How to Build a Strong Content Marketing Strategy

Do you have a content marketing strategy?

Struggling with how to make your content convert and sell?

There are billions of content circulating online made available for more than 3 billion Internet users or 46.4% of the worldwide population. Without a plan, the content you create will merely drown and disappear in the endless stream of online content and information.

Here are the guidelines to help you get started in creating a strong content marketing strategy.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is one of the most ingenious inbound marketing strategies. It is focused on the creation and distribution of valuable and relevant content. Its goal is to attract a chosen market or audience.

Content marketing is focusing on helping brands communicate well with their audience and prospects without selling. It aims to deliver usable information instead of merely persuading people to make a purchase.

Identifying the content marketing strategy

To understand content marketing much better, Uberflip’s CEO and co-founder, Yoav Schwartz, developed a framework for the content marketing process which consists of four pillars:

• Ideation or Creation. Content ideation or creation entails finding outsource and resource materials to create better content that can resonate well with your target audience. There are vast resources and tools to help you generate ideas on what content to publish.
• Content Distribution. Distribution takes care of getting your content circulated to reach your target audience. Valuable content makes a hassle-free distribution. But, with the right distribution channels and tactics, your content will get more views, shares, and leads.
• Content Experience. More than serving valuable information, your content must also deliver an experience. It is through experience that your content gets consumed by your target audience. You need to optimize your content experience to generate leads.
• Performance Insights. Measuring your content’s performance through various metrics is essential to determine what’s working and what needs improvement. Determining your content’s return on investment (ROI) can help you improve your marketing efforts.

Taking these four facts into consideration in planning and brainstorming can help you build a more efficient content marketing strategy, regardless of your expertise and experience.

Setting goals for content marketing strategy

Determining your content marketing goals, think about what would you like to get from your content marketing campaign.

What factors can make you say it was a success? What response would you want to receive from your target audience?

Your content goals can be:

• To increase your website’s domain authority (DA);
• To acquire more inbound links;
• To be a thought leader in your niche;
• To drive traffic, leads, and sales;
• To get more clients and customers;
• To increase customer retention or loyalty;
• To improve your search engine ranking;
• And many others.

After defining your goals, set your content’s key performance indicators (KPIs). KPI is a valuable metric that is used in evaluating the effectiveness of your content marketing strategies to your business objectives. Partner your objectives with your KPIs to make your content marketing strategies measurable.

The next step is to work on building and solidifying your strategy.

Content personalization

Personalizing your content dependent on your different clients’ or customers’ preferences can significantly benefit your business. In fact, statistics states that personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates and revenues.

With content personalization, your audience won’t ever have to receive irrelevant content. It means offering your audience with the right content and device at the right time. Your audience will always have different preferences. Personalization of content all boils down to understanding and getting to know your audience.

Leveraging psychology

One way to get to know your consumers on a much deeper level is through consumer psychology. Consumer psychology lets you in on the thought processes, reasoning, emotions, etc. of your consumers. It can assist you in understanding how to appeal to and persuade your audience better. Psychology’s an essential factor to consider and leverage.

Attracting traffic, building an audience, increasing engagement, converting leads, and driving more sales may be a few of your content marketing goals. But, for these things to happen, your audience or consumers need to take action. With psychology, you can determine and employ what will encourage them to do just that. More psychology below:

• Social Proof. By nature, humans are automatically attracted to brands that are already liked and trusted by others. If you get to build your confidence quotient through different social proofs such as reviews, shares, likes, endorsements, etc., your audience will trust you and engage with you.
• Scarcity / FOMO. The scarcity marketing theory states that humans find more value on things that appear to be scarce. To leverage this and make your audience want more content from you, you need to make them realize that your content is rare – and therefore, more valuable.
• Reciprocity. This psychological principle is about reciprocating an action with a similar action. If someone does something good to you, you’re most likely to do the same. To gain the loyalty of your audience, give them something useful but free such as downloadables, webinars, etc.
• Information Gap Theory. According to its developer, Loewenstein, there’s a gap in a human’s knowledge; and this gap triggers them to find out more about what they want to know. To address this gap, you need to create content that your audience will want to know more about.
• Loss Aversion. This theory explains how humans are more affected by the adverse effects of loss than the positive effects of an equal gain. According to psychology, the pain of loss is twice as powerful as the pleasure felt from gain. Alleviate your audiences’ concerns up front.

The psychological principles listed above are only a few of the many you can leverage to build a stronger content marketing strategy. When utilized properly, it is sure to yield positive results – such as sales and conversions.

Getting the right tools

There’s no shortcut to creating a content marketing strategy that works and converts. However, there are quality tools that can save you a lot of money, time, and effort. But, you should also be wary of other tools that offer the opposite. Below are a few of the tools that I’ve tried and tested which helped me create an effective content marketing strategy:

For content creation:

• Buzzsumo.com – If you’re running out of content ideas, then Buzzsumo is here to help you out. With Buzzsumo, you can track the latest trending and most shared articles, discover key influencers, and even perform competitive research.
• Canva.com – To spice up your content, you need to add in visuals once in a while. And, to help you create beautiful graphics and presentations, you can freely use Canva’s drag-and-drop feature and its thousands of stunning layouts.

For content distribution:

• buffer.com. When it comes to social media scheduling, sharing, and analytics, Buffer is already a household name for online marketers. You can try this tool out for free. But, to take full advantage of its features, you must pay for a subscription.
• Viral Content Buzz. Unlike Buffer, this totally free web-based content-sharing platform will help you share your content and create a buzz on the popular social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Stumbleupon, etc.

These content marketing tips will help you map out and build a strong and unbeatable content marketing strategy for your business. Put the above guidelines into consideration and rise above the growing content marketing competition.

Leave me a comment below with your results as well as anything that did or didn’t work well for you.