How to create a good content marketing strategy

Internet users have never consumed as much content as they do today. To meet this growing need, brands have never published so many, even going so far as to create dedicated internal teams to produce them.

However, before you blindly embark on a Content Marketing strategy that can be costly and time-consuming, take the time to ask yourself the right questions: is the content you create based on a clearly established strategy, responding to objectives specific marketing and to the needs and interests of your targets?

Before going into detail in the key steps to take into account to lead an effective content marketing strategy, let's agree on the definition of content marketing.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is about creating and sharing quality information that is entertaining, educational, interesting, or emotional value. The goal: to establish a lasting relationship with your target audience while achieving the goals you have set for yourself. Videos, blog posts, podcasts, ebooks, newsletters, social media posts… Content can come in many forms. By posting this type of content regularly and delivering it to the right audience, at the right time and in the right place, your brand will become a trusted source of information or advice that consumers will turn to at the expense of your competitors.

Read our article: Importance of content marketing in SEO

Content Marketing and Content Strategy

The concept of "content marketing" is often confused with that of "content strategy". Although they are closely related, it is useful to differentiate them. For Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a macro-vision answering the question "why?" ". It helps determine the story your business or organization wants to tell, and then consider the different ways you can use it to engage your audience. The content strategy corresponds to a micro vision, answering the question "how?" ". It's more operational and details the tactics you'll use to create, publish, promote, and track the results generated by your content.

Consumers in the driver's seat

If it is proven that the techniques of "push marketing" have known a loss of effectiveness for several years (in particular because we learned to ignore them more or less consciously), the Content Marketing - technique of "pull marketing" - constitutes an extremely effective alternative. Because content marketing allows users to choose for themselves the type of content they want to interact with, provided that brands know how to bring value to them. By creating personalized content corresponding to the expectations of their targets, brands have the possibility of directly addressing their audience while leaving them in control.

Content marketing: what elements to take into account?

To ensure the success of your content marketing strategy, it is essential to follow several steps:

1. Set Your Goals - The first step is to determine the goals you want to achieve. What will be the key elements of your success? Is this vision of success shared internally? Clearly establish your KPIs and how you will achieve them.

2. Analyze what your competitors are doing - List your competitors and investigate them: where are they distributing their content? What are their favorite subjects? How often do they publish, on what types of media, with what formats? Understanding who you deal with is essential to being able to stand out and prove your worth.

3. Review your content - Take a full inventory of all the content resources you have. For each content, designate the type of media to favor its distribution channel and the profile of the target audience. Evaluate how well everyone is performing, what performs best, what needs to be updated, and what you can throw away.

4. Define Your Personas - Build a comprehensive profile for each type of existing or potential customer you want to reach while indicating what issues they are experiencing and how to respond to them. What are their expectations, their concerns, their centers of interest?

5. Anticipate Obstacles and Opportunities - Plan ahead to overcome challenges of lack of resources, fluctuating quality, lack of qualified staff, uncooperative management, or growing competitors.

6. Tell Your Brand Story - It represents the story you are going to communicate. This will define the strengths that you will present and guide your long-term relationship with your customers. Your content marketing strategy must be in line with it.

7. Choose your distribution channels: Paid, Owned, or Earned: it's up to you to choose how to organize your media mix. Owned corresponds to your brand site or to all the platforms that belong to you (a blog for example). Earned refers to all the mentions that are made of your brand, whether it is positive press coverage or content published by an influencer. Paid includes all paid levers intended to promote your content, such as Outbrain for example, or sponsored posts on Facebook.

List all the content you have and determine for each which distribution channel is the most relevant in order to visualize more precisely if your entire strategy is coherent.

8. Make a distribution plan - Target the places your target audience is learning (social media, their mailbox, video sharing sites) and the type of content they prefer. Perform research to define the channels that best suit your brand, while regularly monitoring the relevance of these channels.

9. Measure the success of your strategy - Refer to the main KPI's that allow you to assess the success of your campaign and prioritize them in order of importance. Indeed, the page views, the number of shares, and the time spent on a page are important, but subscriptions to newsletters or the number of subscribers generated on social networks are essential to building an audience. To generate a positive return on investment and possibly increase the resources you have available to develop your Content Marketing strategy, measure! Have you generated qualified leads or better, direct conversions?

10. Build your toolbox - Does your company use a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress? Determine if the content will be written by your team or if you will use providers like YouLoveWords.com or Contently. You will also need a good analysis tool to accurately measure the performance of your content. Google Analytics is still a good option, but to get a clear and precise picture of who is interacting with your content, also take a look at Kissmetrics or TrenDemon.

To conclude

If all these steps may seem long to implement, they are in fact quite basic and nevertheless essential. Too often, companies publish a ton of content without having a clearly established upstream strategy.

Developing a plan that includes all the elements mentioned above will increase your chances of gaining the support of your management in the conduct of your content marketing strategy. Cybexo content marketing agency represents your brand in a unique impressive way that keeps the audience engaged and generates sales. We challenge, our graphic design and content creation strategies to compete with your competitors. Above all, don't forget to constantly test, measure, and adjust, the only way to be rewarded with a gain in notoriety for your brand, and a clear increase in your ROI, whatever your KPI's.