Many people consider content creation and deployment to be an effective approach, but it is not at all.
Instead, the ultimate goal of your content planning should be to understand the goal of your target audience and generate valuable insights for them.
That being said, a well-executed content strategy will ultimately multiply your marketing efforts.
Below are some of the steps you can take to create an effective content strategy.
Let’s get started without further ado!
Know your goals
The first thing you need to do is realize your goals, i.e. what you want to achieve in terms of your content.
It can be either your business goals or marketing goals, but it should be well defined so that everyone can easily understand.
To describe this in more detail, you can also set short-term and long-term goals depending on your marketing tactics.
First, you need to ask yourself, “Why do I want to produce content?”
If you can find the answers, these are the goals for your content strategy.
Otherwise, some of the common destination settings are listed below:
- Create brand awareness.
- Generate more sales, which will ultimately increase your business revenue.
- Drive more traffic to your website (only if you have a website)
- Establish yourself as an authoritative and industry expert.
- Maintaining customer trust and loyalty.
I would recommend that you list at least 2-3 goals for your content strategy.
And each goal should be linked either directly or indirectly (this will help you get better content marketing results).
If you continue without a specific goal, you will end up wasting your resources – nothing else!
Once you’ve set your goals, you need to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) for your content strategy.
Basically, KPIs help you achieve your goals by telling you the exact numbers for each goal.
Determine your target audience
When you create a content strategy for your audience, you will reach new heights in content marketing.
Before we go any further, I’ll give you a disclaimer that there is no one size fits all, so your audience may be different from your competitor.
To get to know your target audience, you need to brainstorm with your sales and marketing team and identify the valuable insights as follows:
- Demographic information, including age, gender, and location.
- What’s the pain point of your prospects?
- Which platform does your target group spend time on?
- Does your audience follow an influencer or a celebrity?
And many more.
If you want to go deeper, you need to do market research with your product and service in mind.
In general, audiences consume content based on whether they are interested in a particular topic or want to complete a transaction.
Once you understand the interests of your target audiences, your content strategy will become more effective and efficient.
You have to think about it; Your content strategy will only take effect once you understand your target audience.
Examine your existing content
You may already be rolling out content through a blog post, social media, podcast, or other content.
(If you’re just getting started, you can move on to the next step.)
You know, 37% of content marketers never choose or complete a content audit.
Checking your content is one of the underestimated processes. However, you can solve various problems as follows:
- Improve the quality of existing content.
- Replace the obsolete content.
- Remove poor quality content.
- Delete the duplicate content.
- Understanding what your audience is feeling is valuable content.
You can start by comparing your content against the competition and analyzing whether your content is current and insightful to your audience.
You can then start auditing using content audit tools such as Screaming Frog, SEMrush, and Ahrefs.
From content title to content length to backlinks, you need to review every aspect of your content.
Finally, you need to identify the content gap.
Content gap mainly occurs when;
- Your target keywords are different from your niche.
- You can’t solve your audience’s problems with your content.
- You are crowding out other content than your niche and confusing your prospects.
Content Distribution Channel
The first thing you need to understand is that creating content is very different from distributing content.
The decision about the process of organizing, sharing, publishing and promoting your content is considered a distribution of content.
Depending on your niche, you can use different strategies and channels for distributing content.
Sometimes you need to determine the content distribution channel before you can create content and target audience.
… Because the type of content you share on different channels can vary.
The following image will help you understand the different content distribution channels.
Content Distribution Channel
Source: SEMrush
Decide the content type
After completing the content distribution channel, you need to figure out what type of content you want to create and distribute.
You can choose from different types of content including blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, e-books, and much more.
Content type
Source: SEMrush
However, the type of content will vary depending on your niche and sales channel. Therefore, you must first determine the sales channel.
This article belongs to Blog (a content type) and is an example of content marketing.
I would recommend choosing more than two content types (depending on your choice) as having your content displayed on different platforms will help you grow your audience.
The main benefit of content marketing is that you can reach your audience in every way – which means you don’t have to worry about the content type.
For example, there are more than 30 million podcast episodes and billions of views on YouTube.
So which medium do you choose – audio (podcast) or video (YouTube)?
While you can create both versions of your content, audio and video, creating content accordingly will give you reach in the millions or even billions.
Measure the results of your content marketing
To create an effective content strategy, you need to measure the results of your content marketing.
Creating a content strategy without knowing what your audience liked and what they didn’t is like driving a car in the oncoming lane.
Here are some metrics that will help you better understand whether your content strategy is effective or not.
- Revenue: The success of your content marketing depends on how much ROI you get with your content?
- Commitment and Loyalty: Customer relationships are the most important thing when it comes to loyalty. If your content is engaging and insightful, your audience will keep it.
- Leads: In today’s world everyone is trying to generate leads for their brands and companies. And with an effective strategy, you can generate large numbers of leads.
If you have a website or blog, you can further measure results using the following criteria:
- Number of visitors
- Pageviews
- Unique page views
- Bounce rate
- Average Time on hand
How to measure the results of your content marketing
Source: Neil Patel
You can view the metrics in your Google Analytics account (make sure you have analytics built into your website or webpage.)
Conclusion
The way you create and deliver content can change continuously, but the core objectives of an effective content strategy remain.
If you achieve the success of your content strategy, all you need to do is repeat these steps for your future tactics.
So this is how you need to start before creating a content strategy.
Have you ever created a content strategy? If so, how did it work? Let us know in the comments section below.
Author: Sumeet Anand
Follow @ Sumeetanand143
Sumeet Anand is a B2B marketing expert with experience in SEO, social media marketing and content marketing. He helps brands and companies generate leads with his world-class content strategies and is featured in various major media publications around the world. … Show complete profile >