CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

What is Content Strategy?

In short, your content strategy is the piece of your marketing plan and development that
refers to the management of pretty much any tangible media that you create and own -- written,
visual, downloadable -- you get the picture.

You may have heard how important content creation is, but as we'll get into throughout
this post, it needs to have a well-planned purpose. When you develop a content strategy, there
are some key things to consider:

 Who you're creating it for

 The problem it's going to solve for that audience

 How it will be unique

 The formats you'll focus on

 The channels where it will be published

 How you will schedule and manage creation and publication

Why Do Marketers Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing helps businesses prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective
sources of website traffic and new leads. Think about it -- if you can create just one blog post
that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, an embedded link to an ebook or free tool will
continue generating leads for you as time goes on.

The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will give you the
flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue, such as sponsored
content, social media advertising, and distributed content. Plus, your content will not only help
attract leads -- it will also help educate your target prospects and generate awareness for your
brand.
Seven (7) Steps for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

1) Define your goal.

What's your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce
content and create a content marketing plan? Know your goals before you begin planning, and
you'll have an easier time determining what's best for your strategy.

2) Conduct persona research.

To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content's target audience --
also known as your buyer persona. This is especially important for those who are starting out or
are new to marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and
valuable content that they'll want to read and convert on.

If you're an experienced marketer, your target may have changed. Do you want to target a
new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target
audience? Revisiting your audience parameters by conducting market research each year is
crucial to growing your audience.

3) Run a content audit.

Most people start out with blog posts, but if you want to venture out and try producing
other content pieces, consider which ones you want to make. For instance, if you've been doing
weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an ebook that distills all your blog posts into one
ultimate guide would be a one way to offer information in a different format. We'll go over
several different types of content you can use further down on the list.

If you've been in business for a while, review your content marketing efforts and the
results from it in the last year. Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and
set new goals to reach.

4) Determine a content management system.

Have a system in place where you can manage your content. A few vital parts of content
management include content creation, content publication, and content analytics.
 If you're a Hub Spot customer, you can plan, produce, publish, and measure your results
all in one place using Hub Spot software. Other content management system options include Co
Schedule and Word Press.

5) Brainstorm content ideas.

Now, it's time to start coming up with ideas for your next content project. Here are some
tools to get the wheels turning:

 Hub Spot's Website Grader: Hub Spot's Website Grader is a great tool to

use when you want to see where you're at with your marketing. From your
blogging efforts to your social media marketing, Website Grader grades
vital areas of your marketing and sends you a detailed report to help you
optimize and improve each area. With this tool, you can figure out how to
make your website more SEO-friendly and discover new content ideas.

 What to Write: Get your mind gears going with What to Writer’s unique
content idea generator. This tool asks you questions that will help
jumpstart your brainstorming. It also generates several blog post ideas for
you after you've completed the questions, so you can use those ideas in
your content marketing plan.

 Hub Spot's Blog Topic Generator: Get blog post ideas for an entire year
with Hub Spot's Blog Topic Generator. All you need to do is enter general
topics or terms you'd like to write about, and this content idea generator
does all the work for you.

 Feedly: This popular RSS feed is a wonderful way to keep track of trendy

topics in your industry and find content ideas at the same time.

 Buzz Sumo: Discover popular content and content ideas at BuzzSumo.

Buzz Sumo uses social media shares to determine if a piece of content is
popular and well-liked, so this information will help you see which
content ideas will do well.
  Content Forest: Content Forest offers free tools, which include Keyword
Kiwiand Content Ideator. These tools will help you find popular content
from your competitors, effective keywords to use in your content, and
great content ideas all in one spot.

 Blog Post Headline Analyzer: Co Schedule's tool analyzes headlines and

titles and provides feedback on length, word choice, grammar, and
keyword search volume. If you have an idea in mind, run a few title
options through the Headline Analyzer to see how you could make it
stronger, and to move your idea further along in the brainstorming
process.

6) Determine which types of content you want to create.

There are a variety of options out there for content you can create. Here are some of the
most popular content formats marketers are creating and tools and templates to get you started.

o Blog posts

If you haven't already noticed, you're currently perusing a blog post. Blog posts
live on a website and should be published regularly in order to attract new visitors. Posts
should provide valuable content for your audience that makes them inclined to share
posts on social media and across other websites. We recommend that blog posts be
between 1,000 and 2,000 words in length, but experiment to see if your audience prefers
longer or shorter reads.

o Ebooks

Ebooks are lead generation tools that potential customers can download after
submitting a lead form with their contact information. They're typically longer, more in-
depth, and published less frequently than blog posts, which are written to attract visitors
to a website. Ebooks are the next step in the inbound marketing process: After reading a
blog post (such as this one), visitors might want more content from an ebook and submit
their contact information to learn more valuable information for their business. In turn,
the business producing the ebook has a new lead for the sales team to contact.
o Templates

Templates are a handy content format to try because they generate leads for you
while providing tremendous value to your audience. When you provide your audience
with template tools to save them time and help them succeed, they're more likely to keep
engaging with your content in the future.

o Infographics

Infographics can organize and visualize data in a more compelling way than
words alone. These are great content formats to use if you're trying to share a lot of data
in a way that is clear and easy to understand.

o Videos

Videos are a highly engaging content medium that are shareable across social
media platforms and websites alike. Videos require a bigger investment of time and
resources than written content, but as visual marketing increases in popularity -- after all,
it's 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content -- it's a
medium worth experimenting with. HubSpot Research recently found that video is the
most preferred form of content. Video also captures people's attention more than any
other content format.

o Podcasts

Starting a podcast will help audiences find your brand if they don't have time or
interest in reading content every day. The number of podcast listeners is growing -- in
2016, an estimated 57 million people listened to podcasts each month. If you have
interesting people to interview or conversations to host, consider podcasting as another
content format to experiment with.

o External Content
 Once you've been regularly publishing content on your own site for a while, it
might be time to start thinking about distributing your content on other sites. This could
entail a few things:

 Publishing website content on social media sites, such as LinkedIn

 Repurposing content into new formats and publishing them on

your blog or social media sites

 Creating original content specifically for external sites, such as

Medium

7) Publish and manage your content.

