Businesses must grow to survive, and fast-growing businesses have several strategies for doing so. We can describe the strategy as the creation of a unique and valuable proposition for any business to startup, grow and survive.
Any side hustle or business startup is faced with a major challenge: deploying an effective strategy in a market that is still new and poorly defined, or even nonexistent, and finding the first customers who will buy its product or service. The goal is to generate growth as quickly as possible by hitting hard.
No matter how experienced you are in content marketing, it’s always a good idea to review your strategy and, at the same time, your target audience. Indeed, the market has never been as competitive as it is today. So how do you differentiate yourself? The first step in getting yourself a step ahead of your competition is to develop an effective content marketing strategy.
Why develop a content marketing strategy?
Content marketing allows companies to create reliable and cost-effective sources of traffic and new leads. Imagine writing just one blog post that generates regular organic traffic: you can, thanks to a link embedded in an e-book or a free tool, continue to generate leads over time.
This reliable source of traffic and leads allows you to test other marketing strategies to generate revenue, such as sponsored content, social media advertising, and broadcast content. Also, this content allows you not only to attract leads but also to inform your potential leads and increase the visibility of your brand.
Now let’s break down each step of how to create a content marketing plan.
1 – Define your goal
What is the goal of your content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create such a strategy?
Before establishing your strategy, determine your objectives, this will make it easier to define what is best suited to it.
2 – Perform an analysis of your personas
To set up an effective plan, you need to clearly define the target audience, also known as the buyer persona.
This step is essential, especially for marketers who are just starting or those who do not yet have a marketing strategy. Knowing your target audience will allow you to produce more relevant content that your leads will want to read and that will encourage them to take a given action.
Even if you already have experience as a marketer, your targets may not be the same anymore. Whether you want to target a new group or expand your current audience or keep the same target audience, re-evaluating your personas each year through market research is essential.
3 – Perform a content audit
Most businesses start with blogging, but if you want to take it a step further, study the content you want to produce. For example, if you’ve previously posted blog posts every week, you might want to create an eBook that bundles all of your posts together to provide a comprehensive guide in a different format. This article discusses several types of content that you can offer.
If you already have a strategy, assess your marketing efforts and the results achieved over the past year. Then figure out what you can do differently for the coming year and set new goals. It is advisable to adopt the goals of your team to those of the company in general.
4 – Choose a content management system
It is important to have a system that allows you to manage your content. Some of the essentials of content management are creating, publishing, and analyzing content.
If you use WordPress’s CMS, you can plan, produce, publish and measure your results from one platform.
5 – Define what types of content to create
There are many options for content. Here are some of the most popular formats with marketers, along with some tools and templates to help you out.
Blog posts
The content that you are browsing right now is a blog post. This format, hosted on a website, must be published regularly to attract new visitors. These articles should provide valuable content to your audience, to encourage them to share them on social networks and other websites.
It is recommended that you write 1,000-2,000 word articles, but feel free to assess for yourself whether your audience prefers longer or shorter content.
E-books
E-books are lead generation tools available for download when potential customers have submitted their contact details via a form. They are generally longer, more in-depth, and published less frequently than blog posts, written to attract visitors to a website.
E-books are the next step in the inbound marketing process: after reading a blog post, visitors sometimes want to know more and fill in their contact details to access an e-book that will provide them with important information for their business. . The company offering the e-book thus has a new lead to contact.
Infographics
Infographics are a more compelling way to organize and visualize data than just words. This format is ideal for sharing a large amount of data clearly and simply.
Videos
Videos are a very attractive medium intended to be shared on social networks and websites.
They require a larger investment of time and resources than written content, but they have gained in value since the development of visual marketing. Indeed, compared to other types of content, they are 40 times more likely to be shared on social networks, according to a study by HubSpot.
Podcasts
A podcast allows listeners to experience your brand differently. Their number is increasing: in 2016, around 57 million people listened to podcasts every month. If you want to chat with specific people or lead conversations, feel free to use this medium.
External content
If you’ve been posting content on your site regularly for a while, it might be time to consider posting your content to other sites. This could involve:
- The publication of website content on social networks, such as LinkedIn.
- Reuse content in new formats and publish them on your blog or social networks.
- Creating original content specifically for external sites, such as Medium.
When you have found new ideas, you will have at your disposal various types of content to diversify your website.
6 – Publish and manage your content
Your marketing plan should plan not only for the types of content you will create but also how you will organize it. An editorial calendar will allow you to offer a balanced and diverse list of content on your website. Then create a social media content calendar to organize and manage your content on other sites.
Many of the ideas you think are as relevant today as they will be in a few months. That being said, it is recommended that you cover more current topics as well. Even if these don’t make up the bulk of your editorial calendar, they will allow you to generate spikes in traffic.
Most businesses incorporate holidays such as Christmas or New Year into their marketing efforts. You do not have to limit yourself to these important dates, if some less popular events interest your audience, feel free to post content on your blog or social media about them.
Yet every business needs a solid content and marketing plan to ensure it grows over time. However, it can be tricky for a startup to know where to start to create an effective content marketing strategy. Effective content allows startups to communicate economically, without having to incur costs in advertising agencies as expensive as they are renowned. A holistic content marketing strategy is going to be necessary to generate leads and conversions, that is to say, transform simple contacts into
Your takeaway…
Whether or not you are just starting out or if you have been in business for a while, generating business is paramount to survival. And while ads are proven to work, they are a “one and done” experience. Content marketing can continue to generate opportunities long after they have been created.
Learning to put together an effective content management and marketing strategy requires attention. And if you find yourself knowing that you need one and either don’t have the time or inclination, then consider someone like the Social Media Dudes creating the content for you.
Hiring someone else to write your content can be a great time saver, assuming you hire the right person or company to write your content for you (shameless plug for the services we offer). In order to do a great job, they need to understand your business and offerings. Fees can either be flat rate or by the word.
Still not sure? Read Why Should You Be Buying Blog Posts? and decide for yourself.
What have you found to be the most effective content marketing strategy that has worked for you? Leave a comment and tell us your thoughts.