Did you know that 63% of companies do not have a documented content marketing strategy? That is according to research by Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs.
Unsurprisingly, companies with a content marketing strategy will most likely feel that their content marketing efforts are successful.
Without a strategy, your B2B content marketing’s success or failure is just a matter of luck – and you risk all your efforts going to waste. That is likely why a similar percentage (64%) say learning how to build a content marketing strategy is one of their greatest educational needs.
If you are in that group and have been wondering how to create a content strategy for your business, we are here to help.
This article will walk you through simple steps to developing and executing a B2B content marketing strategy to help you grow your business without wasting time and money.
What Is Content Marketing Strategy?
Content Marketing Strategy refers to a strategic approach to planning, creating, distributing, and managing content to attract and engage a target audience. It involves identifying the audience’s needs, crafting valuable and relevant content, and distributing it through various channels to achieve specific marketing goals.
A well-defined content marketing strategy helps businesses build brand awareness, establish thought leadership, drive customer engagement, and ultimately drive business success.
Creating a content marketing strategy involves several key steps:
Set Your Mission and Goals
Setting clear goals and a mission is a good starting point for your content strategy plan. It is essential to define what your mission is early on so that you can focus on what is important. This brief statement makes it easier to focus on what is essential – and what is not – in creating your content so your content marketing strategy stays on track.
A Content Marketing Mission Statement Outlines The Following:
- Your target audience
- The type of content you will use to reach your target audience
- The benefit they will get
Once You Know Your Goals, it is time for you to move to the next step.
Establish Your KPIs
The best way for you to achieve business goals is to make them specific and measurable. Setting up key performance indicators (KPIs) for your B2B content marketing plan.
The KPIs will help you know when you have achieved your content marketing goals by providing you with milestones you can check off.
They will include what you plan to accomplish in terms of revenue, sales traffic, SEO traffic, and different aspects of digital marketing like email marketing and social media metrics.
Also, you will want to pay attention to B2B marketing expenditure, tracking your spending on different campaigns, and keeping an eye on the cost of acquiring new leads and making sales.
Know Your Audience
For a successful B2C content marketing strategy, you will need to be clear about who your audience is so you can create the right content to reach them. The type of audience you target will determine the content you will put out. There are three things you need to learn here.
Collect Demographic Data
The first step is to collect demographics on your website visitors, social media followers, and email subscribers.
Social media, web, and email subscriber analytics will give you the data you need to know about your audience. These data are:
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Income
You will also get insight into their fundamental interests. To get this information in Google Analytics, go to Audience » Interests » Overview. You will see the market segments that your web visitors fit into.
Get Customer Feedback
Try collecting current customer feedback to learn more about your target audience. That will give you insights into the following:
- How do they feel about the content you are creating
- What are their most urgent needs are
- How can you address their problems with your content
Getting the correct customer feedback can help you:
- Understand your readers’ and subscribers’ priorities
- Decide on the best platforms to reach your customers
- Create your buyer personas
Create Buyer Personas
You can create or flesh out buyer personas with demographic data and customer feedback. Buyer personas describe your ideal customers and readers so you can target content better.
The best customer avatars include information on your customer’s pain points, challenges, sources of information, and behavioral motivators.
When you know all this, you will have a better understanding of the following:
- The kind of content your audience will like and respond to
- How will it help them
- What will make them care about it
Figure Out the Best Content Channels
As you work through this process, you will get a sense of where your audience is hanging out and where you already have a successful online presence. Focus on what works and expand from there rather than trying to do everything at once.
But to be sure, you will need to take another look at web analytics. Go to Acquisition » Social » Overview from your Google Analytics dashboard to see the leading social media platforms where your content is being shared.
With this information, you can easily decide which social media platforms to target to get shares and engagement for your content.
Decide on Content Types
You need to decide on the types of content you need to create. There are some types of content that every content strategy will include.
Most successful B2C content marketing strategies rely on having a central core of content published on your site (or home base), which can then be repurposed and shared on other sites (outposts).
So, blog posts are essential to your content marketing mix and still deliver strong results. Ideally, your blog posts will be actionable, valuable, and shareable and may include various article types.
Identify and Allocate Resources
Now that you know what type of content you are planning to create, who it is for, and where you plan to share it, it is vital to ensure you have everything you need to deliver your content marketing strategy. That involves answering questions like:
- Who oversees producing and maintaining content?
- What physical, human, or digital tools and resources do you need to create the content?
- What will be your publishing workflow, including content scheduling?
Create a Content Calendar
As part of your content strategy, you will need to know precisely when to publish your content on each platform you want to use.
Lack of planning is a crucial content marketing mistake, so it is essential to use a content calendar to get all your content scheduled. There are lots of different ways you can do this.
For instance, you can use Google Calendar and put the due dates for each piece of content. That works well, especially if you are not publishing much content.
That is the most straightforward approach, but if you publish a lot of content and have to manage a content team and the production workflow you have decided on, you will likely want sore features.
Create Content
As you have seen, your B2B content marketing strategy has a lot of prep work before you create a piece of content. But now it is time to do just that. We will use a blog post as our example, but these tips will work for almost any type of content creation.
With the research you have already done, you will have an idea of what type of blog post to create for content marketing for startups. For example, we know that list posts and how-tos are popular with most readers.
It is time to pick a title from the content calendar and start working on it.
Also, Read – How To Become A Content Creator: A Complete Guide In 2023
Distribute and Market
The following essential part of your content strategy is distribution and marketing. That is because you will not get the results you want unless these are handled correctly. For example, you will likely:
- Set a schedule for sharing your content on social media immediately and through a drip campaign.
- Use email marketing to distribute content to your website subscribers.
- Notify influencers to spread your content even wider.
Measure Results
Finally, it is time for you to assess the success of your content marketing strategy. To do this, you will return to those KPIs you set at the start of the content strategy plan and see what is changed and whether you are hitting your targets.
To do this, you can:
- Check the Google Analytics dashboard to see how your content is performing
- Measure social media sharing activity through social analytics tools
- Look at the conversion analytics dashboard to assess the success of your marketing campaigns
You can use many tools to track content marketing success, including Google Alerts and Mention. Both will let you see if your content is being mentioned and shared, helping you hit those KPIs for awareness and engagement.
Tools like SEMRush will help you assess KPIs for your content’s search rank. And you can track email signups through the analytics in your email marketing software.
By monitoring your progress, you can tweak your B2C content marketing strategy regularly so it is always up to date.
Conclusion
While the methods you can use to deliver content to your prospects continually change, the core principles remain the same for developing a quality content marketing strategy based on customer empathy and reliable data.
Even if you are just starting, do not get intimidated by the process. Keep moving at the optimal pace.
Also, Read – Why Is Brand Content Strategy Required And How To Create It?
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