Content marketing can prove vital for driving forth your brand profitably in a competitive business landscape. However, if you embrace it without an effective strategy, it would be analogous to riding a rudderless boat which will always be subjected to strong headwinds.
The marketing budget would go up, but ROI would shrink. How to steer clear of such a bleak prospect?
Chalk out a comprehensive strategic approach for content creation in alignment with your prime business objectives. Segregate important brand promotion initiatives and support them with content planned, executed, governed, and managed at a high level throughout their lifecycle.
Such a robust action plan would spontaneously drive qualified organic traffic, convert leads into hordes, and improve business outcomes.
Craft A Content Strategy That Delivers
To be clear, content strategy is not just broadly defining content topics and formats. You have to develop a clear understanding of things like:
- The persona of your ideal audience
- How and when to connect with leads on which digital touchpoints
- Aligning content type with the conversion funnel
- Ways to govern, audit, and tweak content
- Manner of measuring response to deployed content through insightful analytics
- Measuring ROI
- People to hold accountable for content outcomes
Define Your Content Strategy
Your strategy must have a humane touch to ensure that the targeted leads get an immersive experience. Hence, to optimize the impact, you have to factor in the following:
- Your exclusive objective
- The characteristics of the leads you want to reach out to
- The content types that have to be published
- The frequency of publishing content
- The manner in which the content will complement your brand’s marketing needs
- Things that would make your content stand out in an already stagnated market
- Ways of promoting your content on different social and authoritative touchpoints
- The yardsticks to be used for assessing the success or failure of deployed content
- The alternate plan to be put in place if existing content fails to attract targeted leads
- Manner of strategically incorporating a call to action without going overboard with the sales pitch
Align The Strategy With Your SEO Needs
The ultimate aim of your content is to drive highly qualified organic traffic to your website. In this bid, you have to convince the search engine bots that your content is relevant, engaging, and informative. This will help your site get better search engine result page ranking for pertinent queries.
How to make your content relevant to prospective customers?
- Identify the pain areas, problems, and challenges faced by them
- Conduct relevant market research to map the important issues for which customers seek decisive resolution
- Determine the strategic keywords with which they seek solutions to their issues
Based on your findings, curate superior content for catering to your leads at the precise time when they are most likely to check out the informative and creative matter served by you. Such due diligence will help you offer your customers a unique and immersive experience.
Incorporate Videos In Your Overall Content Strategy
All social platforms are prioritizing video content over textual matter. This is because videos can arrest the attention of viewers better. You need to capitalize on this trend.
Be creative and make video content that can resonate with your audience. Convey the most important message at the beginning of the video, whose length should be concise. Remember, viewers can retain advertisement messages communicated through visual mediums far better than text. This improves the brand recall rate.
Use a good video creator to make compelling videos that are fun to watch yet persuasive enough to make viewers respond to your call to action.
When you create a video, make it device responsive so that leads can be visually enthralled over any device. If your videos get viral, the credibility and popularity of your brand will grow exponentially in no time.
Develop Content Types Based On Conversion Funnel Stages
Your business content’s purpose is to fulfill the knowledge quest of your customers. This makes it paramount to map the content with customers’ journeys through the marketing funnel.
Identify the content type that measures up to the stage at which your leads are in the conversion funnel. Then only will your content will make leads realize what they wanted, how they are on the verge of discovering the appropriate solution, and when the time is ripe for making a decision in your brand’s favor.
Develop your content accordingly to inform leads, influence their decisions, and facilitate making conscious decisions by them. When the leads are at the funnel’s bottom, you can use content that compares your products with similar competing types, helps customers calculate the tangible monetary and other benefits, etc.
Always empathize with your leads, as this will help reflect the sincerity of your business’s intent before them.
Engage in Content Atomization
To boost your SEO efforts, you can atomize your content. Identify content that can be segmented into multiple parts to offer your prospects deeper insights into the same.
Suppose you want to present the results of research to your audience. Instead of encapsulating the entire thing in one content piece, you can fragment it into easy-to-consume content pieces, including videos, whitepapers, visualization reports, presentations, etc.
Select A Good Content Management System (CMS)
The choice of CMS dictates your productivity and ability to mass produce high-quality content. Your efficiency in creating, organizing, publishing, and storing different content types will increase.
Some good options are WordPress, Magento, and Drupal.
Have A Content Calendar
Align your content publishing calendar with your marketing strategies, goals, and team performance.
This will help in tracking performance and making needful changes.
Go For Long-Form Content
Long-form content like blog posts effectively drives more traffic, gets shared better, and secures higher backlinks.
You can cover any topic in more detail, which also helps in accommodating more keywords.
Conclusion
The success of your content strategy depends on how well you can keep customers engaged with your creation. Always keep the content entertaining and use reliable data to back up claims made. Actionable content will surely improve your brand affinity among targeted customers.