The last post looked at content marketing as a way of building your brand and attracting new customers. Today, we’re going to dive deeper into how to create a content marketing strategy that works for your business. 

How content marketing helps you

Simply put, it’s using the information you already have or that you produce in order to boost your brand, raise the profile of your products and services and generate new sales.

Content marketing can help your business develop new markets and generate new leads. It also can provide data that your marketing department can use for analytics, to help you further refine your messaging to lead to yet more sales, as well as helping you prepare and plan for any shifts in the market. 

Content is any information you produce, in any format, and deliver in any channel. It includes product information, user manuals, brochures and other selling documents, white papers, warranty statements and tips for customers. Ideally, customers should get information from you on how to best use your products and services.

For example, a manufacturer of microwave ovens would have content that includes product manuals and safety data sheets, and could also include a recipe book.

You probably already have a lot of content to use. Everything on your website, and every word, symbol, photograph or graphic image in your social media or advertising is your content. (Which means you should ensure that you have the rights to publish them, but that’s content for another blog post.)

With a content strategy, you maximize the return on your investment in its production. 

Steps in developing a content strategy

A content strategy is a type of communications strategy. As we’ve outlined before, we can sum up communications strategy as Get a GRIP: Goal, Reader, Idea and Plan. Review the post about GRIP to refresh your memory. 

We’ve already defined the goal of your content marketing strategy: 

• to develop new markets
• to generate new sales leads
• to provide data for analytics to refine marketing-communications strategy, tactics and messaging, and to plan for market shifts. 

Now, let’s look at the rest of the acronym.

Reader—ie, the audience. Who is going to read your content? Who do you want to read it? 

Every business needs to know its market—its ideal customer as well as its real customer. You need to know why they buy your products or services. What they need, what they want, and what they’ll willingly pay for.

Why should they care about what you sell? What problem they can solve with what you sell. Don’t create any content until you can answer that question. 

Idea—What is it that you are selling? What is the benefit of your product or service? What sets your company apart from the competition? 

There’s a lot of useless information on the Internet. You need your content to stand out, and the only way you can do that is by showing your market how your solution is better for them. Not for you, for them.

Some consultants call this the “value proposition” or the “unique selling point.” It doesn’t matter what the label is: it’s your solution to their needs.

As explained in Get a GRIP, you need to be able to explain this in one clear sentence. If you cannot do that, if you cannot express it to yourself in one sentence, you cannot explain it to anyone else.

Plan—Not only how you will you deliver your message, but how you will organize all the supporting information to explain your key message fully. This includes who it’s for and anything else they need to know to understand how to get the value of your service or product. For more details on that, see the Plan post. 

Once you’ve worked out the full message, determine which channel you’ll use to deliver it. Today, businesses need to use a suite of channels: traditional advertising, including print and signage; website and blog; broadcast, if you can afford it and it makes sense for your target market; and social media.

Format—What form will your messages take? Blogs? Infographics? Podcasts? Videos? Ideally, you should use a mixture, taking advantage of their distinct strengths. Remember, the overall messaging must be consistent across all formats and output channels. 

That doesn’t mean all messages should all be the same. You need to tailor the messages to the strengths and weaknesses of each channel. For example, Twitter restricts messages to 280 characters.

Different channels also appeal to different market segments, as well. The average age of Facebook users is rising, while channels like Snapchat tend to appeal to a younger demographic.

Monitor—A key part of any marketing strategy is monitoring the results so you can emphasize what’s working, change what’s not and prepare the rest of your business for the increase in sales.

Manage

All of this only works if there is clear assignment of responsibility for the planning of the strategy, development of the content and execution of the plan. 

But that’s a subject for the next post. 

Till then, keep a GRIP on your communications!