Getting Your Content Marketing Strategy Right in 2021

We hear a lot about what a content marketing strategy can accomplish for brands online these days. With many blog posts with case studies showing it is a great traffic source for your website. Getting different types of content can help build your brand, as long as you are consistent with your marketing message.

Whether it’s in print, email, or mobile, content marketing builds customer trust, engagement, and loyalty, which are the foundations of long-term revenue growth and sales.

How to Plan out Your Marketing Content:

Creating helpful content for your target audience will help you reach your marketing return on investment faster. A true content marketer will ensure that the team has a plan and can include the breakdown of these important steps:

Content Marketing Examples (Create a list of Popular Content you Love)
Topical Idealization (Find the Best Topics that get Traffic & Engagement)
Keyword Research (Once you find some great topics, be sure to target the right Keywords)
Content Mapping (Where the Content Belongs on your website)
The Type of Content to be Created (Listicles, How-to’s, Ultimate Guides, Case Studies, Video Content, Email Newsletters, Etc.)
Other Forms of Content (You can also create Infographics, Slidedecks, Podcasts, Viral Videos )
Content Calendar (Your Plan for Content Publishing Frequency)
High-Quality Content Strategy (Create an Outline or Brief for Guidelines for your Team of Writers)
Content Promotion (Social Media Marketing, Video Marketing, Repurposing Content, Boosted Posts)
Editorial Calendar (So you can go back and update older content, so it ranks again in Google)

Here are five crucial steps to getting content marketing right.

1. Have a brand message.

Brand messaging should speak to your ideal customer with a simple statement that reflects both your products’ spirit and sparks emotion. Some well-known examples are McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” and Nike’s “Just do it.” Having an over-arching brand message helps you stay top of mind, for Brand awareness in your broader print and digital marketing efforts.

Diving deeper into the core audience, you should have a look at what your potential customers’ wants and needs are, and if you are solving their pain points with your services or product solution. The vast majority of companies never fully develop their marketing message pillars, that speak to each one of their service offerings. We recommend and have trained with the Story Brand, its is paramount that you get streamlined with you messaging.

Be Clear
Be Consistent
Be Memorable

2. Use metrics to gauge results.

If you decide to incorporate content creation into your overall Brand marketing campaigns be sure to measure results with metrics. Keeping good notes on your metrics will help you hit your goals, but it will depend on what you want to achieve.

A successful content marketing strategy means tracking your KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) like the conversion rate of your blog articles. If it is low you know to invest in some Conversion Rate Optimization, or maybe your SEO efforts have quite paid off yet and need to get more organic traffic to your blog. Whatever you do, be sure to measure it so you can improve through time.

Use metrics to further specific marketing goals, including:

Traffic growth (Google Analytics Channels)
Social shares & likes
Sales volume
Number of leads
Cost per lead
Cost per acquisition
Length of sales cycle
Average lifetime value of a customer

Put numbers to all these goals and give your company a time frame to achieve them in. If you fall short don’t worry, your numbers will still be higher if you didn’t set a goal or a strategy on how to achieve them!

3. Speak your audience’s language.

If you are creating different pieces of content for different customer segments, you will want to diversify your message. You speak differently to moms raising children than you will to twenty-somethings just starting their first job.

Having detailed knowledge of who your audience is and what makes them tick. Don’t worry about marketing tactics as much as crafting your images and messaging to each segment. Try Cowlick Studio’s 60-minute marketing plan, it can help you determine your ideal customer.

Image from – https://blog.plusyourbusiness.com/content-marketing-use-google-plus-brilliantly

Once you do get more clients in the door from your content marketing plan, don’t forget to create support documents to ensure more loyal customers. Ideally you want a different form of content for each stage of the customer journey, but often people forget about the types of content needed to keep customers happy. These can be…

Email Marketing Newsletters
On-boarding Documents on What to Expect
Installation Guides
How-to Video Content
Anything that enhances the User Experience

Increasing the likely-hood of just one more loyal customer enhances your ALV (average lifetime value) metric and can pay off huge, after the compound effect kicks-in. Effective content marketing includes what you do after you make the sale.

4. Keep your branding consistent across your content marketing efforts

All of your content should reflect consistent branding no matter if it is a new piece of content or on social media platforms. Place someone in charge of managing your brand standards and set up guidelines for elements such as logos, brand colors, images, and fonts, styles, and sizes of text. Remember that all of your brand elements must work across multiple channels, including print, email, and mobile.

You may need 3-4 different versions of your Logo and even in different colours. This will help with consistency when publishing content. Consistent content, will help cement your Brand in your customers mind if you keep key messaging and brand standards the same across all of your communications.

No matter what type of content you produce it should be easily recognizable by your active users.

Target each stage of the sales funnel.

Not only can your customers be segmented into different target groups, but they are also at different stages along their buying journeys. For example, someone who needs your product but isn’t yet aware of your brand isn’t ready to skip right to product selection and view pricing.

No, you would have to warm up that lead with your content marketing strategy. There are very good examples of content to use at each stage of the customer journey to ensure you are both generating interest as well as sales.

Know where customers are along the journey and craft the right message to hit them at the right time. Do sales funnels and customer journey’s sound complicated to you? It doesn’t have to be, and you don’t need to go it alone. Learn more about from a trusted content marketing strategy advisor and get into contact here.

Marketing | Daryl Driedger