What is a content marketing strategy?
Content marketing drives valuable search traffic and social engagement. These in turn can increase the number of valuable actions taken by your audience.
To create a successful content marketing campaign, you first need a strategy! This sets out the objectives and scope of your project. It keeps everything on track while providing a roadmap outlining the different aspects of your campaign.
Applying funnel techniques
You can use the conversion funnel as a guide when planning your content marketing strategy. This enables you to map your content to key decision points in the consumer journey and address their needs. The conversion funnel helps you understand the consumer journey by tracking the different steps a typical consumer would complete on the way to taking a valuable action, such as a purchase, sign up, or contact request. Content marketers should use funnel insights and knowledge to drive more valuable customer engagement.
In order to apply funnel techniques to your content strategy:
- Begin with awareness content for the top of the funnel to get the word out there.
- Create consideration content for the middle parts of the funnel, when people are assessing options in the market.
- Produce high-impact conversion content for the bottom of the funnel. This drives people to take action.
- Create retention content for past purchasers to turn them into repeat purchasers, or even brand advocates.
- It might also be worth creating re-engagement content for people who’ve dropped out at different stages of the consumer journey to entice them back.
Where appropriate, marketers can use what is known as hero content as part of the funnel. This is high-value content that aims to drive brand awareness. Although it is created less frequently, it can cause a brand’s message to go viral! Examples of hero content include research studies, high quality infographics, e-books, and highly unique and desirable audio/video (AV) content such as exclusive videos or podcasts.
What is a content strategy?
So why develop a content strategy? Well, there are a lot of moving parts in a content strategy. Clearly, it’s a useful document to create to get buy-in and sign-off from stakeholders. It can also act as a roadmap for the project itself. And it can be referred to when queries arise and can be adapted to suit the changing needs of the campaign and audience, as required.
- A content strategy ensures content is developed for purpose by:
- Defining your objectives, KPIs, budgets, and audience personas
- Capturing your brand or campaign story
- Detailing production pieces, such as formats and timings
- Outlining distribution channels
- Measuring the performance of your content in terms of business impact and KPIs.
Credit source : Digital Marketing Institute
