How to become a winner in a content marketing chase in your business niche?
You must create an actionable content marketing strategy. And with the help of it, you will be able to achieve the following organic traffic results.
Are you impressed?
If yes, then read this guide further and you will find out nine steps that will help you build an outstanding content marketing strategy.
Shall we start?
The Essence of Content Marketing Strategy
The essence of SEO content strategy is creating a plan for producing high-quality content that would attract your target audience and turn potential leads into customers.
If you think that developing a content marketing plan is something super-complicated, you are wrong. It is a straightforward and simple process. The only thing that it requires from you is following a step-by-step instruction (you’ll find out about it later on the post), the rest will go smoothly.
Lots of successful companies have created a content strategy that helps them be at the top in the SERP. Here at Visme, we base our content on highlighting our toolset from an educational perspective. In other words, we teach our target audience how to create visually beautiful content without having a design background. We solve the problems that people have.
Plus, we focus our content marketing strategy on search engine optimization (SEO) core principles. We tend to stay in the top ranking positions on Google and always keep an eye on SEO statistics.
Now, let’s see nine steps that you will need to take to create an outstanding content marketing strategy.
Think About Your Goals and Set Them Correctly
Setting your goals could be quite complicated. Likely, you can always build your goals considering the concepts of SMART criteria and OKRs.
Otherwise, building a content marketing strategy can be completely up to you. Don’t complicate it by yourself and you won’t have any difficulties.
The goals for your strategy may vary. Nevertheless, there are some common goals that you should consider:
- Boost your brand awareness
- Acquire more backlinks
- Attract more inbound leads
- Become an influencer in your niche
Despite this fact, the only general goal that every content marketing strategy pursues is getting more organic traffic.
Make Sure You Know Your Target Audience Well
Content marketing has two strategically important aspects – attract people to your website and turn them into customers.
Yes, it is so in most cases. But if you are new to content marketing, you might miss some hidden pitfalls on this occasion.
Let’s say you own a company that offers video services. You decided to write a piece of content that would cover the topic “video content for SEO.”
What do you think, is this topic would be a good topic for attracting potential customers?
Yes, it is a good topic because it explains how video content could help websites rank better. And you can refer to your video services that would be a nice fit for creating video material.
But if your idea is to cover “Top 10 video software to consider”, you are wrong. This post would promote your competitors and work against your brand.
How to understand what content you should cover to meet your target audience’s needs?
You should start with creating a buyer persona.
A buyer persona is a collective term that describes your ideal customer with all characteristics.
However, if you know who your buyer persona is and what your target audience needs, you can proceed ahead.
Also, readout: 26 Powerful SEO Tools and Apps + 10 SEO Gurus to Follow in 2021
Think About Content-Type to Use
There is a vast amount of content to choose from. Each of the types has its benefits.
Nevertheless, there is no point in embracing all types of content at once. You should better focus on one.
How to determine what type of content will be right for you?
First of all, you should understand what type of content your target audience likes the most. Here at Visme, we produce lots of educational content. Since our purpose is to help people make their content more visually appealing, we create blog posts with different visual elements included. Plus, we use video content because it is another great way to show our toolkit to the audience.
Secondly, you must realize what type of content you can produce from a physical standpoint. If you can’t express your thoughts in a written form, you should try yourself on camera. If you can’t work on camera as well, you can always hire a freelancer who would be a professional writer or speaker.
By following these two principles you will be able to determine what type of content you should be focused on mostly.
Figure Out What Your Target Audience Is Searching on Google
Your main content marketing goal is to drive traffic from two of the most powerful search engines like Google and YouTube. Let’s say that you already know who your target audience is. But it is not enough for increasing more traffic to your website.
If you want to get traffic, you need to know what your audience is searching for on the search engines.
How to do this?
Start with brainstorming seed keyword ideas. For instance, your website sells different educational courses online. Your seed keywords would be “online courses”, “buy a course online”, “online learning”, “online learning platforms“, and everything in between related to the topic.
What’s next?
You should explore more keyword opportunities. Especially, queries in the form of questions people put on Google. For this, you can use the Keywords Explorer tool from Ahrefs.
You should review the report “Questions” and see what phrase combinations people use to find your service. By reviewing these opportunities you will understand what your content should be about.
Topic Prioritization
Due to the fact that you have more chances to get potential customers from targeted traffic, you must work on topic prioritization.
You can do this by a “business value” score per topic.
It looks like this:
- “0” – your service can’t help solve the problem
- “1” – your service can help slightly but not necessary
- “2” – your service can solve the problem but there is no point to solve it
- “3” – your service is the only solution that helps solve the problem
It should be stated that this scale can be applied to whatever business you run.
Work on Creating a Content Calendar
Content production must work like a continuously operating machine. And it always must find a balance between the quality of content you create and its publishing schedule.
To put it simply, you must publish content on a regular basis and make sure your target audience consumes it perfectly.
Therefore, you should create a content calendar to keep all the activities on track. In a nutshell, a content calendar consists of what you are going to publish and when.
Content Promotion
Unfortunately, content can’t show itself to your target audience without your help. You must promote your content heavily. And here are some tips on how to do this:
Newsletter
You must work on building and enlarging your email list. The more subscribers you have on the list, the more people see your content. It is a standard way of content promotion but it works ideally.
Paid Advertisement
It is one of the fastest ways to get your content in front of your potential leads. If you pay money, you can be sure to get trackable results.
Outreach
Don’t forget to reach out to influencers within your niche. This type of audience can help you promote your content massively. Plus, by reaching out to the niche-related influencers you can get more tweets, likes, shares, and build some cooperation on a win-win basis.
Here are two scenarios you can use for outreach:
1) You can impress the influencers with some case study with stats they have never heard about.
2) You have mentioned the influencers in your content and you want to let them know about it.
Furthermore, you can use outreach for building backlinks and improving content rankings.
Track the Results
It goes without saying that you must keep an eye on your content marketing strategy performance. Topics change, new trends appear. Thus, if you don’t watch over the changes, your content might be outdated.
How to monitor the content performance?
Google Analytics is the first source of information you should refer to during your content marketing journey. It is pretty good in reflecting your current content performance and traffic.
Video content that you upload on YouTube can be analyzed as well. Just check out the YouTube Analytics channel.
Other than that you can track the ranking performance of your target keywords. For this, you will need the Rank Tracker tool from Ahrefs.
Pay attention to the importance of performance analysis.
Update Your Content
If you notice that the entire content performance of some posts leaves much to be desired, you need to work on updating those pieces of content.
You can either rewrite the post or repurpose it into some other form of content. For example, if your blog is full of statistical data, you can create infographics, charts. Plus, you can combine a few comprehensive guides and create an eBook.
Remember, your content must never stay unrefreshed.
To Sum up
Frankly speaking, content marketing is always a long-time game. You won’t see the results from your content right off the bat. You must keep on creating new content, update the old one and follow your strategy.
There is a golden rule you should stick to. It says “never give up and work hard, the reward won’ long incoming!”
