Content Marketing:
Streamline your Content Marketing strategy in 7 Steps
- Senior Content Marketing Manager
The idea of creating a content marketing strategy may feel like a daunting task, but just by following seven simple steps you can create a plan of action that has organisation and structure, whilst ultimately building trust and authority around your brand.
We’ve distilled our content marketing seminar into 7 easy-to-follow steps:
Step 1: Plan and define your content marketing aims
Align your content marketing ideas to your overall business objectives.
Ideally, each piece of content marketing you do should contribute towards at least one of your business goals, and it’s not all about sales (initially) – it can be as simple as raising the profile of your brand.
Step 2: Deploy a listening strategy to understand your competitors and core audience
What are your competitors up to? How successful are they? Where are they? Profile your audience into buyer personas to help hone your targeting tactics – where do they shop, what else do they like? Are they really all on Facebook, or should you change your focus channel to say, Instagram?
Remember: In order for any level of content marketing to be a success, it needs to be of relevance or interest to your audience
Tool Tip: Try the YouGov Profiler as a starting point
Step 3: Define your story and how you are going to tell it
This is really important. Make sure you know who you are as a brand, and what you are doing, in order to successfully share your story with your audience.
Remember: It’s all about building relationships and connecting on a human level
Step 4: Outline your distribution channels
Generally this will be through your social media channels as a start, and you’ll know which ones to target because you really understand your audience now, right?
Use the findings from your listening strategy to help you determine things like your distribution channels, frequency of postings, and the best day/time to engage.
Step 5: Work out your process, tools & team
Now is the time to work on your editorial and content planning specific to your chosen channels – you need to adopt a long-term view of your personal marketing landscape for this to be effective. Remember to take into consideration seasonal themes and industry events that are relevant to your brand and audience.
Remember: Consistency breeds confidence – confidence from you as a brand and confidence in you as a brand
Step 6: Let the fun begin!
Get creative and start your brand’s conversation – now’s the time to create your content and campaigns.
Step 7: Measure
Define your metric levels. These may be:
- First level metrics (raw measures stating specific and explicit parameters, e.g. tweets, comments, likes)
- Second level metrics (mostly derived from first level measures and relating to strategic business objectives, e.g. awareness, effectiveness, engagement)
The measurement stage of a content marketing timeline naturally falls at the end, however this should not necessarily be performed at this point.
Remember: As with all marketing, efforts should be continuously monitored throughout the course of a campaign to determine the level of success with enough time to adapt, tweak or even drop it altogether!
ROI from content marketing can take time; you cannot expect to see results tomorrow. You need to allow a piece of content, or campaign, to be out there for a period of time in order to accurately measure the success past the initial response.
Look at how a new piece of content has impacted your brand over the course of say, 3 months? Have you noticed a spike in your website traffic? Did this trigger your audience to move into deeper pages of your site, ultimately driving them through the sales funnel? What did they do then? Google Analytics is your friend, make sure this is set-up and that you’re regularly using it!
We’d love to hear your thoughts on content marketing – let’s chat via @gmdesignltd and in the meantime, download your own version of our Content Marketing in 7 Steps to get your strategy streamlined today!
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