5 Best Practices to Develop or Innovate Your Content Marketing Strategy

Did you know that an effective content marketing strategy can generate three times more leads than the traditional ways of marketing like billboards and TV advertisements?

Well, that seemed to get your attention! 

Whether you’re a newly-founded startup that wants to build an empire or a well-renowned market leader seeking to launch a new product line, content marketing can help you build your success stories. By implementing well-organized, productive content marketing strategies, you can put a sustainable business model in place that engages with your target audience and keeps them coming back for more. However, you can’t just slap something random together and expect it to take off!

To get high-quality, considerable traffic and potential leads, ensure that your brand’s content marketing strategy succeeds. If you are new in this particular area and not aware of what goes into content marketing, consider hiring a professional digital marketing agency or qualified content marketer for the job.

This article will help you create a good plan for your content marketing strategy and provide tips on promoting your content to get more visibility and leads.

Why Content Marketing in the First Place?

In today’s world, it’s all about the content you produce and how many people are consuming it. The reason is simple: if you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to keep your content fresh, informative, and engaging.

Truly successful companies rely heavily on content marketing strategy for different reasons, including increased brand awareness, organic traffic, and customer engagement, for their site and brand. Besides, content marketing plays second fiddle in building and nurturing relationships with your audience over time, ultimately increasing your business’s credibility, authenticity, and reputation. Using the power of these values can influence your target customers’ buying decisions. That’s one of the key reasons why more and more online consumers are turning in favor of dipping into articles and videos that solve their concerns and interest them. This shift has also driven businesses to invest in professional content marketing and SEO agency in Los Angeles and stay ahead of the game.

How to Achieve Content Marketing Success? 

If you are a business owner, like most of the others, you must be pretty tempted to make your business big in a short time with the help of content marketing. But unfortunately, while content marketing can help your business in many ways, be it customers or sales, it is not a quick or easy process.

Most businesses assume that it doesn’t matter whether or not the content they’re offering to their customers is half-baked, as long as they are writing something. But, remember, a futile and inadequate content marketing strategy won’t benefit your brand in any manner. Instead, you need a tactical, constructive strategy if you aim to improve the quality and quantity of your traffic, leads, and sales.

Content marketing is a constantly-evolving and ongoing process, which takes monumental effort, years of expertise, and extensive knowledge to bring off successfully. So, unless you’re an experienced content marketer yourself, hiring a professional digital & content marketing agency would be the right choice.

Best Practices to Develop or Innovate a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

If you’re entering the world of content marketing, you better be ready with a comprehensive strategy that will help you get actual results for your business. A well-organized and productive content marketing strategy can be used with any sales, marketing, or advertising campaign and deliver exceptional, measurable results.

Whether you strive to build a customer-centric strategy from scratch or re-invent your existing strategy to win over new clients, here are some valuable practices & tips to build a great strategy.

Practice #1: Define Your Goals and Objectives, both Business and Marketing

“No matter what business you are into, the most critical step in developing an innovative content marketing strategy is planning.”

While some businesses can create their marketing strategies on the fly, this is not usually enough for long-term success. Instead, you need to come up with a plan that will guide you through each step of the process. Doing so will also give you enough time and breaks to fall back on, just in case things don’t exactly go as planned.

The process of building a successful content marketing strategy begins by pinpointing what your business wants to accomplish through its online presence. Here are a few key questions you need to ask yourself:

1. What are the main goals of your company?
2. Who are your target market and audience?
3. Do you intend to achieve long-term goals or short-term objectives?
4. What are the psychographics, geographic, and demographics of your potential buyer personas?
5. What resources would you require to support your business goals?
6. What kind of content would your target customers find interesting and like to read?
7. What is the end purpose of the content that you’re thinking of creating?
8. How much time and money would the entire process take?

Practice #2: Develop Detailed Customer Personas

“Don’t get caught up in the hoopla and hype surrounding content marketing, and remember the reason why you are creating such content in the first place: to attract and retain customers.”

It may seem obvious, but most companies overlook the significance of this step and end up with leads that add no value to their business. That usually happens because they focus on creating content for search engines rather than their prospects and customers.

Your customers are not ‘Search engines’ — they’re real people with emotions, desires, and a wide range of knowledge levels and experiences. When they’re visiting your website or reading your blog posts, they have different goals, so why aren’t you treating and targeting them individually?

You need to create comprehensive customer personas that include their demographics, interests, pain points, buying behaviors, and more. Even if you are about to launch a new offering in the market, you need to define your audience at the beginning and give your strategy a makeover accordingly. It will help you create targeted content that speaks directly to your different customer types. You’ll also be able to measure the effectiveness of each piece of content because you can track which pieces resonate with each persona—and which ones don’t.

Practice #3: Focus on Customer Journey Map

“Making your customers’ journey and experience exceptional on your website or blog is the key to successful content marketing.”

Suppose you’re in charge of your company’s marketing strategy. In that case, you already know how critical it is to produce content that engages perfectly with your target audience and improves their overall experience.

Creating the customer journey map and describing their search process will help you capture your customers’ steps before and after purchasing. Additionally, it gives a clear and cut picture of how they interact with your product or service and potential opportunities to optimize your communication.

Your marketing agency may ask you the below questions when mapping your customer journey plan:

1. Are you able to pinpoint the problem your customers face?
2. How would your product or service solve your target audiences’ concerns?
3. How does your target audience behave online?
4. Is there a space in the market that you can fill? If so, how does your product compare to competitors?
5. What is the ideal customer conversion rate for your business?
6. What prevents your customers from moving to the next sales pipeline stage?

Answering these questions and mapping the journey in advance will enable you to provide your audience with relevant and engaging content and convert them successfully.

Practice #4: Determine the content types you need to create

“Focus on creating content aligned with the lifecycle of your potential customers.”

Once you have created buyer personas, the next step is to create the right content for each stage of the customer lifecycle. The problem is that there are different forms of content, such as articles, social media posts, Infographics, and video content. With so many possibilities and options, it can be challenging to figure out which ones will significantly impact your business.

To ensure success with your content strategy, first, determine what kind of content is best suited to your audience. For example, do your customers want to know about new products, upcoming sales, or special events?

Understanding what kind of content to provide can enable you to compel your visitors to take action on your website’s call-to-action and convert them into leads or customers. In addition, it will also help you define the frequency of when to deliver the content and through which channels.

Practice #5: Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

“If you’re not tracking your content marketing strategy, you’re missing out on key opportunities to understand what works and what doesn’t. So, track and measure everything you’ve done so far.”

Content marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach — every company has different goals and resources. The challenge lies in determining which strategies are most likely to succeed and how your team can support them. Without metrics in place, you risk producing high-quality content that never gets read or shared.

Determining and establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) for your content will help you measure its success and effectiveness over time. You can ask the Phoenix SEO agency to establish benchmarks for specific pieces of content so that you can track their performance.

Takeaway

Content marketing should be your main priority to grow your audience and build trust among clients and potential customers. However, it can also be time-consuming and challenging to manage if you don’t have a proper plan in place. The success of your strategy significantly depends on how well you develop and execute your plan. So, jumping on the bandwagon, decide on a clearly defined strategy, create valuable content, and then find the right way to distribute it.

Are you hunting for the best content marketing & SEO agency in New York, Los Angeles, or Phoenix to develop a constructive strategy that best aligns with your content goals? Contact us to know how we can make your content marketing strategy effective and beneficial for your business.