand that as a part of the content marketing plan, a designated schedule is critical to be followed. The easiest way to delegate it is by using Google Calendar. Putting up due dates, deadlines, and pending work dates are relatively easy to add and edit. The approach you can likely take towards the workflow is just to manage your content publishing and maintain churning out regular content to keep your feed refreshed.
Step 9: Create Content
After accumulating all the information and application of all the strategic tactics, the last step is to focus on the content itself finally. Creating content, after all, has been set in place to make it valuable is comparatively an effortless task. Make sure to research your content and make it as unique as possible.
Step 10: Distribute & Market
Lastly, all the guidelines mentioned above accumulate down to one point and that is how you distribute and market your content. How you decide to use it for your benefit and distribute it through the many different distribution channels.
Bottom Line
In conclusion, content and digital marketing is a vast field. As every business is acquiring new and advanced strategies to take over the market, putting out content that speaks about your company, product, or service is more crucial than creating an impact overall. Therefore first, make sure to work to achieve that, and then when you have aced it, continue to carry it forward to master the art that is content marketing.
Author Bio: Melissa Calvert is currently working as a Marketing Strategist at Crowd Writer. She has work experience as a content marketing assistant to big corporations, gained vast knowledge while working in top corporations. Therefore, she prefers to share her work experiences online with people to show them a real world view.
Image Source: Freepik
