Content marketing gets a lot of attention these days, and while it’s true you need content marketing in order to grow your company’s online visibility, it’s important not to forget to strategize first.
Let’s start by taking the “content” out of it and just thinking of it as marketing and strategy. Marketing is telling the world about your business. Strategy is determining where and how to tell the world about your business.
You can’t tell the entire world about your business, and even if you are a global chain operating in countries all over the world, you can’t market your business the same way in every part of the world – you need a different strategy for each market. What sells in one part of the world might turn people off in a different part of the world.
The internet is at least as large as the world itself, if not larger, and it’s just not possible for you to be everywhere at once. That means you need to identify where your target audience is hanging out online and what will attract them to your brand and motivate them to take the next step in the buyer journey.
Table of Contents
Content Strategy
You need a strategy before you can do any marketing, so let’s start there.
Define Your Target Audience
The first part of any marketing strategy is defining who your ideal customer is. Are they male? Female? Non-binary? Or can you serve people in two or all three of those categories?
Are they married or single?
Do they belong to a particular racial or ethnic group?
Are they religious? If so, which religion? Which denomination?
What’s their income level? If you’re in a B2B industry, you’ll also want to know their job title.
What are their hobbies? Do they like to cook? To garden? Are they Star Wars fans or Trekkies?
What kind of content do they consume when they’re online? Do they read tutorials? Book reviews? Industry magazines?
All this information needs to go into your audience persona, as well as a name and photo/drawing for each one. I recommend at least two personas – one for each gender, and a third if you’re including non-binary customers in your target audience.
Do Your Keyword Research
Next, you need to know what search terms your target audience is using when they’re looking for your products/services or information related to your industry. Conducting keyword research not only identifies what keywords/phrases you should be using in your content, it also helps you identify what topics you should cover in your content.
Find Out Which Social Media Channels They Use
There are almost as many different social media channels as there are industries, and there’s no way you could possibly be on all of the social media channels and be effective on each one. Besides, your target audience isn’t on all of the social media channels. Identify two or three channels where your target audience is most likely to be hanging out and spending the most time, and devote your resources to growing your presence and visibility on those platforms.
If you’re doing your own social media marketing, take some time to get familiar with each social media channel you’re targeting. Check out what your competitors are doing. Search for hashtags relevant to your industry and see what the top posts have in common.
Make a Schedule (and Stick to It)
I network with a lot of small business owners and solopreneurs who write and publish blog posts whenever they feel like it/they have time/inspiration strikes. Those are three things that all need to happen at once, and the second one hardly ever happens because, as small business owners, there’s always something else that needs our time and attention. So the people who don’t want to blog, never do, and then they wonder why no one ever comes to their website.
The first thing you need to determine is how often you’ll be posting. When it comes to social media, this will largely be determined by the particular social media channels on which you decide to spend your time and resources.
When it comes to your newsletter, it will be determined by when your audience checks their email and is most likely to open your newsletter and click through to your website.
When it comes to your blog, it will be determined by one of two things: if you’re doing it yourself, it’s determined by the amount of time you can realistically devote to blogging, even when you’re busy; if you’re hiring a professional to write and publish your blog posts for you, your frequency will depend on what you can afford.
Determine Your Brand’s Voice and Tone
If you have a favorite writer, you could probably identify a passage as having been written by that author, even if you’ve never read it before. Your brand’s content needs to be the same way. People who are familiar with your brand and read your content should be able to identify any content associated with your brand at a glance, even if they don’t see your name or your company’s name.
This isn’t easy, and not only does it take time, but it requires strategy. Do you want your content to be conversational? Personable? Relatable? Or do you want it to be more technical and maintain a sense of distance between you and your audience?
Will your content convey a sense of excitement with every topic you cover, or do you want to appear more calm and levelheaded?
Do you want to use humor, or keep it serious? If you decide jokes fit with your brand, what kinds of jokes fit and which ones do not?
Some of the wording and phrasing you decide to use in your content will be determined by your keyword research, but a fair amount of it should also be determined by how you want your brand to come across when people are reading your content.
Come up with a guide that includes all this information so you can be sure to create content in your brand’s voice every time. It also comes in handy when hiring a content marketer so they know what kind of writing you’re looking to including in your content marketing, which makes their job much easier.
The Strategy of Content Length
How long you want your content to be will vary based on the platform. Obviously, you can’t write a blog post on Twitter, and a 240-character blog post won’t convert any leads.
