Every business whether big or small needs a solid content marketing strategy to generate more followers for their business.
Content marketing helps your business grow, online. All you need is to prepare good quality content that helps your audience know more about your business. Not only this, you need to create content that helps the readers in solving their problems.
Here are some of the top ways to create a content marketing strategy to grow your brand:
Define Your Target Audience
The big question, who are you writing for? And, how can you target them? The first thing you should do is to create a buyer persona. You can create a number of personas based on the various stages of the buying cycle as well various needs of your buyers, however; I would recommend just sticking to a standard number of between 5 to 10 because you don’t want to overcomplicate things at this stage.
Another way to find out information about your target audience is to pull off data in Google Analytics. This gives you key demographic data based on things such as location, age, gender and personal interest.
Set Your Goals And Objectives
Create goals and objectives for your content marketing campaign once, you have the clarity of your target audience.
The content that you create should have a goal. A goal your content could be to drive referral traffic, organic traffic, social shares, engagement, conversions, lead, and sales.
Once you have defined goals, achieve them by setting up objectives for your content. That could be to entertain, to provide information, to educate, to persuade or to create controversy.
What is important is to align your content goals and objectives with your marketing plan and then your overall business plan.
Leverage The Power of Social Media Platforms
Remain present on social media before you create content. Set up profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. Use these platforms as much as possible, engage with visitors, with users, answer comments and answer questions.
Find industry-specific sites or niches that are of your interest may be a Q&A site and put across your thoughts that will not only help increase your knowledge but also your presence.
Online grocery store Mercato does a great job in publishing community focused posts in their Facebook page.
One of the key things that you want out of this process is to build up your own community of followers by engaging with key influencers in those communities. It will help profoundly when it comes to the promotional aspects of the overall strategy.
Perform a Content Audit
First, perform a content audit, go on to your own site and measure & map out everything that you have ever done in terms of content such as look at the blog posts, infographics or videos. Always map your new ideas against your content audit and have a look at what has worked and what has not worked.
Look at about 5 to 10 of your strongest competitors, look at the content that they have created. This gives you a rich source of ideas of what your competitors are doing and measure that against what you are currently doing.
In Google Analytics, perform a site search to look at the data that provides you insights about the questions or queries being asked. It also provides you with information on key performing pages and thus, helps you create content on topics that are not performing well and helps you feed those people back into the funnel who earlier were dropping.
Make sure that your content is keyword optimized. Perform keyword research and the keyword that you establish within your keyword research should feature in the content you create.
One thing that should be an important part of your strategy is copywriting. Copywriting helps grow your brand as it is all about writing compelling, attention-grabbing and engaging content that sells.
Promote Your Content
As mentioned earlier, it lay the foundations when you are populating and engaging on your social media profiles.
Besides, you can look at other things, for example, an outreach program. Gather a list of industry-relevant people who will benefit from that content and then, you can feature those people within a piece of content or you can feature a resource in a top list. If someone benefits from having your content, seeing your content, or sharing it that plays a vital role in your promotion.
