Content Marketing Blog mint

Content Marketing Blog

Essential Steps to Develop Your Content Strategy

When you started your business, you may have begun with a business plan. Over time, your business plan may have changed and adapted as you learned more, and the marketplace changed. The current pandemic has definitely required many businesses to pivot on their strategies. Your content strategy must be dynamic, just like your business plan. Whether you’ve been creating content for many years or are just starting to invest in content marketing, you need to start with a solid foundation.

What Is a Content Strategy?

Before you can build a content strategy, you need to understand the basics. The Content Marketing Institute offers a simple and insightful definition as a starting point:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

A great example of content marketing before the internet is the Star Wars brand. After the first movie, the brand went on to produce comic books, novels, figurines and more, expanding consumer’s interactions with the movies. The SW universe expanded exponentially without the help of the internet, thanks to a sound strategy by the marketing team.

Your content strategy revolves around your core business and aligns with your business goals. It’s a roadmap that guides your content creation to improve your bottom line.

Components of a Sound Content Strategy

A good content strategy starts by looking at your business, your audience, and your goals. Content is storytelling, but if you aren’t telling the right story to the right audience, your content isn’t going to resonate with your audience.

Mission Statement

Essentially, your mission statement answers three questions:

  • Who is your content for?
  • What are you providing?
  • Why should customers care about your content?

When you answer those three questions, you create better content, because you have the right focus. Your mission statement can push you to achieve your best by getting the right content to the right people at the right time in their sales or interactional journey.

Identify Your Brand Voice

Your brand is how you relate to your audience. It’s akin to your business personality. Identifying your brand voice before you create content ensures consistency. Your brand may be clinical and scientific. If so, you may want to avoid creating memes that are light and playful. Your brand’s values and positioning need to carry through your content.

Who Is Your Audience?

Content is created for the consumer. In creating a content strategy, you’ll need to take a deep look into your audience. Don’t make generalizations, but really look at who is buying your products. Look deeper than basic demographics to find out what drives your customer. Once you understand your audience, delve into how they interact with your brand. Ask yourself:

  • What moves your customer through the purchase journey?
  • What is the pain point that drives a buyer to your product? 
  • What do you want the customer to do?
  • What information does the customer need as he or she interacts with your brand?
  • What channels do your buyers engage with as they move from interest to purchase?

Measure Success and ROI

Part of a good content strategy is to look at how well your content is working. There are many analytical tools that let you see what your audience is engaged with. A well-written blog post that your audience shares can help you refresh content to boost your SEO rankings and reach out in a new way. You should also measure sales and whether your audience is actually purchasing your product. Having a large audience that doesn’t increase your bottom line means your marketing dollars aren’t being spent well.

Develop Content that Aligns with Your Content Strategy

Once you have a content strategy, you can use that information to drive content creation. You probably have content assets that can be repurposed into new content for even more success. You may find that you have gaps in content where you aren’t responding to the customer’s journey. Your content strategy can now drive your content to relate to your customer more effectively. Having a focus for content helps you create content that improves your business.

Content marketing is your communication channel with your customer. Today’s customers have to sift through a lot of noise to find the products and services they want. Yelling louder isn’t going to help you get heard. Telling better stories that connect with your customer will. Discuss your content needs with the MintCopy team to find the best SEO writers that can provide content to help you be more successful with content marketing.

Use our online form to get in touch. You can also follow us on FacebookLinkedIn, and Twitter to stay up-to-date with the latest content marketing trends.

Resources:

Share


Recent Posts

Sheetal Pinto - 5/25/2023 06:00

In the past month alone, our team has worked with more than a few small businesses all fired up to jump on the content marketing bandwagon. Because guess what, they have heard of ChatGPT and other ‘magical’ content creation tools that fill them with confidence that they too can dish out content like a pro. Of course they can, with one caveat though—digital content, whether created using generative AI or by professional copywriters must serve a human audience for whom it proves undeniably valuable. So, we’ll take this opportunity to go back to the basics and cover the essentials of how to function effectively in the realm of digital content marketing.   

Sheetal Pinto - 5/11/2023 06:00

What Kind of Material Should I Read for Business Insights?

