A Content Marketing Strategy Framework

If you have not been proactive in re-evaluating your content marketing strategy or efforts, it’s high time to reconsider and redevelop it. Even if you have not been focusing on content marketing, let me tell you that time is changing and you will have to make use of content if you want to remain competitive within your industry vertical.

So, no matter whether you have been or not content marketing previously, you will now need a strong content marketing strategy to get found online in 2013. Generally, too much focus is put into selling the products instead of building a connection with the audience. Think of the connection and engagement with your addressees as the primary thing and then try to understand how and when to push the content in the market. However, before this, you must have relevant content beforehand to publish.

Developing a Content Marketing Strategy

When developing a content marketing strategy, there are a few things that you should consider immediately after you decide to take a plunge in this field. These include understanding the basic purpose of your content marketing efforts, analyzing the audience, as in, who all are included in your target audience, what you’re aiming at or how you want to present yourself or your offerings and what type of content, whether informational, technical or conversation, you want to push in the market. The form of content, such as text, vocal and pictorial, also plays an important role in the process of developing a content marketing strategy.

Content marketing although is not the newest trend in the internet marketing. It’s been around for quite some time now but it’s popular more than ever. Let us see how to work on the above mentioned basic essentials to get your content marketing strategy right.

Purpose of Content Marketing

Your content marketing efforts will be more fruitful if you are able to find the correct answers for these questions:

What’s your goal – to create awareness, gain more traffic to your eCommerce website or increase your sales? It’s obvious that you want to use your content to meet all your goals but in the beginning, it should be to connect with your audience.

What you actually want to push – basic information about your offerings, technical specifications or a combination of both?

What are the problems that your product or service can solve and how they are beneficial to your customers?

Target Audience

This is the biggest question that you come across, not only when developing a content marketing strategy but also when developing new products or starting a new business. Understanding your target audience is really important to generate desired response of your marketing efforts. See, what you need to ask yourself when deciding your target market:

Who do you want to connect with – youngsters, adults or seniors; men, women or both; students or working professionals?

Who can benefit from your products or services – techno-geeks, health-conscious people, and people belonging to higher segments of society or hobbyists?

What type of visitors you expect for your website – regular browsers looking for information or potential buyers you are looking for various options?

Type of Content

Once you know your marketing purpose and audience you want to target, the next step is to identify the type of content, in order to establish a connection with your existing and potential customers. Ask yourself these questions regarding how you will contact your audience:

What are you aiming at – initial interaction, providing information or offering technical specifications?

Whether you want your content to be conversational or purely informational?

Where your roots are and what personality you want to create for your brand?

Do you want simple or sophisticated content going out?

What style do you want to maintain when it comes to the content or message going out to your target audience?

Form of Content

Form of content is really important nowadays. There are some who are interested in reading stories, while some are just looking for quick pointers to speedily grab the crux of the matter. Some like to read while some like to watch. There are some people who like infographics.

It’s quite difficult to focus on everything in the beginning but then you can generate at least two forms of content and gradually focus on other forms. However, keep a track of the content that you audience like the most. Initially you can decide

Whether you will push content only through your website or you want your audience to scan your blogs?

Whether you want to push content through whitepapers or social media?

Whether you want to draft content in the form of text or video or both?

Your content marketing strategy doesn’t end here; rather there are several other elements that you need to focus on. Analyzing your competitors, type of content they are generating, understanding what goes into search engine optimization, analyzing how to include social media in your strategy and finding right content writers are some of the complex processes that you will have to go through while developing a content marketing strategy.

Who Are Your Competitors?

A keen understanding of your competitors and content they are pushing is certainly required. After all, this is how you understand the content marketing trends in your industry. Moreover, you can find out what’s the hottest among people and what they like the most. This way, you can create content that is more effective.

What Goes into Search Engine Marketing?

Arguably, quality content is what you need to come in the good books of your audience as well as search engines. However, content anchored with search engine optimization helps you quickly and more effectively reach your audience.

Including Social Media in Your Content Marketing Strategy

Your content marketing strategy cannot ignore social media, as your online success heavily depends upon social sharing. Analyze how you are going to make an entry on various social networking sites and how you’re going to connect with your audience. To be successful on social media, you’ll have to put dedicated efforts continuously. You will have to generate and share innovative content almost daily.

Finding the Right Content Writers

Finding the right content writers is the most important as well as difficult task in the whole process. This is because, it’s the content written by them that you are going to publish on your website, social media, blogs, newsletters, e-mailers, networking sites, etc.
Developing a content marketing strategy is not an easy task. However, if you want to make big in internet selling, you will have to take all the pains and challenges that keep coming in all through. The mantra is to keep things simple in the beginning, offer only genuine and correct information to your readers and put continuous efforts.