14 Steps for Creating Your Content Marketing Strategy

To grow your business with content marketing, it’s important to start out with a plan. Taking the time to develop the strategy before you begin will save you money, time, and effort – while ensuring your success with content marketing.

1. Set Your Goals and Objectives

For everything you want to accomplish in your business, it’s imperative that you learn proper goal-setting techniques. Goals need to match your business objectives, and they must be spelled out very specifically in order to make them simple to follow.

2. Establish Trackable Metrics

Using your goals, figure out what parts of each goal are areas that you can track. Know how you’ll track it and what technology you need in place to ensure that it happens.

3. Know Who Your Audience Is

Studying your audience is something that has to be a continuous process. The reason is that while your audience demographics may stay the same, their values and principles might change over time. And if you’re not aware of that change, you may offend them with your marketing method.

4. Understand Your Competition

Keeping tabs on your competition is important, especially if they are bigger than you because they can alert you to issues about the industry you may not know about. Plus, you can learn how they communicate with your audience and emulate it yourself.

5. Determine Your Best Content Marketing Channels

Know where you’ll promote the content that you’re creating. Which social media channels will you use? Which advertising platforms will you use?

6. Decide on the Types of Content You Need

Knowing what you know about your audience and their buying journey, combined with what you know about your product funnel, start deciding on the types of content you need based on that information.

7. Set Up Content Templates

To make everything feel cohesive, create content templates for your graphics, your text files, your blog, and what you’ll put on other platforms. This way, you don’t need to recreate the wheel each time you develop new content.

8. Identify Needed Resources

As you create your plan, you’re going to note the tools and resources you need. Make a list of them to ensure you choose the right tools and people to help you in your endeavors.

9. Create a Content Publication Calendar

Using all the information you’ve gathered, create a publication calendar so that you simply need to open your calendar to find out what you are working on today or what is due from your employees or contractors today.

10. Create the Content

Now that you know what you’re going to do throughout the year or the campaign you’ve designed, it’s time to create the content. You might hire someone, or create it yourself. You may choose to use a combination of those methods; it’s recommended that you use everything you can.

11. Determine How You Will Distribute the Content

It’s also necessary that you write down and understand where you’re going to distribute the various types of content you develop. Will it go on your blog, be in a newspaper, form a part of your email autoresponder messages, or something else?

12. Promote the Content

Once you’ve published the content, make sure you promote it as you would any product you want to sell. Know the process and how you will do so for each piece of content so that you can easily schedule it and keep track.

13. Measure Your Results

Using technology like Google Analytics and the analytics offered on various platforms, you’ll want to use the data points you choose to ensure that your assumptions are correct and it’s working.

14. Repeat

Keep going. Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy and is not about overnight success. It is about growing and ongoing success. For this reason, don’t give up. Check the numbers, tweak your work, and keep going.

Creating and then following your content marketing strategy is essential to your success in doing business online or offline while marketing online. Remember that it takes some time for the tactics you use in your strategy to take hold and start working. Don’t give up. But do make it easy for yourself by developing a content marketing strategy and then following it every day.

P.S

I put a lot of time and effort into writing these articles. Not because I have to, but because I genuinely want to help small businesses succeed.

There are no ads on this blog and I hope to keep it that way because I hate annoying ads, popups, and paywalls.

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p.p.s

If you like this article, then you'll love this other article I wrote. It's called 7 Types of Content Marketing to Include in Your Strategy