content marketing strategy

Effective Content Marketing Requires a Strategy — The 5-Step Process to Make it Strong

Bylori

Content marketing remains an effective way for businesses to reach their customers with relevant information that increases brand awareness, conversions and loyalty. Here is a five-step process you can use to create a consistent, documented content marketing strategy for your company.

  1. Know your brand and what you stand for: Acquire a thorough understanding of your brand, what it stands for and what you want to convey about it. Develop a thorough understanding of your audience and customers and know what they want and expect from your brand. Devise a consistent and recognizable voice for your company’s communications. Make sure this process involves executive-level personnel as well as the sales and marketing teams.
  2. Assign a qualified and trusted employee to manage the program: Assign the best person available to run your content marketing program. Employees with strong writing and research skills, editing ability and thorough familiarity with your company are the most likely candidates. Content marketing lives or dies by the quality of the writing and information provided; make sure your program manager can produce or edit material as needed.
  3. Know the latest trends and best practices: Successful content marketing programs require deep knowledge of the online environment and what is currently working for content marketers. Your specialists should understand the use of content marketing software, the most popular social media platforms and the trends that are shaping content delivery.
  4. Keep to a schedule: Devise an editorial calendar that will determine when blog posts are made, social media updates conducted, white papers or other information sources posted and informational emails sent. Your editorial calendar should also specify content topics and notes on the best way to use individual social media and information sites.
  5. Track and evaluate results: Use available tools to track the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. Some social media sites, for example, can give you statistics on how users have responded to your posts. Produce reports at least monthly and circulate them to everyone with a stake in your content marketing program.

How could you use these steps to make your content marketing program more efficient and powerful?

Image via Shutterstock.com