Developing a content marketing strategy 

Step1 – Set Your Mission and Your Goals

A good starting point is to set out a content marketing mission statement, which will help you make the whole process easier and focus on what’s important. A content marketing mission statement includes: 

• Your target audience
• The content you’ll use to reach them 
• The benefit your audience will get

You’ll also need to think about what your business will gain from your content marketing strategy. This is where your business goals come into play. Common or typical business goals can include: 

• Improve revenue 
• Making more sales 
• Getting more traffic 
• Improving the perception of your business 
• SEO success 
• Reduced marketing costs
• Social media engagement

Step 2 – Identify Your Top Audiences 

Relevancy magically creates time and attention, to be relevant we have to understand who we’re talking to and targeting. 

1. Audience, motivated individuals with a common interest or agenda, e.g. shopping or buying similar products. 
2. Segment, cross sections of an audience who share one or more common traits, e.g. age, gender, local area. 
3. Persona, a data informed characterisation of the goals and behaviours of a group of users, e.g. happy-chappy, glum-chum. 

Whichever audience definition you use or look to when guiding your content marketing efforts, make sure you focus on the top ones with engagement, look at their ideals not just demographics. Remember you are not your audience, focus on their needs and wants not yours. 

Step 3 – Pick Topics and Identify Keywords 

As a content marketer, your goal is to educate and inform your audience and in turn build their trust while generating worthwhile conversions. One way to find topics is to find out what prospects and customers most about when related to the subject. Keyword research is identifying the keywords that are relevant to your business, industry and audience, which will become the backbone of your content development. You can create content around keywords that will drive traffic and higher SEO rankings for your website and brand. 

Step 4 – Consistency Is Key 

A content strategy must have a long term goal, over a long period of time you’ll start to see content and social engagement rise, providing you with richer audiences. Every piece of content you produce is essentially a lesson in branding and should contribute to your company’s wider image. You should work to create a tangible brand voice and image through every piece of content you create to enhance consistency. 

With these four steps you’ll be much closer to achieving goals and seeing results when it comes to a content marketing strategy. All you have to do now is create the content and get it out in front of your audience. 

At Blue Whale Media, we have a full in-house content and marketing team, so if you need help or would like our assistance when creating a content marketing strategy then give us a call or drop us an email.