Your content marketing strategy will be your guiding light in the preparation and promotion of your content. The initial commitment to creating a content marketing strategy may seem time consuming but it will actually save you time in the long run.
What are you trying to Accomplish?
Your content should align with your content marketing strategy. For example, are you trying to:
- drive traffic back to your site
- expand brand awareness in key demographics
- direct prospects to a lead-generation form
Determine your goal and then produce appropriate content for your mission and broader business objectives. Produce content that fits your capabilities and resources as best as you can. As you grow, you’ll be able to incorporate other types of content if necessary. You’ll be able to drive business as long as your content is genuinely useful and relevant.
How will you Measure it?
Decide how you’d like to measure your goals. Will you measure the attainment of your goals by a dollar amount, percentage, traffic count etc.? After you have identified your goals, determine which metric(s) you will use to keep track of your progress. For example, some companies use Google Analytics to measure page traffic, Salesforce to track leads and sales, industry or business specific tracking platforms etc. Use the business appropriate tracking tool to measure your content marketing efforts. 
Creativity
One word of caution. Don’t suppress creativity by only focusing on how a piece of content will help you to realize an objective. Try to create great content and determine how you can relate it to your content marketing objectives. For example, explore appropriate publishing channels for creative yet goal enhancing content.
Who are your Customers and Where are they Hanging out?
Create a profile of your target customers and particular buyer personas. Find out as much as you can about your target audience. Social listening will help you to create content that will appeal to them. For example:
- What kinds of content does your target audience share?
- Where does the content they consume originate?
- Are they mainly hanging out on instagram, twitter, facebook, blogs etc.?
- Can you best find them through search or passive advertising channels etc.?
Then what?
Use your content to help your audience attain their goals, remove their pain points, make something convenient for them to buy or experience, give them an edge, access, status etc.
How to Drive Traffic back to your Platforms
Now that you’ve created helpful content that will appeal to targeted buyer personas, you can publish the content in the form of a blog, social media ads, email newsletters etc.
Expand Brand Awareness in Key Demographics
Your content should reveal your industry and business expertise to a wide audience, not just prospects or customers. You may want to use the following to accomplish your objective: success stories or case studies, blogs, how-to-videos etc.
Direct Prospects to a Lead-Generation Form
Offer incentives. These incentives may be in the form of contests, guides, webinars etc.
If you follow through with these activities, you’ll be able to integrate your content marketing strategy with your business goals and ultimately obtain greater exposure, leads and sales.
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