Your marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you'll create -- it should
also cover you'll organize your content. With the help of an editorial calendar, you'll be on the
right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website. Then,
create a social media content calendar so you can promote and manage your content on other
sites.

Many of the ideas you think of will be evergreen -- they're just as relevant months from
now as they are today. That being said, you shouldn't ignore timely topics either. While they
may not be the bulk of your editorial calendar, they can help you generate spikes of traffic.

Most people count on incorporating popular holidays such as New Year's and
Thanksgiving in their marketing efforts, but you don't have to limit yourself to these important
marketing dates. If there are niche holidays that might appeal to your audience, it could be
worth publishing content on your blog or on social media. HubSpot Staff Writer  Sophia
Bernazzani compiled this ultimate list of social media holidays -- keep an eye on it when
you're planning your calendar.

(See Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b14Axh8fwQ)

Success Stories

1. BuzzFeed – Quick Videos

A year ago, our Facebook feeds were flooded with Tasty videos that made us all don the
chef’s hat and head on to our kitchens.

The quick videos that are still floating on the internet show various comfort recipes; the
recipes that we would generally love to cook to beat the munchies. These tasty videos managed
to appease the content appetite of Facebook users to a great extent.

The Secret Behind The Success

The videos did not make us go grocery shopping; the ingredients could be easily
found in every person’s kitchen. Even a person with worst cooking skills could easily
cook food with the help of these videos. The autoplay video feature of Facebook worked
wonders for this innovative marketing strategy. Food is everyone’s weakness, so they
could easily engage everybody with their content.

2. Get Response – Jump To Influencers

Get Response used the genius marketing strategy of getting influencers to share their
valuable experiences of working with them.

Not just written quotes, they even got accompanying YouTube videos featuring various
influencers offering positive reviews for Get Response. Incorporating this strategy worked
amazingly well for them and soon they became the biggest email service providers in the world.

The Secret Behind The Success

Get Response had high profile clients who had a large following. They took the
testimonials from the individuals connected to content marketing. These influencers were
 well-known bloggers or content market experts who praised Get Response for providing
better traffic. Get Response knew that majority of people following these influencers
would also belong to the same category, i.e., content marketing. Therefore, getting these
influencers to promote their company meant more customers!

3. Rolex – Eternal Sophistication

Having a very strong image in the market, Rolex played it safe with minimalist content
and high definition images. The sheer sophistication that these timeless classics carry could not
be compromised with, but they did need some marketing technique.

Coming up with a completely innovative and fresh approach was not easy for Rolex, so
they decided to go with their own eternal sophistication technique. Their content was similar to
their product, brilliantly classic.

The Secret Behind The Success

Rolex knew that the timeless pieces it creates are enough to lure the audience. It
did not describe its product rather just gave an extremely detailed and high definition
photograph of it.

4. Go Pro – Stunning Visuals That Captivate Hearts

Go Pro took advantage of the masses’ increasing inclination for video content. Instead of
going the traditional way of written content, Go Pro used real-life videos to attract more
audience. It included its customers in its marketing strategy, compiling and editing videos
uploaded by the customers and then uploading it under the title, “People Are Awesome”.

The Secret Behind The Success

Go Pro got its customers to upload videos captured by the company’s products.
Being a producer of camera products, Go Pro was aware that people did not buy video
cameras solely because they wanted to capture their moments, but also because they want
to share their experiences with the world. Go Pro made its user upload more and more
videos, thus giving them a better platform. In turn, they got a better reach and lured more
customers into buying their products.
5. Optum – Quality Comes First

Optum made use of the most basic content marketing strategy, i.e., QUALITY. They
were more interested in giving quality content instead of focusing on new marketing strategies.
The campaign they worked for needed to inform and educate people. So, instead of delving into
other marketing strategies, they decided to work hard on the content. They created as many as
1000 pieces of content which included things like ebook, infographic, podcasts, articles, videos,
emails and many others.

The Secret Behind The Success

Optum knew that people needed information more than anything else and decided
to offer them what they desired. They educated people with their content and made sure
that it fed their desire to know more. The power that a good content can have was not
compromised in their marketing strategy. This was not a great innovation on their end,
but it did work wonders for them. This entire campaign exceeded Optum’s goals by
250%!

Conclusion

Many organizations have indulged into content marketing as they feel that traditional and old
marketing strategies don’t really help them and are even slow and expensive. In order to gain
more leads, content marketing is one of the best methods now. There are innumerable tactics you
can use to reach another height. Some of them were discussed above. Use the same techniques to
get yourself a larger audience just like they did.

REFERENCES:

Retrieved from: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-marketing-plan

Retrieved from: https://businesstown.com/5-brilliant-content-marketing-big-brands-success-
stories/