An effective content marketing strategy is today the basis for building a positive image of the company. It is hard to imagine activities aimed at promoting a brand on the Internet without content marketing. In today's article, we will try to answer the question of how to create an effective content marketing strategy. We invite you to read.
First of all, it is worth starting by answering the question of what content marketing really is. Simply put, this is it communication strategy marketing where content plays a major role. Content includes articles, blog entries, infographics, animations, videos, and more. The goal is to make them beneficial for the recipient. It's all about usability and quality. And also that they fulfill the assumptions marketing communication purposeswhich were created on the basis of reliable analyzes and developed strategies and tactics.
Why is a content marketing strategy important?
The Internet overwhelms us with the amount of information in the form of advertisements, banners or pop-ups. We block them with special plugins, but many of them still reach us. Due to the fact that there are so many of them, the ads simply start to escape our attention. As Internet users, we are bombarded with information every day. So we need really qualitative content to get our attention at all. That is why the content marketing strategy plays such an important role.
While public relations focuses on direct brand promotion via traditional media, content marketing works differently. It builds content to educate the audience and build a brand to become an expert in a given field. In addition, it effectively supports the achievement of sales goals. For this reason, more and more companies in Poland decide to use in their communication strategy also content marketing.
The representatives of the e-commerce industry are considered to be specialists in this field. They quickly discovered how much can be achieved with effective content marketing. Okay, but how to create a strategy that will bring tangible benefits?
The goals of the content marketing strategy
What is an effective content marketing strategy? At the very beginning, you need to set its goals. You have to remember that they should be identical with the company's business goals. In order to achieve the expected results, it is necessary to make informed decisions. There is no point in creating a content marketing strategy without answering the question of what is really expected of your business.
What content marketing strategy will be effective for you?
We will check and recommend the best one.
When developing a strategy, it is useful to follow the SMART rule, which indicates that goals must be simple, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. It is also necessary to define operational goals. Each of them is to be assigned a value that defines KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), i.e. key performance indicators. This value will determine the effectiveness of the content marketing campaign. For many brand owners this can be a big challenge, but agencies that provide comprehensive consulting offers provide support in developing this type of strategy.
Competition analysis
Content marketing strategy requires prior competition analysis. It is worth knowing as much as possible about your competition and learning from its mistakes. Thanks to this, you can run your own business much more consciously. How to do it? First of all, by analyzing the competitors' positions in the search engine.
Tools such as Ahrefs, Senuto or Semstorm will prove to be helpful here, as they primarily inform about the keywords on which a given brand is positioned. On their basis, it is possible to check what content is created by the competition and to whom it is directed. This will allow you to learn about their strategies and develop your own on that basis. It is also worth checking which of the content we publish is the most popular and go in this direction, e.g. by creating similar or developing existing ones.
There is also a lot of talk about how important it is storytellingthat allows companies to stand out from the competition. Telling a brand story is the perfect example of how to engage in dialogue with people through content. This will attract attention, build commitment and encourage people to be interested in the company's offer.
Who is the recipient of the content?
What can we suggest as PR agency? A content marketing strategy must target specific audiences. Without answering the question of who they are, we will not develop an effective action plan either. For this purpose, it is necessary to create a profile of a representative or representative of the target group, i.e. a persona. It is worth trying and doing it in maximum detail, examining the person's age, gender, place of residence, place of work, hobbies, lifestyle, etc. The better we know the person, the more effective the strategy will be. For this purpose, tools such as Google Analytics, analytical tools of portals such as Facebook or LinkedIn, as well as information from employees who have direct contact with customers, will prove useful. This will allow you to get a full profile of the representative of the target group.
Strategy implementation plan and effectiveness study
After collecting all the most important data, you can proceed to planning the implementation of activities assumed in the content marketing strategy and spreading them over time (for this purpose, it is worth creating content for spare). At this stage, you need to have ready answers to what types / formats of content will be used, how they will be tailored to the recipients, what are the needs of the recipients, when the content will be published and by what channels it will be distributed. As new content is published, it is also necessary to research what effects have already been produced by the content. The market and the environment are constantly changing, so an effective content marketing strategy must also include the observation of changing algorithms.