Constructing the Strategy Behind Your Content Marketing
Content marketing is creating and sharing material that is authentically beneficial for your audience to build trust and thought leadership. It allows you to reach and engage your target audience without disrupting their daily lives; it’s an inbound marketing strategy that uses education, storytelling, and leadership to generate leads.
Many businesses encounter roadblocks when starting their content marketing. With so many content avenues and platforms available, you can get overwhelmed trying to use each one and not knowing where to allocate your time. Or not seeing results from your different platforms often because of a non-cohesive strategy bridging the content.
A content strategy is taking the different forms of content and platforms, such as blogs, social media, or emails, and planning how they can support one another to create a larger impact. For example, one blog post can only gain so much interaction but a whole content marketing strategy of correlated posts can create a movement of engagement and conversions.
Content marketing is most effective when it follows a goal-oriented and business-specific plan. This also allows you to see how your content is performing on an individual and comprehensive level. Our content strategy process helps you prioritize content, create a short and long-term plan, and provide goal checkpoints for reliable digital marketing.
Creating Consistent Messaging Across Channels
If you are sending out monthly newsletters, posting on LinkedIn, and publishing blogs, they should ideally interweave. If they are disjointed and unorganized, you are left with a lot of information and not a lot of direction. It’s difficult for your audience to follow making it less likely that they’ll take your desired action.
If each piece of content is planned based on when, what, and where (eg. LinkedIn post on October 14th about your new service) it develops a seamless relationship between your marketing activities, all the while keeping your digital content focused and your audience engaged. At Evolve, our high level of communication ensures each piece of your digital content strategy is completed on time with clear deliverables.
Putting Your Strategy Into Action With a Content Calendar
A content calendar is the output of your content strategy; it’s the detailed plan on how you will carry out your strategy. To create your content calendar, we break down your marketing strategy into digestible parts.
These are the steps we follow to lead your content marketing strategy:
- Evaluate your business resources – You can be as involved in the content creation and execution as you want. This allows you and your team to focus on other important responsibilities.
- Determine the content type and focus – Based on your business goals and quarterly activities, we plan where and what your content will be.
- Establish content frequency – We align your resources and goals to determine an attainable schedule.
- Outline your calendar – Then we put it all together! We create a detailed content calendar for each quarter that supports your digital marketing plan.
A content calendar provides structure for your business so you are not questioning what you should post each week or not consistently communicating with your audience. We know that things come up, that’s why our content strategies provide flexibility to continually align with your business.
The Tactics Behind Your Plan
Depending on your business type, industry, and goals, we recommend a wide range of content materials. Each piece plays an important role in your content strategy. A few of the more popular content types include:
- Blogs – On average, companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month
- Newsletters and Emails – 81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters
- Social Media – This includes LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and other applicable accounts.
Video – 72% of customers said they would prefer to learn about a product or service through video
