Since several people have started to avoid the traditional forms of advertising, content marketing has become one of the most usable and practical tools for digital marketers today. With the right application, content marketing and a stellar search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy can help you get noticed by relevant people. That said, the success of your content marketing and SEO efforts rely heavily on a well-thought out SEO and content strategy.
Research by the Content Marketing Institute says that 65% of all successful content marketing professionals begin their efforts with a clear content strategy. And unsurprisingly, 86% of all content marketers who haven’t been lucky had no defined strategy. So to ensure you don’t end up making the same mistake, we’re helping you design a crisp SEO and content strategy that helps your business stand out.
What Is a Content Strategy?
A content strategy is used when a business or any person creates informative and useful content to achieve their business’s or personal goals. A business may do this so they can get increased visibility in front of the customer. For instance, one of the goals for your new ecommerce store may be to increase the traffic you get on your website or build awareness of your newly launched store.
One effective way of achieving this is by creating a strong content strategy that not only lets you publish great content, but also helps you gather leads for your sales funnel.
Here’s how to create a winning content strategy.
Make Your Content Unique
One way several brands connect with their audience is by finding a unique content angle that lets them intersect between their customers’ pain points and what their brand excels at. According to the Content Marketing institute, this is called a “content tilt” because you take a big problem and then tilt it towards your brand’s direction. That said, defining what your brand stands for can be a lot harder than it may appear on the surface.
Brands normally decide to say that it is their product which makes them unique, but if there’s a competitor in the market with a general product, your product isn’t going to be unique. What makes you truly different from other companies in the industry?
Define Your Target Market
Start by understanding who you’re targeting. To target your customers effectively, you need to know where they’re spending most of their time, how they choose to solve their problems, and the amount of money they’re willing to spend. Create a map of their journey from product discovery, consideration, and point of purchase to repeat customers.
This is why you need to create content for every specific stage. For instance, if a customer is stuck in the consideration stage, they’re going to product reviews, or unboxing videos to help decide if they should buy the product.
Get To Know Your Target Market
Once you have a clear idea of who your target market is, you should try to understand them a bit better. When you know this, you can create the appropriate content to reach your customers a bit better. Here are the three actions you can take.
1. Demographic Data
The first step is to collect information on your email subscribers, social media followers, and your website visitors. Whether it’s email subscriber analytics, web analytics, or social media analytics, you’re going to get a plethora of insights on your target market. The information you can gather can be:
- Age
- Education
- Gender
- Income
- Hobbies and areas of interest.
2. Gather Customer Feedback
If you want to learn more about your target market, gather feedback from your existing list of customers. This will give you information that tells you:
- What they think about the content you’re producing for your website
- What their needs are
- How you can fix the problem people have with your content
Decide How You’ll Measure Success
Once you have extensive information about your target market, you’ll have to figure out how you’re going to measure success. Some businesses focus on lead generation to measure the effectiveness of the content they’re creating for their website. In the same way, focus on measuring the leads your business is able to gather and how quickly those leads can be converted. Moreover, you should also measure the organic performance of the ungated content you’re posting. If your organic entries are increasing disparately to your business’s leads, you’ll have to take a deeper dive into the content you’re producing. Determine which content piece is converting well and which isn’t.
Create A List of Titles
One way you can rank well on Google is by finding relevant topics and keywords. Try to focus on topics you have high volumes of content to write on. For starters, it’s imperative that these topics are related to the products and services you’re offering.
Moreover, with the help of a simple Google search, you can easily determine what the competition is writing about or how you can use important tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to learn more about the content you’re deciding to include in your content calendar.
Catch Topics Before They Become Popular
Sure, keywords can help you find some excellent opportunities for content marketing, but what if you’ve found a relevant keyword for your business with a negligible search volume? If you think there’s a content piece you can write that will do well with your target audience but lacks keywords, write it
Wrapping Up
Once you’ve created and published the content you wanted to post, like any SEO strategy, you’re going to see a significant lag in how it performs. Make a dashboard of your content’s goals so you can keep track of what’s happening and how close you are to achieving your goals. If the growth doesn’t seem promising, it may be a good idea to go back to the drawing board.
