Are you wondering where to start with your content marketing strategy? Here are the most important essentials!
Analyze the Data
Good content marketers don’t just create great content; they also regularly measure the results of their efforts.
Whatever your goal is, it’s essential that you analyze the results of your content using data-driven approaches. Otherwise, you would be wasting money and time on content that isn’t helping your business. Your success could be measured through general traffic with Google Analytics, in social shares, or “attention metrics” like scroll depth.
Optimize Your Content
We cannot skip mentioning the use of keywords to optimize your content. Content, like other elements of internet marketing, has to be properly optimized for search engines. Try to target one or two keywords in a text first in order to make your content more effective.
Answer Questions
We mentioned the value of targeting specific keywords above. In case you’re already doing this, you’re probably targeting and ranking for a good number of simple keywords relevant to your industry. While this is a valid strategy, trying to rank for complex search queries can have even better results, such as ranking in the Google Featured Snippet, also known as position zero.
Know Your Audience
When creating content for your audience, keep it relevant to your industry, and focus on how your services and products can help solve a customer’s problem. You can use various tools, like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, to learn more about your website’s demographics.
Armed with this knowledge, you can decide better what kinds of topics and what style of writing you can use in your social media posts, blog posts, and website content.
Know When and Where to Post
You can write the best blog posts, but if they are posted on a platform your audience doesn’t visit, or at a time when your audience won’t see them, they will likely go unnoticed on the Internet. Knowing your audience will give you an idea about what websites and industry blogs they read and what social media platforms they use.
Make a Content Calendar
As part of your strategy, you’ll need to plan exactly when you will publish your content on each of the platforms you use.
Lack of planning can be a critical content marketing mistake, so it’s crucial to use a content calendar to schedule all your posts. There are a few ways to do this. For instance, you can use Google Calendar and simply insert the due dates for each post there. This works best if you’re not publishing a lot of content frequently.
Find the Relevant Questions
We mentioned before the need to create content around what your audience wants to see. For this purpose, you can use Buzzsumo’s Question Analyzer or Answer the Public.
Find a question that seems relevant to your audience, determine the type of content it fits, and add a title of the post to your calendar. Repeat this process until you have planned enough content for the next few months.
If you need any help with your content marketing, feel free to contact us!
