Building A Content Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Content Marketing is laser-focused on creating, publishing and distributing content to the target audience using various online platforms. Thus, it becomes imperative to know how to make a content marketing strategy.

It is also referred to as attracting and converting potential leads into customers by offering valuable content for free.

The main aim of content marketing is to deliver valuable, relevant, and consistent content with an aim to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and convert them into loyal customers afterwards. But to become a content marketer you first need to know the basics of content writing & marketing. This can be easily done if you take a content writing course.

How to Build A Content Marketing Strategy for Your Business?

1. Define Your Audience

The very next step after defining your goals and objectives is to have clarity on the type of audience that you want to target.

This step is crucial for those who are just starting out with online business or marketing.

You have to think about the audience that is going to see, hear or watch your content. Do not create content just for the sake of it. Create content that provides value, information and solutions to the problem of your target audience.

When you are aware of your target audience, you can produce relevant content that will initiate them to read and convert as customers.

You can segment the audience by age group, gender, location, regional languages, income range, challenges they might be facing, their interests or where they are in the buyer journey (someone who visited your sales page, you might want to show them another content that can be testimonial video or invite them to a webinar).

So, you can make your ideal audience avatar and give it a name. Then produce the relevant content for them.

2. Allocate Resources

After you have decided on the type of content that you are planning to create, you have to make sure that you deliver everything that is on your content marketing strategy for B2B on time.

Think and define who is going to be in charge of producing, maintaining & delivering content. This certainly depends on the size of your company, the content team or whether you are outsourcing content.

The next things that you should keep in mind are the tools and resources that you are going to use. Are you going to have an in-house content team or hire freelancers?

Some small marketers prefer having a team of freelancers rather than having an in-house team of content writers.

3. Create a Content Calendar

A content calendar is a crucial component of the entire content marketing strategy for B2B. You need to know exactly when you want to publish your content on each of the platforms that you are using for content promotion.

If you do not have a content marketing calendar, you are not efficiently using the content marketing strategy.

With the help of a Content Marketing Calendar, you can plan and execute your content in an efficient and timely manner. It is a plan that tells you how your content will be laid out over a specified course of time. A quality content marketing calendar helps you to get organized and generate results in your content marketing strategy.

4. Promote Content

As mentioned earlier, there is no point in creating content if you are not promoting it. Content is created with the purpose of promoting it to create brand awareness and initiate more conversions. This is why you need to have the right mix of promotional channels.

You can start promoting your content with organic search. This involves creating content that has a higher rank in Google’s Search Engine Results Page. The content here should be keyword rich.

Next promotional channel is the email newsletter. Emails are a durable promotional channel for content. You can segment your audience and then create customized content.

Social Media Channels are the obvious choice for content promotion.

5. Track the Results

After you have created content, conducted competitor analysis, promote your content through various social media channels, the next thing you need to have is a tracking mechanism that ensures your Content Marketing efforts are working in the right direction. You need to have a reporting format to track your goals. Initially, you can create an excel sheet and add your goals for each of the content channels. After this, add the views, fans, subscribers, potentials in front of each channel so that you know which activities and channels are working positively.

There might be times when certain content pieces might not work according to your demand. In that case, inspect what went wrong and how can you improve it. Track your results once in every month. Improve the content pieces that need improvement and promote the top performers.