That said, how long will your content be when there are no limits on length? This primarily applies to your blog posts and newsletters. How much content is enough to get your audience’s attention? How much is enough to draw them in and convince them to take the next step in the buyer journey? How much is too much – the point at which they start clicking away without having finished the content?
Hubspot looked at their most-read blog posts and found they averaged around 2,330 words. I’ve heard some content strategists claim they never write a blog post less than 2,000 words long, and others say they never write less than 3,000 words per blog post. It’s unlikely that everyone who finds their blog is reading each word, but by making their content easy to skim (lots of subheadlines and relevant images), they make sure to include something for everyone, while also making it easy for everyone to find what they need.
Again, this will be determined, at least in part, by your resources. If you don’t have the time to write 2,000-3,000 words every week, or the budget to hire someone to write that much content every week, then commit to one blog post every other week, or once a month. There is also a case to be made for shorter content, especially in certain industries, so don’t feel like any of these are hard rules – they’re more like guidelines.
Your newsletter should always be kept short – no more than 500 words. People are busy and they don’t always have time to read a whole blog post in their email.
The Strategy of the Buyer Journey
What does your buyer journey look like? Can people buy your products/services directly from social media, or do they have to go to your website? Or do they have to go one step further and email or call you to get a quote? How do people find out about you and what do you want them to do when they do?
If you’re in a B2B industry, who’s making the purchasing decision and to whom do they answer? How many people are involved in the buying decision?
You’ll need to answer all these questions in order to determine the action you want your audience to take after consuming each piece of content. The call to action will vary with each piece of content, especially if you have a longer sales funnel.
Content Marketing
Now that you have a content strategy in place, it’s time to create the content:
Website Content
When it comes to creating content I like to start at the end and work my way back – meaning I like to start at the end of the buyer journey (the sales page), and work my way back until I end with brand awareness (social media).
So start with the landing pages on your website. Are they optimized with relevant keywords? Are they long enough? Unlike blog posts, your landing pages should be no more than 500-600 words in length – long enough to show up in searches, especially if you use the right keywords, but not long enough to bore your audience before they get to the call to action.
Blog Content
Once you have your list of relevant keywords and the topics that are of the most interest your target audience, you can start writing your blog posts. Some people like to come up with a list of 4-5 topics and write the posts all at once, or in a fairly short time frame, and schedule them to be published later (refer to your schedule to determine the best time to publish your blog posts).
All your blog posts should lead to a particular call to action, and it’s important to remember your buyer journey here. Where in the buyer journey is your audience when they read your blog post? Are they ready to buy? Or are they just looking for information, in which case they might want to follow you on social media and/or sign up for your newsletter?
Newsletter Content
Email marketing management systems, such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact, make it easy to schedule your newsletter, so you can write it up ahead of time, and then set it and forget it. Mailchimp can even help you identify the best time to send your newsletter to each subscriber so they’re more likely to get it at the time when they’re most likely to open it and click through to your website.
Social Media Content
Social media is great for increasing your brand awareness and getting in front of people who may not have been aware of your company, but it’s also an opportunity to build on relationships with influencers, referral partners, and leads who have not yet become customers.
You can use social media to drive traffic to your website, but you can also use it to demonstrate your authority by sharing content from companies in related industries (never a direct competitor), and liking and commenting on their posts, as well as the posts of your target audience.
Content Strategy … Again
Content strategy should always go before content marketing, with one exception:
Measure Your Results
Once your website is up and running and you’ve published some blog posts, distributed them on social media and through your newsletter, it’s time to see how you did.
Did you get likes, shares, and comments on your social media posts? Did you gain new followers? Are they high-quality followers? These are all well and good, but remember that they are not the same as sales. If you’re getting a lot of engagement on your social media posts, but they’re not converting into sales, it’s time to re-evaluate your social media strategy.
How many people are coming to your website? Where are they coming from – SEO or social media? If SEO, which search terms did they use to find you? If social media, which social media platforms?
How long did they stay on your website? How many pages did they visit? Did they take the call to action you wanted them to take, or just click away?
Only once you have the answers to all these questions can you go back to your content strategy, revise as necessary based on what worked and what didn’t, and then go back to content marketing.
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If you’re ready to ditch the DIY and hire a professional to help you, we’ve got you covered. Whether you need help with your content strategy, your content marketing, or both, you’ve come to the right place.
