Content Marketing Strategy: Unleashing Growth with A Comprehensive 11-Step Guide
Did you know that a staggering 63% of businesses do not have a formalized content marketing strategy? This is according to the latest research from MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute (CMI). It’s no wonder that businesses with a content marketing strategy are more likely to consider their efforts successful. Without a plan, success or failure is just a matter of luck, and you risk wasting all your hard work.
Perhaps this is why a similar number (64%) say that one of their top educational needs is learning how to build a content strategy. If you’re in that category and have been wondering how to create a content strategy for your business, we can help.
Since OptinMonster’s initial launch in 2013, we’ve used content marketing to grow our own traffic and boost conversions, and we want to share what we’ve learned with you. This guide will walk you through 11 simple steps to designing and executing a content marketing strategy that will help you grow your business without wasting unnecessary time and money.
Step 1: Define Your Mission and Goals
Establishing a content marketing mission statement is a great place to start when planning your content strategy. This brief statement makes it easier to focus on what’s important and what’s not, so your content marketing strategy stays on track.
Step 2: Establish Your KPIs
The best way to achieve your goals is to make them specific and measurable. That means setting key performance indicators (KPIs) for your content marketing strategy.
Step 3: Know Your Audience
As we’ve already mentioned, for a successful content marketing strategy, you need to be clear about who your audience is so you can create the right content to reach them. There are three actions you need to take.
Step 4: Assess Your Current Position
Many businesses already have content out there. This could be content that’s on your blog, podcast, video channel, social media platforms, and so on.
Before you start thinking about creating new content, it’s a good idea to carry out a content audit. We’ve got a guide on how to conduct a content audit that takes you through the process step by step.
Step 5: Figure Out the Best Content Channels
As you work through this process, you’ll start to get a sense of where your audience hangs out, and where you already have a successful online presence. It’s important to take stock of your current position and tweak your strategy to improve it.
And that’s it! By following these 11 steps, you’ll be well on your way to creating a powerful content marketing strategy that helps you grow your business.
Remember, the key to a successful content marketing strategy is to keep refining it – make sure you’re reaching your audience and meeting your KPIs, and tweak your strategy as necessary.
Step 6: Content Types and Performance Assessment
This guide covers various types of content including blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, videos, and more. The next crucial step is to determine whether your content is helping you achieve your objectives.
If you’re just starting out and have no content yet, you can skip to Step 5 – Determine the Best Content Channels. However, if you already have some content, you’ll need to conduct a content audit. This involves:
- Recording all content, including blog posts and guest contributions
- Evaluating their effectiveness or success
- Identifying gaps in your content
You might also want to compare your content with that of your competitors and consider how any upcoming content will fit into the market. Let’s take a look at an example of how this might work in your content marketing plan.
Methods for Logging Content
A great tool for tracking all the content on your website or blog is Screaming Frog. It’s a URL crawler that will list URLs, review page descriptions and titles, search for duplicate pages, and publish sitemaps. The free version can crawl up to 500 URLs. SEER Interactive provides an excellent comprehensive guide on how to use Screaming Frog. You can also use this tool to conduct competitive research by performing the same type of analysis on your competitors’ content.
Another tool for logging your content is SEMRush’s Content Audit feature. You create a project, choose the area of your website to audit, select the URLs, and then click Start Content Audit. You’ll receive a detailed analysis of your content, including titles and descriptions, article length, backlinks, and Facebook shares. You can export the data to create a simple spreadsheet with all the URLs.
Review the Performance of Your Content
Now it’s time to evaluate how valuable your content is. You’ll be looking for indicators such as whether the content has many inbound links, its position in search results for relevant keywords, and whether it’s widely shared. You can find more of this information using additional SEMRush tools, such as the site audit and position tracking tools.
This will help you identify:
- Content that is so successful that it doesn’t need to be changed
- Content that needs to be updated or improved to achieve your objectives
- Content that needs to be replaced or removed
Recognize Content Gaps
Identify any gaps that you can exploit. These might include keywords relevant to your market that your content isn’t focusing on, questions from your target audience that you’re not addressing, or rank-starting content that could be improved, for example, to focus on Google’s answer boxes. These are the boxes that contain the answers to a specific query and appear above search results. You can use Ahrefs to perform a content gap analysis.
Step 7. Determine and Distribute Resources
Make sure you have everything you need to execute your content marketing strategy now that you are aware of the type of material you intend to produce, who it is for, and where you intend to share it.
That entails responding to inquiries like:
- Who is responsible for creating and updating content?
- What tools, resources, and people are needed to create the content—human, physical, or digital?
- What will the structure of your publication process, including content scheduling, look like?
Let’s take a closer look at each of these.
Who is responsible for content creation?
This inquiry relates to role distribution. You must consider who will be in charge overall as well as who will be delivering each piece of content.
This will depend on your company’s size, the size of your content staff, and whether you are producing content internally or externally.
Here’s an illustration of how that would appear:
- Content and content strategy are subject to ultimate approval by the CEO or chief marketing officer.
- Your content marketing manager, who will collaborate with the content team, will be in charge of carrying out your content marketing strategy on a daily basis.
- Content will be produced by people based on their areas of expertise.
What Equipment and Materials Do You Require?