Reading is like the spinach of the writing world, except instead of bulging muscles, it gives you bulging vocabularies! The more you read, the more you absorb the written word and the better equipped you are to string together coherent sentences that engage, convert, and transform. It's like a superpower, except instead of flying or shooting lasers out of your eyes, you can craft an epic tale that will make people laugh, cry, and question their existence all at once. So don't skip your literary greens, folks. Your writing muscles will thank you!
Are you struggling to write compelling content for your business? Don't worry, you're not alone. But before you hit that panic button, remember what Stephen King said, "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." Yes, that Stephen King. The horror writer. If he can dish out writing advice, so can we! And the advice is simple: read. Here are 3 reasons to build a reading habit.

Sheetal Pinto - 4/13/2023 08:11

Affordable Content Marketing for SMBs - FREE eBook

Every small and medium sized business has unique challenges. Building a strong customer base is a common struggle for SMBs. The content writers at MintCopy have put together content marketing best practices and useful tips to help your content marketing efforts deliver the right results. Download this free eBook - our essential guide to creating content that will transform the way you attract and engage customers.

Sheetal Pinto - 3/30/2023 06:00

How to Avoid Making these Mistakes in Your Content

When you invest time and money in creating content for your website and other digital assets, you want to ensure you get a good ROI. Whether you hire a content agency, write content in-house, or hire a freelance copywriter, it’s important to monitor how published content is performing. Content that isn’t ranking well on Google might be ridden with mistakes that turn customers away and deter positive engagement. Here are three common content mistakes made by copywriters that could be keeping your content from reaching its full potential.

Sheetal Pinto - 3/16/2023 00:00

Content Marketing Best Practices that Garner Attention

Remember the movie, “Field of Dreams”? It made popular the phrase, “If you build it, he will come”. Shoeless Joe and other baseball legends may have magically appeared on a cornfield-turned-baseball diamond. However, when it comes to content marketing, your audience will need more than a field of dreams to attract their attention. If you’re trying to get more traffic to your website, don’t wait for your local SEO efforts to direct your audience. Give them a hand with these proven content strategies.

Sheetal Pinto - 3/2/2023 06:00

How to Use a Pillar Page to Improve your Content Quality

Consider the dictionary meaning of ‘pillar’ – “a firm, upright support for a superstructure”, also defined as “a fundamental precept”. Your content marketing campaign is your ‘superstructure’ that requires a ‘firm, upright support’. That’s the key function of content pillar pages. Without these essential supports, your ‘content superstructure’ will neither stand strong, nor will it attract the right attention.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/23/2023 06:00

Two Proven Ways to Organize Products with Similar Keywords

In business, cannibalization typically refers to a loss of sales. A company introduces a new product that displaces sales of an older, usually more outdated, product. Instead of having an increase in sales, the market growth remains stable. What does this mean in the world of SEO and content marketing? Keyword cannibalization occurs when two products have similar keywords or phrases and confuses the search engines about which page is right for which query. Instead of competing with other businesses for search traffic, you’re competing with your own web pages. Here’s why keyword cannibalization is bad for business and how you can overcome it.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/9/2023 06:00

How to Optimize your Content for a Global Audience

The global market is much smaller than it once was.  Statista reports over 5 billion internet users globally, or about 63.1% of the population. Reaching out to a broader market can help your business grow, but it’s not as simple as updating your website in a new language and simply hoping your audience finds you through search.

Sheetal Pinto - 1/26/2023 06:00

How to Build a Functional Content Marketing Funnel

Most people don’t wake up and think, “oh, today is the day I buy my new mattress,” unless they’ve researched different brands and checked pricing at different stores. Modern customers often take their time with major (and even minor) purchases. Using that information about today’s shoppers can help you design a content marketing map, or funnel, that guides the customer to your product.

Sheetal Pinto - 1/12/2023 15:49

Draw Insights from Your Competitors' Success 

According to Ahrefs, organic search drives over 53.3% of global traffic. Creating an SEO strategy is key to increasing your reach through search. As you’re setting new SEO goals for 2023, it may be useful to analyze what is working for your competitors. Also look at what they’re missing, to build that effectively into your own SEO strategy.