Currently, 35% of businesses have a content marketing strategy. While this number is increasingly growing, many of these businesses that employ content marketing are failing at their efforts. Most content marketers focus on one story, publish, and move on instead of developing a content marketing strategy. What should be included in this plan? Below are the 5 essentials to make a successful content marketing strategy.
1. Know your audience
It’s extremely important to understand whom you are creating your content for. To determine the characteristics of your audience, create buyer personas. Buyer personas include demographic information and personality features that define the customers your business has and/or wants. In order to create successful content, you have to know what your audience wants before it does. The only way to do this is to understand your audience completely.
2. Match your content to the sales cycle
The sales cycle can be divided up into three stages: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. The awareness stage is for customers who have never heard of your business. For them, create content that informs them about who you are and what your mission is. The consideration stage is when your customer is aware of your business but is not hooked on purchasing your product yet. For this customer, create content that exemplifies your competitive advantage over your competitors. In the decision stage, customers are more incline to purchase your product and this is when the sale happens. Create content that gives this audience the final push to purchase your product.
3. Make your content
Of course, all of these steps are only good if your content is exciting, entertaining, and contains a purpose. By understanding your audience and what stage in the sales cycle you are in, you can create content that is tailored to your target market.
4. Get your content out there
Once your content is generated and published, it’s time to get it out there and promote your content. Content marketing is composed of two parts: content generation and marketing efforts. Promote your content on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Include a link to your blog at the end of your signature on emails. Promote through channels that are relevant to your audience so they know you are creating content just for them.
5. Analyze your content
Once your content is published and out there, you need to analyze how it performed. Many content marketers forget this essential step in the content marketing process. In order to make future content successful, it’s imperative to analyze past content and determine what makes each piece of content successful or unsuccessful.
Even though content marketing is becoming increasingly more popular in business strategies, many businesses have not created successful content marketing strategies. With these 5 essentials, your business won’t have the same fate. Do you have any other essentials to a content marketing strategy?