Next, decide how you’re going to produce the material. Your content creators could be:
- internal content producers
- experts in graphic design, podcasting, or video production
- Freelancers
Going back to your Buzzsumo search results and looking at the authors of the most popular content is one easy approach to locate excellent freelancers.
It won’t do any harm to approach them and ask if they would be interested in joining your content team. Through networks like Contently, NDash, ClearVoice, and others, you may also locate excellent independent content creators.
Additionally, you’ll need tools for podcasting and making polished videos, and you’ll need to make hosting arrangements on websites like Blubrry, Vimeo, Spreaker, and YouTube.
To get started, look over our list of video marketing suggestions.
Content Process
Next, determine how you will go about producing your content. For an ordinary blog post, you might need to:
- Make a plan and have it approved.
- Write the article
- Make supplementary images
- Post it to the editor.
- Alter anything
- Upload
- Publish
Just one more item has to be completed before you begin researching and writing content: make a content calendar so you can plan what will be released when. In the following phase, we’ll examine that.
Step 8. Calendar your content
You must schedule exactly when you want to post your material on each of the platforms you intend to use as part of your content strategy.
Use a content calendar to schedule all of your material because failing to prepare is a major content marketing failure. There are various methods for doing this.
The due dates for each piece of material, for instance, can be entered into Google Calendar. That functions fairly well, particularly if you don’t post a lot of content.
The simplest method is that, but if you produce a lot of content and need to oversee a content team as well as your chosen production workflow, you’ll probably need extra functionality.
Tools for productivity and task management, such as Asana (shown below), or an editorial calendar tool, such as CoSchedule, are options for handling this. You can schedule various steps in the content development process using either of these.
asana content calendar example
Conducting preliminary research to identify the topics your audience will be interested in is one method to locate content to add to the calendar.
Discover the queries that your clients raise.
We have spoke about the importance of tailoring your content to your audience. Utilizing Buzzsumo’s Question Analyzer or Answer the Public is one technique to learn that.
You can search for a topic in the Answer the Public search box to get a list of questions that people have really Googled.
reply to the results of a public search
Decide on the type of material, such as a blog post, choose a topic that appears pertinent to your audience, and add a title to your calendar. Continue until you have prepared content for the upcoming few months.
Step 9. Develop Content
As you can see, your content marketing strategy involves a lot of planning before you ever produce any content. But the moment has come to actually do it.
Although we’ll use a blog post as our example, these pointers can be applied to nearly any kind of content development.
You already conducted some research, so you know what kind of blog post to write. For instance, we are aware that how-to articles and list postings are well-liked by our readers.
The time has come to choose a title from the content calendar and get to work.
Do Your Content Research
When you’re prepared to write, you must ascertain:
- What is currently available
- How your fresh material can benefit your readers
This is conducting a Google search, looking at the most popular content on your subject, and determining how you might enhance it. This method is known as the skyscraper approach.
If you’re gathering the correct kinds of information, original research is a viable choice.
Identify the important terms to use for better SEO and higher search rankings by conducting keyword research. In our keyword research 101 article, we go over this procedure in great detail.
Establish the Content
Start writing or developing your content at this point. You must now consider how to convey the personality of your brand in the material you produce.
You could want to strike a balance between being extremely professional and informal. Additionally, you’ll need to strike a balance between demonstrating your knowledge while avoiding patronizing your audience.
Here is some guidance from Sprout Social on how to maintain continuity with your brand language while optimizing your content for search engines. For ideas, check at these effective content marketing examples.
Step 10: Promote and Distribute
The next crucial part of any content strategy is distribution and promotion. This is because without proper management, you won’t achieve the results you want. For example, you might plan to share your content on social media regularly, both immediately and in a drip campaign using a service like Missinglettr. You could distribute your content to subscribers through email marketing. You could also let any influencers know who were mentioned in your post to get the word out even further.
Use OptinMonster to effectively promote your content on your website and through your email newsletter. For example, Olyplant used OptinMonster to increase pageviews by 157%. OptinMonster offers various targeting options, such as page-level targeting, onsite retargeting, and geo-location targeting. It also integrates with major email marketing services. Additionally, you can use OptinMonster to attract your lead magnet, direct new visitors to your site’s most important pages, and show fresh content to visitors each time they visit your site to keep them interested. Our marketing campaign software has helped OptinMonster customers triple their email lists and increase conversions with gated content by 3806%.
Step 11: Measure Results
Now it’s time to evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. To do this, you’ll revisit the KPIs you set at the beginning of the content strategy plan to see what’s changed and whether you’re meeting your targets.
You can check Google Analytics as mentioned above to see how your content is performing. You can use Buzzsumo and other social analytics tools to monitor social sharing activities. You can check OptinMonster’s conversion analytics dashboard to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing activities. Google Alerts and Mention are additional tools for monitoring the success of content marketing. You can check both of these to see if your content is being shared and referenced, which can help you meet your awareness and engagement KPIs.
You can check KPIs for the search rank of your content using tools like SEMRush. Also, the analytics in your email marketing software will let you monitor email signups. By tracking your progress, you can keep your content marketing plan up to date by adjusting it as you go along.
That’s it! You now know how to create an effective content marketing strategy from start to finish.
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