Collaboration has its benefits when it comes to content marketing. Engaging a team of content creators to work together can promote inspired ideas, strong team communication, and marketing materials that drive results for your business.
But in order for your team to successfully collaborate and create marketing materials that support your bottom line, they must have a shared vision and goal.
Your team needs a content marketing strategy.
What is a content marketing strategy?
A content marketing strategy is a plan for publishing, maintaining and distributing valuable and relevant content for a defined target audience in order to attract, acquire and engage customers, with the ultimate goal of driving profitable customer action.
All of your content marketing pieces, including blog posts, white papers, case studies, PR, social media marketing, inbound marketing, PPC, SEO and more, should be guided by a content marketing strategy.
A content marketing strategy is not a content strategy
The root of content marketing is a marketing strategy: using content to deepen relationships with your customers. Content strategy, on the other hand, seeks to manage content as a strategic asset across an entire organization.
Learn more about the practices of content strategy here.
A strong content marketing strategy answers these questions:
- What goals should content achieve for your business?
- How will content achieve these goals?
- What audience are you targeting with your content?
- As it pertains to your business or industry, what are your audience's greatest needs?
- What ideas and messages will your company communicate through content?
- How often will you update content, and on what platforms?
- Who is creating the content?
- Does content look and feel the same across different teams?
How a content marketing strategy impacts your bottom line
So what does all this mean to you and your business? Creating a content marketing strategy not only sets your team up for success, it can make a positive impact on your company’s bottom line.
Here are the top six benefits you can expect to find from a content marketing strategy:
- Increased team efficiency.
A good content marketing strategy should define how much content needs to be produced, where it should be published, and when, plus the strategy for creating goal-achieving content.
That means your team has a schedule and doesn’t have to start from scratch on every piece of content they create, so they can create marketing pieces faster.
- More traffic.
Content marketing leaders experience 7.8 times more site traffic than non-leaders. The way to become a content marketing example? Craft compelling, valuable content your readers want.
That purposeful content starts with a defined content marketing strategy.
- Become an authority to your customers.
Each piece of valuable content you create and share helps build up your reputation as a helpful resource. When you do this consistently, customers (potential and existing) start to consult you as an authority when they have questions or are ready to make a purchase.
The key is making sure you truly know your target customer’s needs and what your business provides to address them — that’s the sweet spot where you can provide true value.
The best way to understand a customer’s needs? Understanding them and making them your own through empathy mapping.
- Better search engine rankings thanks to focused content.
Creating quality content specifically for your intended audience increases traffic to your site, which improves your site’s authority and relevance.
If your content is truly valuable (it will be if it’s created based on a content marketing strategy that captures what your audience needs), you can give yourself a boost in rankings, which helps drive even more traffic and, ultimately, generates more leads.
- Increased brand awareness and customer loyalty with consistent content.
Creating consistent, valuable content allows you to form stronger relationships with your desired audience. When a customer trusts your content, they are more likely to become loyal to your brand and become a brand advocate who shares your content.
This can lead to more awareness and recognition, which can help you attract more potential customers.
- More accurate goal setting and tracking.
Your content is also only as good as your ability to measure it. A content marketing strategy establishes your content’s goals so you can track, measure and assess whether content is effective.
You’ll get an idea of what’s working and driving results and what’s not, so you can adjust your efforts to maximize results.
Begin your content marketing strategy plan now
Ready to set your business up for success with a content marketing strategy? We can help with that. Give us a call at (602) 258-5263 or send us an email today to get started.
