How do you create a content marketing strategy?

7 steps to get you started

Perhaps you know that you need a content marketing strategy, but you’re unsure how to do it. It can seem like an overwhelming task at first. But don’t worry. We’re going to break it down into seven easy steps so you can get to grips with it.

Read on to find out how to create a content strategy.

Step 1 – Know your audience

The first step to creating a content marketing strategy is to become familiar with your audience. An ‘audience’ is not simply your buying customers, either. Your audience will be much broader than that, incorporating people who are generally interested in what you have to say.

Let’s banish the myth that all you have to do is sell products to people. Such a pushy approach can turn potential customers off. Take a more subtle strategy by creating content that your audience appreciates. Doing this builds trust with your audience, and they begin to listen when you start talking about how you can help them.

There are many ways to identify your audience, including:

• Surveying current customers
• Paying attention to industry trends
• Excluding those you know you’re not targeting
• Analyzing whom your competitors are addressing

Start with these points to get an idea of who your audience might be. Our digital marketing agency focuses on helping you identify your audience and create a content marketing strategy that is appropriate for them.

Step 2 – Plan for success

If you don’t plan for success, then it’s unlikely you will achieve it. Like many areas of life, content marketing requires careful planning. As a starting point, take a look at the metrics on your published pieces of content. Are there any numbers that are particularly revealing? Are there any metrics you would like to choose to guide your success moving forward?

Don’t forget that your content marketing strategy needs to fit into your larger business objectives. At One Stop Media, we are a digital marketing agency obsessed with the complete alignment of your business objectives with your digital strategy. Only through this alignment can you expect to enact a content strategy that delivers on its promise to build your business.

Step 3 – Do a content audit

A content audit is an essential part of any content marketing strategy, as it can point out both what you’re doing right and where you can improve.

During a content audit, you will want to answer the following questions:

• Which topics are attracting your audience’s attention online?
• Which keywords seem to be the most effective?
• Which content formats create the most engagement?
• What channels are responsible for the most traffic?

Depending on your specific business objectives, you can also add your questions into the mix. A content audit looks at what you’ve already done and how it has been received. Then you zoom in on those bits of content that have overperformed and underperformed and try to understand why. You can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work. At One Stop Media, we are a digital marketing agency that regularly conducts content audits for our clients, uncovering opportunities to optimise content and improve results.

Step 4 – Plan your editorial calendar

There are multiple stages to planning your editorial calendar. First, you need to prioritise your actions. You may like to do this based on the expected gain an action could provoke. At any rate, with many plates in the air, you will need to prioritise which ones need catching. Once you have your priorities sorted out, you might like to think about what topics you want to focus on.

Be aware of the need for topic clusters. Content in topic clusters is based on an interrelated theme and can help drive traffic between articles. Finally, you will need to use some kind of content calendar where you can pencil in pieces of content on the dates they are planned for publishing. At One Stop Media, we have procedures in our digital marketing agency to create an efficient workflow for planning, creating, and distributing content.

Step 5 – Create your content

There are a few tips applicable to the action stage of your content marketing strategy. Firstly, know that quality is king. If you create content that is lacking in quality, it won’t speak to your audience. It will probably also have a detrimental effect on your branding.

One aspect of content that enables quality is that fickle word, originality. Many carbon copies are floating around the internet. You want to be original by incorporating your insights, data, or research into your content. It does make a big difference.

Also, make sure you diversify your content into different types. You can repurpose a blog post into a video, for example. Same content, different format. Make the most of user-generated content (UGC) for the social proof it lends to your business.

Step 6 – Plan content distribution

There’s no point in having the best content in the world if it never sees the light of day. That’s where content distribution comes in. Content distribution is simple, taking advantage of paid and organic channels to put a spotlight on your content.

Consider what channels you already have in use and how you can make them perform better. Are there any channels you haven’t explored yet that could amplify your results? These are good things to investigate, either for now or in the future. As a leading digital marketing agency, we can offer you many different options for content distribution. We can even advise you on what options might best suit your content marketing strategy and business needs.

Step 7 – Analyze your content performance

Having a content marketing strategy isn’t a one-time deal. It requires constant maintenance to keep across your content performance. Those metrics that you decided upon earlier in the process will be very useful now. Use them to understand how well your content is performing. You will know how to pivot to make your content marketing strategy an ongoing success with the data in hand.

Want more content tips? Read our article ‘3 Tips for clever content marketing that works.’

Get help with a new content marketing strategy

If DIYing your content marketing strategy seems a bit involved or time-consuming, we can help you at One Stop Media. We’re a boutique digital marketing agency based in Melbourne, and we are well versed in creating compelling content marketing strategies.

Get in touch with us today to find out more.