How to Create Winning Content MarketingStrategies

Content marketing has become an intrinsic part of digital marketing, as it has helped businesses in customer acquisition, brand building & awareness, and improved interactions with existing customers and other stakeholders.  However, at the other end of the spectrum, we also see businesses that have either remained clueless about their content marketing strategy or have been unable to create the right ones. Such businesses can do a lot better with their digital marketing initiatives if they focus on devising workable and effective content marketing strategies. Here’s a step-by-step approach for content marketers to create winning strategies for their brands.

Research: You will have to find out the topics that may be relevant to your brand or industry. You need to scan through industry magazines, books, etc. to better understand the current and emerging trends in the industry. You can also look at the content marketing strategies being deployed by your competitors. It’s not about following on your competitor’s footsteps, but an effort to give something more useful and interesting to your target audience. You can also look at keywords that your target audience is commonly querying on search engines. This will allow you to create content that is in line with the needs and requirements of the target audience.

Generate ideas: Once you have collected relevant stuff through research, start generating some ideas that may be presentable and interesting to users. You can invite the team for a brainstorming session, so that the best ideas can be generated and evaluated. You can shortlist the most effective ideas and use them for your content marketing initiatives.

Choose the type of content: You have to define the type of content you are looking for. Some types of content, like news stories, have a short shelf life, but they can provide a quick burst of traffic. You can also create long-term content that would continue to get traffic over longer durations. Your choice will depend on the ideas that you have shortlisted and what your target audience would prefer.

Create an editorial calendar: To ensure a professional approach to your content marketing initiatives, you need to have an editorial calendar. If you are just memorizing your content marketing plans or jotting down ideas in random sheets of paper, it can create a lot of confusion. You can lose track of the content marketing goals and strategies that you may have defined. An editorial calendar will provide a clear roadmap that you need to follow to achieve your goals. Making changes to your plans and strategies,and corroborating with other team members will also become easier with an editorial calendar.

Regularly monitor the outcomes of your content marketing initiatives, so that you can track your progress and make changes, if required. Also, avoid knee-jerk reactions since some content marketing strategies may take longer to bloom and deliver the desired results.