Content marketing and its practices are changing fast. The recent content marketing trends have been all about serving the modern digital expectations of the masses. It is needless to point out that content marketing in the digital age has been a go-to solution in building relationships with audiences. Moreover, they offer value to businesses by generating high quality leads to businesses by tapping into their interests.
However, to create a dedicated content marketing strategy, one has to be very careful about their brand image, the audience and the positioning values around which the content pieces must work.
In this blog piece, we talk about the 10 core elements of a content marketing strategy that can help you strategise your priorities, ideas, scope and ways of communication through content marketing effectively.
1. Persona
One of the first things to keep in mind when creating your content marketing strategy is to focus on who is your persona. When writing for personas, a writer keeps in mind the pain points and interest areas of the reader. This helps in improving the quality and relevancy of your content by understanding what your audience needs.
An engaging and well written content has the power of motivating your audience for solving the important digital marketing needs of your business. Personas help marketers to have a clear idea of who their target audience is and what they can do to reach them in a targeted manner. Furthermore, they help the writers in winning over their distractions and offer their audience a valid reason to hook to their writing and brands for their interests. Writing for persona also allows the marketers to pursue their Call to Action in a more emphatic and determined manner.
2. Brand voice
While following a content marketing plan for any brand or business, one of the most important things for a writer to focus on is to ensure consistency with the objectives and tonality of the brand. Every brand has its own voice.
Your content marketing objectives must be aligned along these values to serve the long term strategic interests of your business. Your every content piece must be a reflection of who your brand is and what it represents. This also helps your content to stand out from the challenges of competition. This also helps in boosting the trust and confidence of your existing readers and customers who are in tune with your marketing calls.
3. Marketing objectives
Your content marketing objectives must solve the larger purpose of meeting your marketing objectives. Keeping in mind your marketing objectives further allows the marketers to adopt a multi-channel strategy for promoting your content. Furthermore, this allows the entire marketing unit of your organisation to function on common grounds and understanding.
This also helps in ensuring the optimal utilisation of the resources by matching the fitting need of your marketing objective. Keeping in mind the marketing objectives is also important in keeping track of the progress of your content marketing initiatives and their impact on your overall marketing performance.
4. Customer journey map
Reflecting on the journey of the consumers is of immense importance for creating content from your customer’s perspective. Being aware of the journey of customers, you can base your content based on the factors and triggers with which you can interact with your audience. This helps them to make decisions better and model their journey for the betterment of your brand.
By charting the journey map of your target audience, you have the advantage of saving a lot of time and effort on research and have a clear idea about what needs to be done. In this way, you can also create your content marketing strategy better and take important decisions on the type of content to be produced.
5. Content promotion techniques and channels
This is the follow up to the previous point whereby deciding about who your audience is, you can decide about the medium and channel of communication. Content marketers have a wide variety of channels to cater to where their audience is potentially present. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Quora – the list of content marketing channels seems to be never-ending! In view of this, deciding on the type of channel has to be driven by important factors like marketing goals and target audience.
It is important to choose an appropriate content marketing channel to then work on factors like tone, angle and format of any content piece. By effectively producing content for your decided content marketing channel, a brand has the opportunity to engage with its audience in a better manner.
6. Competitive research
An important part of the responsibility of content and digital marketers is to do competitive research of several topics and content pieces. This improves their managerial ability to decide what form and type of content to produce. Having an idea of trends and competition further helps the content marketers to assess what is popular and what type of content is working for their target audience.
In this manner, content marketers have the opportunity in outclassing their competition. In cases when your content marketing campaigns are not performing well, doing competitive research provides a great deal of help in finding the reasons for failures and thus improving the performance.
7. Setting timely goals
One of the top priorities for a content marketer must be to set time-bound goals for their outreach efforts. Further, they must assess the performance of their content regularly. This helps them to stay abreast with the trends and take a strategic approach in finding the solutions to the problems.
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This also helps the businesses to have an understanding of what is needed to be done next. Setting goals helps in determining the factors which are to be involved in making a decision. Furthermore, they provide answers to the questions of how the accomplishment has to be made. It further helps the marketers to decide the resources which are to be involved in making a content piece and the timelines which are needed to be followed.
Goals hence give all the marketing exercises a purpose. They are crucial to aligning the content marketing initiatives for both short and long term interests of a brand.
8. Deciding and measuring KPIs
Key performance indicators help marketers to track the performance of their various marketing activities and campaigns. They give the content marketers the idea about the effectiveness of their content pieces in affecting the minds of the audience.
KPIs are important with the view of determining the return on investment made on several digital and content marketing initiatives.
It helps in finding numbers about the engagement and success rate of both – a content piece and the campaign.
Furthermore, it helps the businesses to decide what or what not is relevant to them. In this manner, the marketers can push to improve the engagement and conversion rates and avoid the risks of uncertainty and confusion.
9. Relevancy
As a content and digital marketer, one of the key areas of responsibility is to work on content pieces that are firstly relevant and, secondly, engaging. In the time when search engine results are a major driving factor in making decisions, your content, if not relevant, is not valuable.
Decoding what is relevant for the audience is a skill that the modern-day content marketers must imbibe in the times when the internet has made the likes and preferences of a user of supreme value. Helping your users find the right content which they are looking for is one of the major ways of building trust and rapport with your audience.
Understanding the relevancy also helps the marketers to improve their ability to cater to their audience’s interest in other forms of marketing as well. By understanding what is relevant, you also have the scope to talk about trending topics and gain traction from Google and other search engines in terms of ranking.
10. Effective Storytelling
One of the most important things to keep in mind while creating content must be to focus on gathering the attention, interest, and engagement of the audience. By communicating your brand in a storytelling format, a marketer has the opportunity of positioning their value offerings in a memorable manner.
This advantage the marketers by giving them the reasons to grab the attention of the audience and connect with their audience better. This further helps in bringing a sense of uniqueness to all your content pieces. This helps to position your marketing message and brand value proposition in a compelling format that sets you apart from your competition.
