The advancements in the digital world has taken the world to a new horizon. User experience, content strategy, content marketing, web development, and interface design are relatively new concepts in the digital space. Even so, many businesses use content marketing to promote their brand, products, and services and increase their online visibility.
Customers have become more skeptical than in previous years. They want to engage with brands that add value to them before they make a purchase. It is this very point that has given rise to the importance of content marketing.
Businesses should create innovative content marketing plans because it can help them achieve their business goals. For instance, a good plan can help you attract potential audiences at each stage of the funnel. It can enable you to keep your customers engaged after a sale.
Mailchimp says that companies that want to promote their brand awareness, increase online visibility, boost loyalty or generate more leads should implement an SEO-focused content strategy. Generating unique content is good for your target audience and the search engine.
Since there is so much that goes into developing a content strategy, the article will lay out 7 things that matter the most and that you should consider.
Let’s get started.
1. Define Your Goal
Why are you developing a content marketing plan or creating content? Listing your goals before developing your plan can eliminate some obstacles most brands encounter. It is imperative that businesses have an efficient content strategy that fulfills business goals and meets users’ expectations.
Content marketing can help brands achieve the following objectives:
- Promote awareness about the brand, product, and services
- Attract new customers
- Foster brand loyalty
- Educate and engage with customers
- Develop a solid SEO presence
A core strategy has a content component comprising substance and structures and a people component comprising workflow and governance. Understanding these components enables you to achieve your business objectives.
- The substance represents the tone, style, topics, and message your business wants to communicate.
- The structure includes how you break up the content and prioritize it.
- The workflow comprises the tools, resources, and processes you need to create and maintain content.
- Governance describes the integrity, consistency, and quality of the content.
2. Quality Matters
Some marketers believe that quantity is more important than quality when generating content for their websites. However, that is not a good strategy because publishing an article every day is not enough and can’t make much of a difference as long as it’s of questionable quality.
High-quality content provides your target audience with accurate information and real solutions. Also because of that, you can only create value by understanding your buyer persona.
Intensive research can help you know your target audience’s age, demographics, job title, pain points, and interests. With a clear picture of your target audience, you can now proceed to create high-quality content from exciting topics.
3. Use Strategic Keywords
Use relevant keywords in your content because your target audience will easily find your website when they search for information using similar words. But, you should avoid adding keywords with low-search volume in high-quality content. For instance, opening a restaurant that sells tasty beef stew in a city full of vegetarians will have fewer busy days.
Similarly, creating high-quality content and adding keywords with low-search volume will not appear in the search engine results, and nobody will click, read or search your content.
On the other hand, search engine algorithms reward content with high search volumes.
Strategic keywords have low SEO difficulty and a high CPC rate. They can also help you craft compelling topics that excite your target audience. Indeed relevant keywords and the buyer’s persona are interconnected, and a good content strategy should have both.
4. Create Different Content-Types
Pillar posts, cornerstone content, cluster content, evergreen content, and trending topics are popular words in content marketing. Each of this content has a different purpose and influence on your target audience.
The following is how you can incorporate them into your content marketing strategy:
Pillar Posts
Pillar posts are long and more detailed than regular articles. They are comprehensive guides that provide in-depth information about a specific topic. They are also the best posts for internal linking. You should consider the type of content you want your target audience to interact with.
Generating pillar content for your target audience is important because it helps them find solutions to their problems in your content. You may create other content and add related subtopics to your content strategy.
Cornerstone Content
Cornerstone content is not the same as pillar posts. However, they are also long-form content with many internal links. These comprehensive guides don’t do any selling like pillar posts. But your target audience gets their first impression about your brand from the cornerstone posts.
They are informative, educational, highly visible, and rank high on Google. Indeed, audiences and search engines prioritize non-selling educational content.
Cluster Content
Cluster content is a type of content in which the writer provides a specific subtopic explanation and links it internally with the main topic. For instance, think that you have a pillar page whose core topic is “how to get more Instagram views and likes.”
You can create related subtopics for your cluster content. You can create posts with topics such as “5 Platforms where I can buy real Instagram Views” or “What is the fastest way to grow on Instagram?”
Cluster content gives your audience a better experience when interacting with your content. They don’t need to search for the content because you guide them using the cluster and pillar model. Your pages will definitely rank well when you use this model because Google is happy when websites prioritize user experience and reward them with a higher ranking.
Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is a post that is unaffected by changes in the marketplace and can last for an extended period. Good examples of evergreen posts include “Beginners guide” or “How to .”You can refresh this content by updating or adding a few points even after some years.
When developing your content strategy, you should prioritize evergreen content because other non-evergreen content is only valuable for a given period and gets outdated after that. On the other hand, evergreen content can be updated and reused for a long time.
Trending Topics
Trending topics don’t necessarily meet your target audience’s needs, but they have a high potential of capturing their attention. People are interested in the latest updates, emerging technologies, new inventions, or trending social news. Articles discussing new problems and controversies excite potential clients.
For instance, TikTok is a platform that has been around for a while but has gained massive popularity recently. You can increase your brand visibility by creating content that has a big pull on your target clients.
5. Take Advantage of Different CTAs
Adding call-to-action (CTA) to your posts is part of a good content strategy. There are different CTAs for each content type. Adding these CTA in your content marketing strategy can leave your potential customers with good feelings.
Further, these CTAs should support your marketing goal. For instance, you can ask your website visitors to leave their email behind. You can use your audience’s email to build an email list for future marketing campaigns.
Another CTA is motivating your audience to download a free blueprint or template to maintain the add-value-first aspect. This works well with pillar and cluster content types.
6. Make Your Voice and Tone Stand Out
Images, voice, and tone are important elements that should be part of your content strategy. They are the powerful front-line tools in any content strategy toolkit. Each brand should know its voice and tone and strive to make it stand out.
Brand voice reflects how it describes its personality, identity, or image. It should be consistent across different content types. The brand tone is the kind of emotions and feelings that it puts in its message.
This varies based on the readers’ emotional state. For instance, you can use humor in your welcome to build likability and loyalty. However you can’t use humor in a warning message as it will have a negative outcome.
Therefore, you should develop your brand voice and tone strategically because they help enhance users’ experience and build brand image. Indeed your audience will recognize and appreciate everything your brand does depending on its voice and tone.
7. Analyze Your Competitor Landscape
The first step in creating content for your target audience is understanding their needs. A buyer personas segment them based on factors such as needs, age, demographics, behaviors, etc. Understanding their pain points enables you to create unique content and add CTAs to help drive sales.
Looking at the content your competitor brands publish can give you insight into what your target audience wants. Analyzing your competitors’ content and existing data can help you uncover the opportunities and obstacles your brand faces now and in the future.
The good news is that the internet has many tools that you can use to research how your competitors are behaving online and how the target audience is engaging with their content.
In Conclusion
There are multiple finer details that you should consider when developing a content strategy. Knowing what to prioritize beforehand can make the journey smooth and speed up the desired results.
The article has discussed 7 things you should consider before developing your content marketing strategy. These tips can help you build relationships with your target audience and increase exposure in this competitive era.
Gravitating your content marketing plan around the needs of your audience and evaluating your competitors can help your business gain an advantage over them.