Content marketing strategies can be invaluable to retailers.
The goal is to address the needs and interests of consumers, build authority, and foster relationships through blogs, videos, social media, and other content forms.
Your content marketing strategy isn’t to be confused with your content strategy or content plan. You’ll often find these terms used interchangeably when the three are separate and necessary assets for any marketing plan.
Your content marketing strategy is why you’re creating content, the audience you’re helping, and how you’ll help them in ways your competition cannot. Typically, this involves using content marketing to build their audience so they can either lower costs, earn more revenue, or reach better customers.
Your content strategy is broader in scope. It digs into the creation and publication of valuable and usable content. You’ll determine the titles and types of content and where you’ll publish them. Some will be posted on your website, while others will go to different sites where your audience will likely browse.
Your content plan is the tactical document outlining exactly how you’ll execute your content strategy and who will handle all the tasks.
Your content marketing strategy must come before you build your content plan. It is the marketing plan for your content, so it needs to include key topic areas you’ll cover, the content assets you’ll create, when and how you’ll share your content, and any specific calls to action to include.
With that said, let’s focus on what to include in your content marketing strategy.
Why content marketing?
Content marketing generates more than three times the leads for your business as outbound marketing; however, it costs 62 per cent less. Not only this, but a content marketing strategy can also affect other marketing activities you’re already using.
For instance, an ongoing content strategy can help you build more organic search traffic, increasing the chance your company will appear in the search results for users in your target demographics.
Having a content strategy in place can give you content to fuel social media syndication efforts. You’ll have updates to share on social media and content you can add to your email marketing campaigns. You can use your best material for a landing page to increase conversions for a paid advertising campaign.
Content marketing isn’t limited to just blog posts. You can use it with many assets, including white papers, video, audio, infographics, etc.
Think about your content marketing goals. Do you want to increase your customer base as a whole or boost the average order value?
Improve the quality of your customer base? Reduce marketing costs? What unique value are you aiming to provide with your content?
Consider your business model and the opportunities and obstacles you may encounter as you execute the plan.
Additional information
Buyer personas: Discuss the specifics of the audiences for whom you’re creating content. You’ll detail who they are, what they need, and what their content engagement cycle may look like.
It’s also a good idea to map out the content you can deliver throughout their buyer journey so you can help move them closer to their goals.
Brand story: Consider the messages you want to share and how your copy differs from the competition’s.
Remember to note speculations about how you believe the landscape will evolve after sharing the messaging with your audience.
Distribution channels: Outline the platforms you’ll use to tell your brand story.
Outline your goals, objectives, criteria, and processes for each one. Then, consider how you’ll connect them to maintain a seamless customer experience and cohesive brand conversation.
If you do not know where to start, consider the channels your target audience uses to connect with the brands they love—even if they are your competition.
Food for thought
If you struggle to find the time to develop a complete content marketing strategy, a one-page plan can simplify the process.
This plan includes a laserfocus on the goals your company aims to accomplish within the next year, how you-you measure progress toward those objectives, what the content marketing will do during the next year and the metrics you’ll measure to determine how successful the content marketing is.
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