Are you happy with your content marketing strategy? Do you think you have built an Effective Content Marketing Strategy to drive more leads for your business? Or do you think that you haven’t made an Effective Content Marketing Strategy and you need to revive it?
Whatever your answer turns out to be, one thing is undeniable that an effective content marketing strategy is the backbone of online marketing.
Though it is true that many content marketers are not happy with the results of their content marketing efforts.
Many a time, their efforts don’t generate enough leads and their campaigns don’t yield as many sales as they would like.
It is very strange to note that only 22% of businesses are happy with their conversion rates through content marketing. The rest is still struggling to get it right.
Which side are you?
Happy with your content marketing campaigns or still struggling to achieve lead generation targets and conversion from your content marketing campaign?
If you are still struggling with content marketing then trust me the problem is with your content marketing strategy.
All successful content marketers agree on one thing and that “Content Marketing works like magic if the strategy is right.”
Here is another fact that would help you understand the power of effective content marketing.
Do you know that 88% of B2B businesses rely on content marketing, according to the report published on Forbes.
Since it is evident now that Content Marketing delivers fantastic results more and more marketers are trying to make the best use of it.
They are using different methods such as micro-influencer marketing, e-Books, blogs, white papers, case studies, etc., to get their content reach to their audience through different channels.
How to Make Effective Content Marketing Strategy for Your Business?
Now that you understand that content marketing is the most effective way to engage with your audience and drive them into your sales funnel.
The question now is what are you doing wrong because of that you are not getting the results you want.
Technically, you need to relook at your entire content marketing strategy and also review your approach.
The devil lies in the details. The approach I usually recommend to people who want to re-engineer their content marketing is that they need to break up the entire content marketing phenomenon into small pieces and start working from step one.
First of all, you need to understand the building blocks of the concept.
This will help you define your approach, strategy, content pieces, tone of your communication, distribution channels you would use, the audience you want to target, and objectives you want to achieve.
Remember, the end objective of every content marketing is not to generate leads, sometimes it could be different.
Technically there are six components of content marketing.
Let’s first See the six components of Content Marketing. This will help us fix the broken pieces in your content marketing strategy.
- Get Clear on the Concept of Content Marketing
- Identifying The Building Blocks of Content Marketing
- Make Sub-Strategies
- Measure Your Metrics
- Relooking at the Content & Content Creation Strategy
- Relooking at the Content Distribution Strategy
Below we will try to understand all of these six components of content marketing and fix the problems you have in your content marketing strategy.
This will help you revive your existing content marketing strategy and build an effective content marketing strategy for your business.
Get Clear on the Concept of Content Marketing
Content marketing is a marketing technique, of a strategic nature, that is targeted at the consistent creation and distribution of valuable, relevant and useful content on digital channels like websites, email, webinars, social media, blogs, etc., with the purpose of acquiring new leads and cultivating them until they buy your services or products.
This means the concept of content marketing is about content, creation of content, and distribution of content.
Identify the Building Blocks of Content Marketing
The next component of Content Marketing is Building Blocks. We need to understand the building blocks of content marketing.
So, as discussed in the last point the three important pillars of Content Marketing are Content, Content Creation, and Content Distribution.
But, there should be an objective that you should pursue with your content marketing strategy.
And setting up your objective is not difficult at all. Technically your objectives should basically include:
- Attracting more and more visitors to your content.
- Increasing the retention rate of your visitors.
- Increasing your revenue from customers by always engaging them with your content.
Make Sub-strategies
Breaking down the strategy in smaller parts makes it easy to formulate and complete it.
Hence, you should break down your content marketing strategy into smaller sub-strategies.
In this case, it would be based on your core concept of content marketing such as:
- Complete Content Strategy or content planning
- Content Creation Strategy
- Content Distribution Strategy
Relooking at these three sub-strategies would help you find the gaps in your content marketing strategies and you can easily fill in those gaps to make it perfect.
Measure Your Metrics
The most important part of content marketing is measuring the metrics. If you consistently and carefully keep analyzing your metrics you will find the areas which need improvement.
You can use analytical tools like Google Analytics to measure your website’s or blog’s content marketing performance and gaps.
Once you have identified the gaps and areas of improvement it becomes very easy to fill those gaps and make your content marketing strategy perfect.
Relook at Your Content & Content Creation Strategy
Content is King and that is obvious from the amount of content you see on the internet.
Just go over the internet and key in anything you want to learn about and you will find thousands of weblinks in the search results.
And there is no end to it, every day millions of content pieces are created and uploaded on the internet.
Just creating content is not enough.
There should be thought, objective, and reason why your customer would want to consume your content.
You can find out the gaps in your content marketing by looking at the metrics and figuring out the problem areas.
For instance, the reason for your content marketing not achieving your goals could well be because your readers or visitors do not find your content valuable and engaging enough.
In this case, you have to start researching and writing informative and useful content that focuses on the pain-points of your audience. This can help you to engage them better.
Irrelevant content could well be that the reason your target audience is not getting engaged with your content.
If the content you are putting out does not address what the consumers are looking for, then you will see a high bounce rate on your website and blog.
In this case, you have to figure out what your target customers are looking for.
You can find that out by doing a survey among your target customers, checking questions being asked on Quora, Facebook, and other social media forums.
In case your content is not getting the required attention then there could be some SEO mistakes.
You can resolve that by implementing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase the organic traffic to your content.
Relook at Content Distribution Strategy
Even if you have all other components of your content marketing strategy perfect and the Content Distribution Strategy is not right you may not get the results you want from your content marketing.
You can check your metrics and find out where the problem lies in your content distribution strategy.
Another reason could be that you may not be distributing your content widely enough. In such a case, you should look at expanding your coverage by using more channels for the distribution of your content.
Influencers, especially authors and bloggers can help you reach your content to a wider audience. You can try reaching out to the social influencers if they can help you in your content distribution through their channels.
Try to distribute your content as much as possible. For instance, you may use:
- Email marketing
- e-Newsletters
- Blogs
- Websites
- Third-party websites
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Facebook Groups
- LinkedIn Ads
- LinkedIn Groups
- Social Media Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Native Ads
- Content Syndication
- Social Media Influencers
- WhatsApp Marketing
- SMS Marketing
There are many other ways to distribute your content, you just need to explore more channels you can make use of to distribute your content.
Conclusion
Content marketing is a strategic approach to reach out to the right audience in order to get their attention and direct them into your sales funnel. It is also important to make sure that once they are into your sales funnel they don’t fizzle out of it.
Once they get in your sales funnel you must constantly engage them through your content and offers to ensure that they only get out when they have bought your goods or services or both.
It does not end there; rather you have to keep serving them fresh and valuable content that will keep them coming back to you to buy more of your products.
Monitoring, measuring the metrics, identifying the areas of improvement, and improving is the key to success in content marketing. And obviously, this is the basis of an effective content marketing strategy.
