Developing a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

Our first step towards a successful marketing program is to develop the strategy behind it. It’s important to determine your specific goals to find success with your content. Where do you start? What should you look for?

Creating a Rock Solid Strategy

Today, the leading websites offer more than just information about your company, contact information, and your product offerings. They provide resources for solving customer problems and post new, engaging content to keep their audience coming back for more. CMI reported that 56% of survey respondents said they did not have a content marketing strategy in place. It’s important to first ask yourself and answer the following:

• Why are you creating the content you are creating?
• Who is your audience?
• Who are you? – Determine your “voice”
• What types of content will you create?
• How will you develop your content?
• When will you develop your content?
• What does success look like?

What Do You Want To Accomplish?

While the question is actually quite simple, the answer to this question is not. Many companies do not understand that putting out a higher volume of content does not equal results. Organizations should develop a content marketing strategy because:

• Web content provides the customer with clean, logical access to products and services and should funnel them to the site’s conversion pages.
• Web content provides information that answers some of the toughest problems customers face.
• Web content positions the organization as the trusted expert in its industry.

It’s important to note that the purpose of your web content should focus on providing value and information to the customer. Just like keyword research attempts to identify what your customers are searching for in your industry, your website should give an answer to those searches. A smart content strategy begins with understanding what the customer needs and what they are asking for.

Determine your Measureable Objectives

In order for track content success and guide your campaign, you need a strategy with specific objectives. By implementing these goals, you will be able to discover what’s working, and allow you to make changes to find an effective formula.

Successful content should:

• Improve your brand awareness.
• Generate more traffic to your site.
• Bring in new customer leads and/or sale.
• Expands your online reputation and creates engagement.
• Encourages natural links and optimizes your search engine rankings.
• Increases your competitive advantage.

 When you produce any single piece of content, it should accomplish one or more of these goals, and the sum total of all your content should accomplish all of them. Keep your objectives at the forefront of every piece of content that you develop. Before you create new content, hold it up against your objectives and ask:

• Does this piece of content help establish my company as a thought leader in the industry?
• Does it help solve my target audience’s challenges and provide value?
• Will it generate qualified traffic to my site and create engagement?
• Is this content better or different than what the competitors are offering?

Take a look at your overall content portfolio and determine if you’ve previously created content that fulfills these objectives in one way or another. Are there ways they can be improved? Do they reach any particular objective? Your objectives will guide your campaign not only as you create new content, but as you evaluate and update your current content.

Generate More Traffic, Leads and Sales

The first goal has obvious benefits; everybody wants to boost or increase traffic to their site. The ultimate goal for increasing traffic is to increase conversion and generate sales for your business. Quality content should always work to naturally funnel traffic toward your conversion pages.

Remember, your content will only benefit your business and add value for the customer when it’s relevant, timely, and engaging. When you generate engaging content, bounce rates drop and conversion rates go up; you’ll also see your content take off in social media.

You can objectively measure traffic increases and conversion rates. That makes this objective a great one for your strategy, not only as you develop your content but also as you measure its success. When you see positive results, you can rest assured that your other goals for your content — the ones that are harder to measure — are reaping the benefits, too. That is, if you see increased traffic to your site and an increased rate of conversion when that traffic lands there, then your brand is strengthened, your mindshare has increased.

Proactively Manage Your Online Reputation

The rule for reputation management is simple: Be proactive and don’t wait for a problem to develop. Proactive reputation management ensures that the organization’s own content fills the search engine results page when that organization’s name or key people get searched. By making sure that the organization’s content is visible, it becomes much harder for any possible negative content to rise up to the page one search results.

Most searches generally don’t go past page one of the search engine results page. If you want to manage your reputation, focus on keeping page one filled with quality content that reinforces a positive brand image. When customers search for your brand, they should find nothing but positive information about your firm, and a smart content marketing strategy ensures that they will.

To achieve this, your content should be distributed through a number of channels. Using social media, businesses can communicate to their customers and manage customer engagement. Social media sites typically allow you to create your own profile page. Channels such as Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are great examples of social media channels that allow you to do this. Keep a look out for industry specific social sites, and build profiles on there as well.

Content for Search Engine Rankings

Any set of objectives for a content marketing strategy would be incomplete if it ignored search engine optimization (SEO). Without considering SEO at the development stage, the possibilities for your content are diminished.

Content development and search engine optimization are vital pieces to the puzzle when finding success in content marketing. On-page SEO is about assuring that each content page optimized efficiently so that the content will have the best chance for ranking highly in search. Check out Vertical Measures free guide for SEO best practices to learn more.

Consistently producing useful content will establish your company as an industry leader, and offers information or help to the audience. A smart content marketing strategy begins with understanding what the customer needs rather than what you want to offer them.