As a beginner, the idea of designing a content marketing strategy may be intimidating. The truth, however, is that it is not as hard as it sounds

 The latest research from the Content Market Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs shows that 63% of businesses don’t have a documented marketing strategy. It’s not surprising that companies who develop a strategy are most likely to be successful in their content marketing efforts. Of course, without an effective strategy, success will be risky and can be achieved only with a bit of fluke. If you’ve recently stepped into the field of content marketing, here are some tips that will help you develop a flawless content marketing strategy:

Set Your Goals

Oftentimes, we get so immersed in the sea of what, how and where of content marketing that we neglect the single most essential foundational piece: the why.

So the first thing you need to do is document your goals. Find out why you are doing content marketing. Is it to create leads, improve revenue or to get more traffic? Is it to build relationships or simply to improve your customers’ experiences?

Whatever your content marketing goals are, make sure they align with your company’s overarching mission, goals and vision, and are sustainable for the long-term. Stick to three to five business goals maximum in order to keep your strategy coherent and clear. This will also ensure that your content marketing strategy stays on track.

Determine Your “One Thing”

The internet is inundated with enormous amount of content, and every hour more and more is being published. So you need to aim to integrate something unique in your content marketing strategy that will make your organization stand out from the rest of the crowd. To put this in other words, it is important determine the message of your content program. Is it to motivate and inspire? To create Youtility (i.e. to be useful rather than be ‘amazing’)? Or to educate and entertain?

The pertinent response to all of the above questions has to be in affirmative if you want to create an impeccable content marketing strategy. You’ll otherwise lead on to rowing the same boat as others, sailing in the same glut of content.

Here’s one fantastic way to filter out your “one thing”: Write down all of the brand messages your company uses. Then, cross off the messages that your top three competitors are using. What you’re left with is a distinctive set of messages, which will help make that “one thing” clear for you.

Pro tip: Incorporating design elements into your content marketing strategy can enormously help drive the success of your business. You may look for affordable logo design services to create your brand identity on a budget. However, you need to make sure that you don’t compromise on the quality.

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Establish Your KPIs

The best way to achieve goals is to make them specific and measurable, which can be done by setting key performance indicators (KPIs) for your content marketing strategy.

The KPIs will provide you milestones you can check off, helping you know exactly when you achieve your goals. They will include what you plan to achieve in terms of revenue, traffic, sales, SEO and different aspects of digital marketing like email marketing and social media metrics. For instance, you might want to get a certain number of new email subscribers, hit a certain revenue target, get more signups or even improve the search ranking of your key pages to boost traffic. In addition to that, you’ll want to keep an eye on the cost of acquiring leads and marketing sales while also paying attention to marketing expenditure.

Identify Your Audience

For your content strategy to be successful, you need to have a clear idea about the audience you’re reaching so you can deliver the right content to them. The first step is to collect demographics on your visitors, social media followers and email subscribers. The second thing you can do to know your audience is receive customer feedback so as to discover how they feel about the content that you’re producing and what their most urgent needs are.

Once you have the demographic data and customer feedback, you can flesh out customer avatars, also known as buyer personas, describing your ideal customers so that you can target content better.

Assess Your Current Position

Most businesses already have content out there such as blogs, social media content, podcasts, videos, etc., which is why the next important step is to find out if the content you’re producing is helping you to meet your goals.

For this purpose, you would have to carry out a content audit. Log all the pieces of content, assess their usefulness, and identify the gaps in your content. These gaps may occur mainly because you’re not answering the questions that your target audience is asking or perhaps because you’re not targeting keywords related to your niche. Perform a content gap analysis to find a list of competitor keywords you can target with your own content.

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Create Content

When it comes to creating content, remember to use a list post or how-tos as they are popular among readers. Research your content well and add something new that adds value to your audience. Whatever the tone of your content is – super-professional, very casual, or something in between, you would have to make sure it reflects your brand’s identity.

Apart from that, keep in mind important SEO ranking factors to optimize your content. Create consistency with your brand voice. If you need more inspiration, you may take a look at some successful content marketing examples.

Measure Results

It’s time to evaluate your performance and assess the success of your content marketing strategy. Return to the KPIs that you set at the start of the content strategy plan and see what has changed, whether you’re hitting your targets. You can check Google Analytics to see how your content is performing, look at OptinMonster’s conversion analytics dashboard to assess the success of your marketing campaigns and measure social sharing activity via Buzzsumo and other social analytics tools.

Using Google Alerts and Mention will allow you to see if your content is being mentioned and shared, allowing you hit those KPIs for awareness and engagement.