How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy from Scratch?

Content marketing has become a significant part of every company’s strategy. But creating great content isn’t always easy. Content marketing strategies: how do you create them?

Content marketing is a form of marketing where businesses engage in content production and share valuable information through various media channels. This helps them build relationships with their target audience and increase brand awareness.

To get started, you should identify your goals and objectives. Then, determine who your ideal customer is. Next, decide what type of content you want to produce. Finally, choose the platforms you want to publish your content on.

Almost every successful company uses content marketing for marketing its products and services. Creating a great content marketing strategy requires a clear vision of your goal.

Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves creating and sharing valuable information through various channels. One of the goals is to enhance customer retention and attract new customers.

Table of Contents

What is Content Marketing?

According to Statista, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent online content for a clearly defined target audience. Companies of all sizes widely use it to build brand awareness, attract and retain loyal customers, and boost profitable customer actions. What distinguishes this form of marketing from traditional marketing techniques is the focus on consumer relevance, tailoring content to the needs and interests of a specific group of consumers. Many brands, marketers and content teams have already recognised the power of custom content and helpful content and have started implementing content marketing strategies into their promotional efforts. It has become an integral part of digital marketing in recent years.

Some Interesting Content Marketing Statistics

In 2021, global content marketing industry revenue was estimated at roughly 66 billion U.S. dollars. The source projected that it would increase to 76 billion in 2022 and continue growing over the years to reach 137 billion in 2026. (Source: Statista)

During a July 2021 survey among B2B marketers worldwide, 69% of respondents projected they would invest in video content marketing in 2022. Events (digital, in-person, or hybrid) are an area of investment for 61% of respondents, while 57% said they would invest in owned media assets. (Source: Statista)

During a 2021 survey carried out among professionals involved in content marketing, 42% of respondents stated that they expected their content budgets to increase over the next year; 20% expected them to stay the same, and three percent to decrease. (Source: Statista)

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The Three Types of Content Marketing Strategies

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is tactic content marketers use to build credibility for themselves or leaders in their company. The main goal of thought leadership is to become recognised as an expert and used as a go-to resource in your field.

It typically occupies the top layer of the funnel. The goal is to build awareness, demonstrate expertise, and establish a commercial conversation by establishing an unmet need. When an individual or brand is considered a thought leader, others in the same industry consistently look to them for insights.

Thought leadership content may include research, opinions, personal anecdotes, or future predictions. It may reference current events, evaluate industry trends, or spark debate among other thought leaders. And it may also be produced as eBooks, whitepapers, infographics, webinars, podcasts, original research, etc.

Lead Generation

In the purest of terms, lead-generating content marketing is a strategic marketing effort to create and distribute interesting, engaging, and relevant content to attract and develop leads from a predefined visitor persona.

For your lead magnet to be effective, it must provide a solution to your target audience’s challenge. If your lead magnet does not solve a specific need of your existing or potential customer, it cannot generate leads for you. It would be best if you offered value to generate leads.

Your lead magnet must be created to solve a specific challenge. Don’t mistake creating a generalised lead magnet. Your lead magnet should be specific to your user so you can have a high conversion rate.

Your lead magnet should be easily accessible to your audience. The lead magnet should be delivered right away. If your existing or potential customer has to go through a long process before they get the offer, they might not convert.

Your lead magnet must be easy to digest. Most prospects do not want lengthy books or reports that might overwhelm them. The easier it is to consume, the more it will keep your audience engaged. This is the reason why checklists convert very well.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

This refers to creating content that helps your web pages to rank high in the search engines and drives organic traffic to your website or app. It includes everything to do with your SEO strategy, such as selecting topics and keywords with the right search volume to the writing and structuring of content on your website. It also includes everything to do with the bounce rate reduction on your website or app. Authoritative blog posts, videos, lists, infographics, and how-to guides make good SEO content.

Create an Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar, aka content calendar or publishing schedule, is used by bloggers, publishers, businesses, and groups to control the publication of content across different media, for example, newspapers, magazines, blogs, email newsletters, and social media outlets. An editorial calendar is essential in your content creation and promotion workflow. For instance, it will help to ensure that subscribers to your email list are not bombarded with promotional emails.

Building a Content Marketing Strategy from Scratch

To develop a strong content marketing strategy, you should consider these six things:

1. What Kind of Content Would You like to Produce?

You can choose to produce several types of content depending on what your audience prefers and your skillset. Some of these content types include, but are not limited to:

Blog Posts/Articles
White Papers, eBooks, Case Studies and Reports
Podcasts
Email marketing (email newsletters/nurturing campaigns)
Videos
Interviews
Infographics
How-to guides
Social media posts
Webinars

Know What You’re Trying to Achieve with Your Content

What are your goals for creating that piece of content? Your content marketing efforts should have a clear purpose. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Generate leads? Increase traffic? Grow sales? These are just some examples of what you may want to accomplish. Once you have determined these goals, you can think about how you will measure the success of the various pieces of content you produce.

As many brands and marketers have already recognised the power of content and started implementing content marketing strategies into their promotional efforts, it has become an integral part of digital marketing in recent years. Click To Tweet

How To Find Your Niche and Target Market

Who is your audience? Who is going to consume your content? Are they male or female? How old are they? Where do they live? What type of device do they use? This information will help you determine who your ideal customer is. You can then create content that appeals to them.

