To help you create a winning content marketing strategy, we gathered insights from 14 content professionals, including marketing assistants, CEOs, and digital marketing executives. From building an editorial calendar to developing content pillars, these experts share their top tips for crafting a successful content marketing plan for your business.
- Build an Editorial Calendar
- Maintain Consistent Content
- Prioritize Proofreading
- Leverage Jobs-to-Be-Done Framework
- Set Clear Goals and Prioritize
- Conduct Audience Research
- Understand Your Actual Customers
- Collaborate with Micro-Influencers
- Implement Content Operations Framework
- Target Long-Tail Keywords
- Create Roundup Content
- Utilize Paid, Earned, and Owned Media
- Write Reader-Focused Content
- Develop Content Pillars
Build an Editorial Calendar
Creating a successful content marketing strategy for your business starts with building an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is a plan outlining what content will be created, when it will be published, and how it will be distributed. It includes topics, titles, authors, deadlines, and other relevant information.
Building an editorial calendar allows you to plan and organize your content so that it’s consistent and effective. Additionally, it gives you a better idea of what content your audience wants and needs, as well as how to measure its success.
Jaya Iyer, Marketing Assistant, Teranga Digital Marketing
Maintain Consistent Content
Create a plan and stick to it. From podcasting to blogging, people who follow you want to see regular and frequent content. On some platforms, the need for content is almost demanded, like YouTube. It is a helpful practice to share with your followers which days you upload or post—whether that be a new blog post, podcast episode, or YouTube video.
Julie Ann Howlett, Freelance Writer and Marketer, Julie Ann H Digital
Prioritize Proofreading
One thing that should never be missing from your content creation process is proofreading. So many companies make the mistake of skipping it completely or treating it as something that can be rushed through at the last minute.
Proofreading involves checking your content for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and inconsistencies in tone and voice. By incorporating proofreading into your content marketing process, you can ensure that your content is error free, polished, on-brand, and professional.
At a minimum, you can run your content through an online proofreading tool. This will help catch any basic mistakes. It’s even better if you can hire a proofreader to check for adherence to brand guidelines and consistency across all your content.
Amanda Napitu, Founder, Improving Your English
Leverage Jobs-to-Be-Done Framework
I’ve found that leveraging the jobs-to-be-done framework has been incredibly helpful in identifying content to produce. Product Managers use this framework to uncover exactly what the customer is trying to achieve.
From here they’re able to create features or new products that match this. I always remember the quote “people want a quarter-inch hole, not a quarter-inch drill.” We could say the same about content. Your customers want to know how to solve a problem, not necessarily why your product is the best in the market.
Luciano Viterale, Co-founder, Luciano Viterale Consulting
Set Clear Goals and Prioritize
A strategy for successful online brand building is content marketing. Your efforts to produce and promote content will be more effectively organized if you have a content marketing strategy. You can begin creating goals for your content strategy once you’ve finished your market and competitor analysis.
You can make sure that all of your efforts are focused on reaching your marketing goals by outlining them clearly. The ultimate goal may be growth, but you should be able to compare your outcomes to this objective, so it’s critical to be more detailed. Once these objectives are established, you can start outlining the key performance indicators (KPIs) that make the most sense.
You can target multiple objectives at once the more material you provide. But be careful not to overextend yourself. Focusing on just two or three objectives is preferable to trying to accomplish all of them and failing miserably.
Andre Oentoro, Founder and CEO, Breadnbeyond
Conduct Audience Research
One specific step we followed in creating a successful content marketing strategy is to conduct research to better understand your audience and their interests. This includes understanding their pain points, what motivates them, and what types of content they prefer.
By doing this, you can create content that resonates with your audience and addresses their needs. You can also use this information to identify the channels and platforms where your audience is most active, so you can distribute your content more effectively. Additionally, it’s important to measure the success of your content marketing efforts through data analysis so you can refine your strategy over time.
Brenton Thomas, CEO, Twibi
Understand Your Actual Customers
So many companies make the mistake of creating a content marketing strategy based on who they want as customers, rather than who their customers actually are. Your content and overall marketing efforts will land so much more effectively if you truly understand the challenges and desires of the people who are engaging with your brand and purchasing your products or services.
