Get Your Content Marketing Strategy Started in 60 Minutes
Creating a content strategy can seem daunting to even the most creative and experienced marketers. With so many digital channels, diverse audience segments, different teams, varying opinions and measureable factors, just getting started can seem like the hardest part. The good news is if you are aware of all these contributing factors, you are already on the right track to defining a content marketing strategy that will work.
Don’t let the scale and steps involved in the task keep you from getting started. You only need one hour and a few guiding questions to get your team working towards clear, actionable, and cohesive content marketing goals. You can emulate the proven methods used by Best-in-Class B2B Content Marketers – here’s what it takes!
In this article from Marketing Land, you will find 8 critical checkpoints, to help you get started on a solid content strategy:
- Business Goals: Start with the big picture by outlining the major business goals your content marketing can support.
- Content Goals: Narrow down how each piece of content you publish will support these larger goals. If you have competing or overlapping goals, try to prioritize or find harmony between them.
- Your Audience: Make sure the content you create is speaking to the right audience at the right time. Identify who your customers are, where they spend their time online, and what kind of content they are engaging with and sharing. It may be helpful to create a customer persona (or multiple ones) to tailor your content appropriately.
- Competitors: Take a peek at what your competition is doing to distribute their content, how often they are posting, and where they are leaving gaps for you to excel. This contrast can help you understand your own strengths and weaknesses.
- Realistic Content: Quality trumps quantity, but frequency also matters in the rapid digital marketing space. Be realistic about your team’s content generation and the quantity you can expect to produce on a regular basis. Having the best SEO copywriters on your team is beneficial, but only if they have the bandwidth to keep up with the pace of content generation you need in order to reach your audience effectively.
- Channels: Identify where the content you produce will live on your website, social media profiles, and other distribution channels.
- Content Team: Recognize who will be doing the work and delegate new tasks if necessary. If you need better SEO copywriting or professionally written blog posts, consider hiring a copywriting agency to fill in any gaps in your team.
- Measures of Success: Set a timeline and identify KPIs that can be accurately measured to determine if you have achieved what you set out to accomplish.
While a detailed and fully conceptualized content marketing strategy will certainly take longer than one hour to materialize, this handy template from Vertical Measures can help guide your conversation and kick start your plan. This one hour can break your strategy into pieces that make the process more manageable. Once the building blocks are in place, you and your team can start filling in the gaps and expanding on the specific details.
Need help creating quality web content or producing more engaging blog posts? If you need help meeting your content marketing goals, MintCopy can help. We provide engaging, effective, share-worthy content that converts. Give us a call today at 888-646-8003 to discuss your copywriting requirements or send us an email.