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Content Marketing Institute states that Content is the present and future of marketing. Marketers claim that content is the king and focus their efforts and a huge part of the budget on a successful content marketing actions. Before starting running your blog and publishing articles you need to create a content marketing strategy. Let’s discuss what content marketing strategy is and of which steps it consists of.

What is a content marketing strategy?

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing strategy as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

To create the strategy you need to have a clear understanding of who your audience is, what problems every buyer’s persona has and how your piece of content is going to resolve their challenges. Additionally, think of how you are going to deliver your product/service value and uniqueness to your customers and gain an opportunity to leverage their choice through the content.

Consider which types of content your potential customers are interested in and which sources they use to look for this content. Moreover, decide how you are going to measure the KPIs.

Steps to create a content marketing strategy

To create a content marketing strategy you have to take these several steps.

Step 1 — Define your goals

First of all, it is important to discover why you plan to start running your content marketing? What goal do you plan to reach by creating and distributing content?

Step 2 — Understand your target audience

Before writing articles you need to understand who your target audience/potential customers are? Create several buyer’s personas, think about their problems, pain points, possible ways to resolve their issues and sources they use to look for the information.

Step 3 — Assess Your Current Position

In case you have been already running content marketing campaigns start with the analysis of your current situation. Check what content performs the best on your website and other channels, what articles are the most popular among your clients and what keywords your website is ranked for on Search Engines.
You might also want to have a look at your competitor’s content strategy. Useful tools for content marketing analysis: Google Analytics, SemRush, Moz.

Step 4 — Set your KPI’s

KPI’s are basically your goals transformed into numbers. At this stage, you have to decide, what results you plan to reach with your content marketing efforts and how you are going to measure success. For example, track page visits, time spent on a page, inbound links clicking, lead generation, conversion rate, followers or subscribers, etc.

Step 5 — Determine which types of content you want to create

Blog articles are probably the most popular type of content. But there are many more possible pieces of content that you may include in your content plan:

• Blog Posts
• Ebooks
• Case Studies
• Templates
• Infographics
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Social Media

Additionally, consider, how you re going to distribute your content, so the right piece of content was seen by your buyer’s persona.

Step 6 — Create a Content Calendar

Create a plan, when and where you want to publish each type of content. How many articles per week are you going to publish on your blog? How many posts on social media pages to make? When you’d like to add a case study or create infographics?

Step 7 — Publish, distribute and measure

The creation and publishing of the content is only the beginning. If you won’t distribute your content properly it will never be seen by your audience. Here you’ll need to develop a strategy on how, where and when you plan to share your content with a target audience.

Eventually, how you plan to measure the results your content marketing strategy brings. To measure the results you can use Google Analytics, SemRush, Moz and other tools. Compare, how they correspond to the planned KPI’s.