Talk to them directly; don’t just rely on whatever limited data you can access. Remember, there’s a human being on the other side of the screen. Connect with them on a human level, and the results will speak for themselves.
Rachel Honeyman, Content Marketing Consultant, Honeyman Creative Solutions
Collaborate with Micro-Influencers
Collaboration with micro-influencers is one specific tip for developing a successful content marketing strategy for your business. They may have a few thousand to tens of thousands of followers, but their engagement is often high, and their followers trust their recommendations and ideas.
Working with micro-influencers can be a new and effective approach to spreading your message and reaching your target audience. Offer micro-influencers one-of-a-kind content opportunities that apply to their interests and expertise.
This could include guest blogging, content co-creation, or conducting collaborative webinars. To encourage them to participate, be creative, and provide something of value.
Kelly Chan, Marketing Manager, Accountant Online
Implement Content Operations Framework
Creating a successful content marketing strategy can easily be done by clustering all the relevant keywords you want to rank for on Ahrefs or SEMrush. And just like that, you’ll have a few months or even years of content ideas.
The problem comes in executing it.
That’s why a content operations framework is vital to ensure your strategy stays on track and continues to pump out content like clockwork.
This will involve three parts: your technology stack, your knowledge transfer protocol, and your hiring process.
Whether you are running a blog or a YouTube channel, you need a seamless way to hire and onboard new content creators fast and frictionless.
Brendan Aw, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, brendanaw.com
Target Long-Tail Keywords
One specific step for creating a successful content marketing strategy for your business is to conduct keyword research and identify relevant long-tail keywords to target with your written content. Long-tail keywords are phrases of four or more words that have less competition and a clear search intent.
Because of this, targeting these keywords in your written content will allow you to rank much higher in search engine result pages (SERPs), attracting relevant and organic traffic to your website.
Moreover, as the search intent is much clearer for these keywords, you can more easily identify and write about how your products/services match the searchers’ needs. This will help to increase your conversion rates, increasing your sales in a cost-efficient manner.
Nicolas Montauban, Growth Strategist, Codific
Create Roundup Content
Roundup content is a great way to create content and information, especially for long-tail searches. If you are trying to rank an e-commerce website, it’s increasingly important to think not just about the words or phrases that potential clients are asking for but to think about the questions they are asking, the answers to those questions, and how you create that content.
Roundup content, where you ask questions and compile a combination of answers, is important because it provides different perspectives and angles that can be used to develop in-depth and long-tail content and information.
Gresham Harkless Jr., Founder, Blue16 Media
Utilize Paid, Earned, and Owned Media
For creating a successful content marketing strategy, it’s important to take advantage of all three forms of media: paid, earned, and owned.
Each form of media has its own unique benefits, and when used together, they can help you maximize your reach and achieve your marketing goals. By diversifying your marketing strategy and taking advantage of all three forms of media, you will see more traffic, leads, and ultimately more sales of the product or service you are selling.
Mike Wood, Digital Marketer, Legalmorning
Write Reader-Focused Content
Remember, the content is not for you; it is for a prospective or current customer/client. Don’t write content using internal marketing language; write content that makes the reader feel like you have authority in your space without making them feel intimidated while reading it. When you know your product and service and work in it daily, the line separating helpful and actionable information and overwhelming is thin.
The content needs to strike a tone that is appropriate to the reader’s knowledge, regardless of their search intent.
Jeanne Eury, Owner, 8 Arms Group, LLC
Develop Content Pillars
Regarding blog content, creating content pillars are essential to the success of a campaign.
The focus of blog content is to get relevant keyword rankings for terms that best suit your target audience. These keywords will be backed heavily by secondary keyword terms and will help boost your focus keyword.
Content pillar pages are areas that allow relevant keywords to surround your focus keyword and support your campaign.
In the research phase, come up with all the relevant keywords that you would like to rank for to push your focus keyword, and then come up with blog titles based on those keywords.
Robin Francis, Digital Marketing Executive, Growthlabs
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