Quick Tips on How to Create a Killer Content Strategy

There is one thing that every inbound marketer has on their daily list of to-dos, and that is creating new content. Whether you are writing content yourself or not doesn’t matter, content marketing is a strategy that is vital towards any inbound marketing campaign.

Because of how important content marketing is, I am going to help you start your strategy with a few helpful tips.

Recognise Your Audience

It is all very well to have all the ideas in the world and the passion, but without thinking about who you are writing to, your blog posts might fail to reach its full potential of audience engagement. Do your research and look at the demographics of your audience; how they interact on social pages and the website, what age they are, and how old they are.  These are all questions that will help you put together a persona of the ideal customer.

Once you have the persona of the ideal customer, you will be able to start writing blog posts as if speaking to them directly. By doing this you will be able to help solve customers’ problems and write blog posts based on what customers need most by having the knowledge of what they are searching for.

You can use an analytics program to analyse the route customers take when visiting your website, gaining all the knowledge you need to piece together your ideal customer persona. There are numerous analytic platforms out there such as Ruler Analytics and Hubspot that have the incredible capability to track customer activity such as what keyword a visitor used, what medium they came from, and whether they became a conversion.

Plan Content to Fit Each Stage

Content marketing has so many roles to play when it comes to inbound marketing, from attracting visitors to helping convert leads into sales. But a blog post doesn’t do all this alone; there are a number of different types of content that you need to create in order for a stranger to travel through the inbound marketing funnel to become a sale. Here are some rules to stick to:

• Attract visitors to your website through blog posts and social media updates
• Convert visitors through compelling landing page copy and call-to-actions
• Close leads through powerful email marketing content
• Encourage customers to promote through social media updates and email campaigns

Create a Content Calendar

“Fail to prepare, prepare to fail” – This is one quote you should remember when it comes to content marketing.

It doesn’t matter how you do it, whether through outlook calendar or by excel spreadsheet, creating a log of scheduled content is key. You should at least have a schedule for 1 months’ worth of content, but ideally it should be 3 months. Now I know what you are thinking… ‘What planet is she on!?’, but once you have a content calendar in place you fill find that scheduling isn’t really as difficult a task as you thought it might have been… and you will come to realise how much time it can actually save you.

Have a look at your website stats; how many visitors do you get, how many visitors turn to leads, how many leads turn to sales. Look at which area needs the most improvement. If the problem area is attracting visitors to the website… schedule more blog posts and social media updates. Analyse which SEO keywords need addressing as well to be able to make a note of them in scheduled content pieces.

From analysing which areas need improving, start putting a content schedule together. Add dates in your calendar to remind you to create blog posts and social media updates daily, updating landing pages monthly, email campaigns bi-weekly, and so on. When planning content in advance, it is a good idea to add holidays such as Christmas, Halloween, and Easter to your calendar so you can write about these topics in advance… you might be likely to forget about Halloween if its July!

And so that concludes my quick tips for today. I would like to think you now have a basic understanding of how to begin a content marketing strategy and feel confident enough to start one yourself. You can always find out more about content marketing by visiting our ‘8 (Practical and Clever) Ways to make your Content more Engaging’ blog post.

Remember to think about who you are writing to, what content to write for each purpose, and to plan ahead to save you time every day.

We would love to hear how you get on with your content strategy, so please feel free to add your comments.

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