What is content marketing and how to build an effective strategy

Nowadays, creating engaging and quality content seems to be the only strategy

that can guarantee the survival of publishers. In fact, good content brings with it a loyal and attentive customer base, which in turn means organic traffic, greater chances of collecting first-party data, and almost endless opportunities for retailers to refine sales strategies. Unfortunately producing quality content is not enough, the editorial plan must be supported by a well-defined content marketing strategy, otherwise, the road to failure is dangerously close.

For example, it is very unlikely that you want to reach any target, much more likely you want to target a very specific segment. Similarly, you don't want to solicit any action but prefer your users to focus on some particular action. This is why taking some time to define your content strategy is so important and generates so much better results than just throwing yourself headlong into content production without having a clear editorial plan behind it.

 

First step: define your goals

The first thing to do when defining a strategy is to identify your goals and objectives because, in the absence of this crucial first step, any action would be nothing more than a waste of time. So you have to answer questions like “ what are the business goals I need to achieve? "And" how will the content I plan to produce and my content marketing strategy brings me closer to reaching it? "

During this phase, we should also try to define in which cases we can say that we have been successful, if possible in a quantitative way and any case understandable and shareable. For example "I want to increase sales by 5%" is a better goal than the generic "I want to increase sales". In other words, goals should always be measurable. The definition of a time frame is also very important, i.e. what needs to be done in how much time.

 

Second step: identify your audience

 

Good, excellent, interesting, is extremely relative concepts: they strongly depend on who you are in front of. In other words, some content may be of value to a certain audience but completely useless and uninteresting to another. This is why it is so important to define the audience you want to target.

As a publisher and/or retailer, you will probably have had the opportunity to collect a large amount of first-party data about your users. These are of enormous value because they allow you to analyze and understand your audience, predict the type of content they might be interested in and the problems they need to solve. At this point we can start thinking about how the content produced can help the identified audience to solve the above problems.

A publisher or retailer may also be interested in attracting a different cluster of people that they think could be a strategic advantage. In any case, adequate user analysis is at the heart of any effective content marketing strategy. You should define " personas ", try to identify their motivations, and draw up a map of their paths through the site or app.

 

Here are some questions you need to ask yourself about personas:

• What are their goals and how can they be helped to achieve them?

• What are their motivations?

• Where do they encounter difficulties / what problems are they confronted with?

• Which channels are most engaging for them?

• And consequently: how can storytelling be used to create a connection with these users?

 

Check what content you already have

 

Once you have defined your goals and understood how to talk to your users, you should check the content you already have. We need to understand how they are performing and if they are adequately supporting the new editorial strategy. Your SEO strategy could also benefit from this course of action, especially if you understand how to refine old content so that it fits perfectly with your current and desired audience. You could save time and effort by restyling old content, for example by turning simple articles into videos or infographics.

 

The crux: develop an editorial plan

 

This is the heart of the whole process. Basing decisions on what has been discovered, on research on keywords, on trends, and performance, it is necessary to understand which topics could be most profitable, the tone of voice to use, and the most suitable time to publish. Care must be taken that every step of the user's journey is covered, from awareness to consideration to decision and finally to building loyalty and sharing. An editorial plan must therefore be defined and assign a priority to each task, making sure that the contents are carefully diversified in such a way as to produce the right type of content for each user. This is a very difficult part of developing an effective editorial strategy.

If you are interested in mastering this area you could greatly benefit from a course, for example, Digital Marketing Master and Digital Marketing Essentials Master from Talent Garden, which can give tremendous support in acquiring all the necessary knowledge and skills.

 

Choose the medium and channels for your content and promote them

 

Deciding what content to produce isn't the only thing necessary. The channels you are going to publish on are equally important as not every channel is suitable for every content and every user. It will be appropriate to use proprietary media (the website and social channels) but you can also choose a mix between paid and proprietary media, and you can decide - for example - to give priority to a video streaming platform over a traditional one. static platform.

 

Evaluate performance

 

Finally, never underestimate the importance of numbers! You have to make sure you can correctly evaluate the performance of your content since this is the only way to understand if they are bringing real added value and if they are helping to achieve their goals. So before getting involved in a content marketing plan, you need to make sure you have access to a solid analytics system tailored to your needs. Once the system is set up, it needs to be monitored and you need to understand how to interpret the results.