The popularity of content marketing is increasing day by day because of its multiple benefits including search engine rankings, higher domain authority, increased conversion potential, referral traffic, and social traffic. However, the main reason for its popularity is the compelling results that can be achieved with minimum cost, as it only needs an idea and a plan to execute it.
There are many content marketing strategies that fail because they are unplanned. To produce and promote the engaging content, you need a good strategy. And the biggest mistake people make is; rushing to develop the content strategy and copying everything from their competitors.
Publishing without planning and purpose, content marketing efforts can never be successful, as it is not effective content marketing. Here are some steps that can improve your content marketing programs to help you get started.
1. Set your Objectives and Define your KPI – To evaluate your performance and improve content marketing efforts, you should have clear goals and metrics to measure success. Leading organizations use standard metrics to analyze how their marketing efforts are developing strong relationships with customers.
2. Know your Target Audience – Social media make it much easier. Track their attention and split across multiple channels that fit their needs and preferences. Earn consumer’s attention and search out where your audience is spending time.
3. Discover your Channel Strategy – Now you know where your target audience is spending time. Once you have the list, sort it into ones that are popular sites with high traffic, where you think your target audience may be receptive. Also, keep an eye on your competitors, where they share content through referral data sites and traffic.
4. Determine Market Opportunity – Now you have developed your channel strategy, the next step is to find out what content you should create for the selected platforms. It will help you to influence and stand out from the crowd. Add original insights and value to your customers.
5. Analyze Existing Processes and Resources – The biggest reason for marketing efforts to fail is because you don’t have the appropriate processes and resources to support them. Marketers not only need to evaluate the content, existing budget, and technology, but they also need to find out “how organization’s content resources fit together and where additional technology, processes, and talent are needed.
6. Content Plan – It’s time to start developing your content plan. Your content plan should include:
-Input steps
- Content objectives
- KPI
- Audience definition
- Channel strategy
- Market opportunity
- Processes and resources
-Content to Create
-The channel through which you engage your audience with the content
-Contributors to create content
-Workflow to create, produce and publish content
The content that will be created, includes content topics, categories, subcategories, frequency, formats, and share of overall content production.
7. Evaluate and Optimize – Now, if you are done by developing and executing, your content plan is still half the battle. You need to optimize and evaluate your content strategy to improve your content marketing programs.
The question arises here is, how to evaluate the performance?
To do so, evaluate the performance based on each topic, find out the channels that engage your audience more deeply, check out which contributors deliver the strongest results.
Tracking out this data on a regular basis will help you to identify which type of content is working for your website and which contributors you need for further support to deliver the content which best engages your audience.
A good content marketing strategy meets the needs of its audience and the emerging technology and developing such a marketing strategy will help your company to grow.