How to Build a Written Content Marketing Strategy
Nearly 40% of successful B2B marketers use a documented framework to develop their content strategy. A written strategy provides a concrete vision for all stakeholders that ultimately ensures more efficient and effective execution of corporate goals. Joshua Nite of TopRank Marketing advises that:
“…it starts your content initiative with measurable goals and a plan to achieve them. It just makes every aspect of creating content and distributing it easier and more effective.”
Use the following steps to develop a structured content strategy.
1) Why: Use the knowledge you have of your audience to develop the business case for your content strategy, and a mission statement to support it.
2) Establish Goals: Create objectives that your content efforts can meet. Without overwhelming yourself, establish business goals for relevant departments such net new leads, or revenue influenced by content.
3) Document Your Audience: Using the research from step 1, develop personas—but only as many as your resources can support. Keep it simple.
4) Plan Content for Each Stage of the Buyer Journey: For most businesses you need content for each stage of the funnel: Awareness, Consideration, Decision. Be cognizant of the priority marketing challenges.
5) Define Goals for Content at Each Stage: This will support the broader goals from step 2. Attach KPI’s to each goal to quantify success.
6) Content Promotion Strategy: Buyers like to consume content differently. Use the research from step 3 to know where your audience is, and which channel(s) to leverage to reach them.
7) Create an Editorial Calendar: This step keeps you on-pace for achieving your micro and overall goals. Mapping content projects to goals ensures you are not creating more (or less) content than you need, helps manage resources, and keeps management in the loop. These are the key fields to have in your content calendar.
Have a look at Nite’s take on building a content marketing strategy in the link below.
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