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Create An Effective Content Marketing Strategy To Grow Your Brand

A Strategic Step By Step Approach To Reaching Your Customers

By Noor Published 3 years ago 6 min read
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Create An Effective Content Marketing Strategy To Grow Your Brand
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

We all need a content marketing strategy, whether we are creating a YouTube video, an article, or a product. A content marketing strategy is essential in effectively reaching your audience in a clear, direct, and concise way.

What is Content Marketing Strategy?

According to Copyblogger,

A content marketing strategy is a plan for building an audience by publishing, maintaining, and spreading frequent and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires to turn strangers into fans and fans into customers.

- Demian Farnworth CopyBlogger.com

Benefits Of Content Marketing Strategy

Implementing a content marketing strategy benefits both the creator and the consumer in many ways.

  • Helps you to reach your audience in a direct, clear, and relatable way.
  • Creates a systematic step-by-step approach to building and maintaining your brand
  • Allows you to better understand your customer’s struggles and problems and work on providing valuable content as a ‘solution’ to their problems.
  • Allows you to use the right content for every stage of the customer journey.
  • Makes the process of content creation and promotion less stressful for the creator as it creates a manageable, organized strategic plan to follow to grow your brand.
  • Perfect for helping you pitch your idea and get funding as it perfectly lays out your strategy to future investors and stakeholders. This will make them feel more confident in investing in your idea, as you have invested time and energy in creating a plan and shown commitment to your goals.
  • Makes it easier for you to track and monitor your progress, success, and failures as you will document your journey as you go.

How To Create A Content Marketing Strategy?

In the article titled ‘Building and Applying a Content Marketing Strategy’, published in Foleon, the author explains the importance of creating a well-planned CMS in order to effectively reach your audience in a clear and concise way. If you have the chance to read it, I highly advise you to do so as it goes in depth on the exact process of creating and applying the CMS to your brand.

Below are the main six steps to building an effective content marketing strategy for your brand.

Step 1: Identify your audience

  • The best way to identify your audience is to build a persona of your customer. You can do so using this template here.
  • The model of persona building helps you to properly identify and target your audience as well as create a purpose for your content.
  • Incorporate your imagination in order to create multiple personas that are inspired by actual people, with genuine desires and needs.
  • Focus your attention on the multiple personas as you go about creating your strategy.
  • Poor targeting can be detrimental to the success of your CMS strategy and can result in a poor conversion rate.

Step 2: Identify Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

  • Unique Value Proposition is the value and benefit of your product or services to your target market.
  • It allows you to place yourself in the customer’s shoes and understand what the product/service will do for you, and why you should choose this brand over the competition.
  • Blend your UVP with your customer personas in order to understand the full picture.
  • Spot gaps in the market so you can use strategies to fill the gap.

Step 3: Locate Your Audience

Do this with your personas in mind and use all the distribution tools (social media and traditional promotion methods) to effectively find your target market.

  • Identify internal and external forms of advertising. Internal forms of advertisement are useful if you run a business with employees, where you would educate them on the values of the brand and your content marketing strategy, whereas external advertisements allow customers to realize your brand, products, and services.
  • Take advantage of Google Analytics in order to get specific data and reach maximum external exposure.
  • Use the power of Segments in Google Analytics in order to filter out data according to location, gender, and age in order to know where you should focus your energy and time.
  • Incorporate a responsive design in order to optimize for mobile users, to ensure they gain a good experience viewing your content. There are many free and paid templates online that cater to mobile users.

Step 4: Identify Your Buyer’s Journey

  • Gain inspiration from your previously created customer personas in order to understand the journey that your customer takes to interact with your content.

Buyers’ journey is the process that defines the customer’s experience, from the moment that they become first aware that the product exists to the act of considering and evaluating their need/want for the product and deciding to make the purchase. It varies according to the field and the type of transaction.

The three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision stage are all critical to effectively and intentionally planning your buyer’s journey to ensure it is successful.

Reassess all your existing forms of content to suit each stage of the buyer’s journey to ensure buyers are moved swiftly through each stage of their journey.

Creating a spreadsheet that allows you to locate and identify the content gaps is a great idea to get started, as well as plan future content.

Step 5: Implement A Content Calendar

  • A content calendar is great time management and organizational tool that will lay out future content for you to follow and tick off. It helps you create short-term and long-term goals for your main content.
  • Organize your content around different topics, mini niches, and campaigns to create a formalized structure to your calendar.
  • Track your progress, celebrate the small wins, yet make it customizable and changeable based on changing trends and goals.

Step 6: Write Your Style Guide

  • Find your voice and make sure it is consistent across your content.
  • Think of creating a style guide that allows a uniform approach in writing. Visually display your content to make it more memorable, recognizable, and effective to your target audience.
  • Use the snowflake method for writing out the outline of your style, then fill in the minor details as you go. Think of it as a short value system from your audience’s perspective.
  • Implement your mission statement, which includes your brand’s values, delivery system, and purpose.
  • Make sure your style guide is easy to access and available to all.

Step 6: Stay Consistent In Your Writing

Use writing systems such as MLA or APA to stay consistent in your grammar and writing style. Stay consistent in your style to avoid confusing both yourself and your readers.

Resources:

  1. ‘What Is A Content Marketing Strategy’ by CopyBlogger
  2. 'Building & Applying A Content Marketing Strategy' By Foleon

About The Author

Noor is a first-year business student at Tredu. She is passionate about marketing and content creation. She runs a holistic wellness blog and recently launched her YouTube channel specializing in holistic healing.

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About the Creator

Noor

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