How To Write for Your Target Audience

Research your audience thoroughly before you begin writing for them. Consider who your audience is, what challenges they face, where they hang out online, and who they trust—conduct market research to get details of your audience. Once you know who you are writing for, go into extreme detail. Please talk about the daily tasks the person does at their job. Talk about what they do on the weekends with their family, etc. Your writing tends to have a better impact if it targets a specific audience rather than the general population.

Why Should People Care About Your Business?

Why should someone trust you enough to read your content? If you’re unsure, ask yourself this question: “If I were reading a magazine and saw an article about a product, would I buy the product?” If the answer is yes, the article has provided value to you. So, your content needs to provide value to your readers.

Creating the best content marketing idea or plan is the main focus of content marketing strategies. Click To Tweet

A plan is essential for any business, whether a small one or a large corporation. Identifying your market is the first step. Then, you need to figure out what they want, how much they spend, where they go, and what they do when they’re there. Once you know all these things, you can develop a plan to reach them.

The best way to use content marketing is to create valuable content for your audience. This means writing blog posts, articles, and other types of content that help your audience solve problems they face. If you write about topics your audience cares about, you’ll be able to attract them to your site.

However, it would help if you were strategic about content creation. Thus, you need to use a content marketing plan and a content calendar to guide you in the type of content to create and the social media channel and other avenues to reach your target audience.

Your content marketing plan will also guide you through creating content for each stage of the customer buying process. For instance, you will know what original content to produce for potential customers in the consideration stage, e.g. audio or long-form content.

Measure Success

There are several ways to measure content marketing performance, such as the number of leads generated, sales conversions, social share and customer satisfaction. Lead generation and conversion rates are the best way to measure content marketing performance. Most companies use Google Analytics to measure their performance. This tool can also be used to measure the performance of your social media content.

What is the best content marketing strategy? As with most things in marketing, it depends because there is no perfect content marketing strategy that suits all businesses. Click To Tweet

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Frequently Asked Questions about Content Marketing

Here are some answers to some frequently asked questions about content marketing. Please schedule a call if you have questions or need further clarification on content marketing.

What Are Content Marketing Strategies?

Creating the best content marketing idea or plan is the main focus of content marketing strategies. You could use this plan to future-proof your business or its marketing strategies. This could include content revolving around written materials and visual images.

Content marketing strategies are used to grow an audience by creating, preserving, and disseminating regular and consistent information that educates, entertains, or inspires strangers or potential customers to become fans and customers. It also inspires existing customers to become repeat customers and brand advocates.

Content marketing strategies consider your business goals and use the content as a springboard to achieve those goals.

A content marketing strategy often comprises smaller strategies such as:

a selling strategy to increase revenue.
a content strategy to plan and create content.
a marketing strategy to create awareness of your content, brand, and product.

What Are the Challenges of Content Marketing?

The challenges of content marketing include the following in no particular order:

How to curate the articles without knowing them.
Consistency in creating and publishing content.
Finding high-quality content syndication partners.
Creating content that attracts and engages the target audience.
Understanding buyer personas and creating content relevant to match.
Producing content in various suitable formats and measuring the success/ROI of content marketing.
The continuous updates and trends in paid promotions and Google algorithms make defining a solid content marketing strategy challenging.
Finding the people with the right skills to produce content.
Acquiring the necessary tools to produce content
Finding and acquiring the right technology to deliver a personalised customer experience.
Content marketing can be a very long, complex and time-consuming process.
The benefits of content marketing are sometimes not immediate.
Content marketing is not sales but can influence sales by raising awareness, attracting leads and driving conversion rates.
Balancing SEO with creativity is tricky in content marketing.

What Are the 3 Components of Content Strategy?

The three main components of content strategy are:

Brand focus
User experience
Content distribution

However, another vital component often overlooked is SEO content creation and integrationSEO. Other components that need to be considered for successful content marketing strategies consist of a mixture of three types of content creation:

Viral Content/Top of the Funnel Content.
Thought Leadership Content.
Sales Content.
Pillar Content.

Which Strategy Works Best?

As with most things in marketing, it depends because there is no perfect content marketing strategy that suits all businesses. Every business has distinct requirements. Focus on a plan that can deliver merits to your consumer and not just drive sales. The best approach is to have different content and simultaneously run multiple content marketing campaigns that complement each other, i.e. an omnichannel approach. You can even repurpose the same or similar content in various formats. However, for your content marketing strategy to be successful, it must have four core elements: brand positioning, owned media value proposition, business case, and strategic plan.

But in general, the best content marketing strategy uses data to inform future content to know what resonates best across various platforms.

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Conclusion

In conclusion, building a content marketing strategy isn’t hard when you know what you need to do. Start by creating a plan, then work through it one step at a time.

It requires some upfront work, but it’s worth it. You’ll be able to create better content, leading to higher engagement and, ultimately, more leads and sales.

You can consider outsourcing it to a content marketer or agency if all these sound too tedious because a killer content marketing strategy requires a content marketing agency. At Mauco Enterprises, we are skilled at the different type of content creation (text and visual content) that ranks high in search engines and social media platforms, appeal to existing, and potential customers and helps meet their business goals. We also offer a content audit service to help you make the best of your existing content. Contact us today and let us help you create a successful content marketing strategy to grow your business.

How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy from Scratch?

What is Content Marketing?

Some Interesting Content Marketing Statistics