Before you start writing your next blog post, creating an infographic, or shooting your first video, ask yourself the following question:

What problem are you solving with this content?

Content marketing can be a fantastic way to grow your business, but if you don’t have a strategy in place, you may be wasting your time on low-quality content that doesn’t really solve anyone’s problems.

Use these tips and strategies to come up with better content that will help your customers and potential customers solve their problems—and get more people coming through your doors!

What is a good content strategy?

A good content strategy is a well-thought-out plan for the creation and distribution of content.

It will help you reach your marketing goals, grow your business, and generate positive results.

The key to effective content is that it must be aligned with your company’s goals and target audience.

If you’re in search engine optimization, then the content should focus on keywords that people are searching for.

If you have a retail store, then your blog posts should promote products and services in order to get customers into the store.

If you run a restaurant, then recipes and cooking tips would be relevant topics. Whatever your industry or target market, there’s an appropriate topic or angle that can make your content compelling and help grow your business.

Why do I need a good content strategy?

Content is king these days and if you want to stay afloat, you need to create content that’s in alignment with a well-thought-out content marketing strategy.

It can feel overwhelming at first but once you get the hang of it, it gets a lot easier.

The hardest part is knowing what your goals are and how each piece of content relates to those goals.

By creating a content strategy, you’ll be able to make decisions based on data rather than gut feelings.

One of your biggest goals is to build trust with your target audience and that requires you to provide useful and valuable content consistently.

Think about it, if someone doesn’t know who you are or what you offer, how can they trust your brand? 

With a good content strategy in place, you’ll be able to measure your efforts’ success by tracking traffic sources and conversion rates.

Once you have this information, you can use it as leverage when trying to justify spending time and resources on developing more content for various purposes.

10-step formula to create your content marketing strategy

For newcomers to content marketing or if you are interested in upgrading your strategies, the following 10 tips should help you in the right direction:

Step 1: Set your Business Goals

The first step to creating a good content strategy is to set your business goals.

What are the metrics you want to increase? Do you want to grow your email list, bring new customers into your business, or get more website traffic?

For example, if I were looking for more website traffic my goals would be around keywords and key phrases that I wanted to optimize for on Google.

Step 2: Research and Define your Target Audience Personas

Before you start creating your content, it’s important to research and define your target audience personas.

This is the first step in building a content strategy that aligns with your customers’ needs and interests.

Start by asking yourself questions like: Who are they? What do they like to do? What are their problems or pain points? What are their goals or aspirations? Once you have an idea of who they are, you can begin defining them in more detail.

Step 3: Research and Analyze your Target Audience Content Needs

Once you’ve identified your target audience, it’s time to research what content they need from you.

What questions do they have? What kinds of information are they looking for? What would answer their needs the best?

Armed with these answers, you can create more relevant, valuable content that will keep them coming back.

Step 4: Identify what’s Working for your Competitors and Industry Influencers

Analyzing what’s working for your competitors and industry influencers can help you create content that will be effective with your target audience.

This is important because it helps you figure out which direction to take your content marketing strategy in. In order to analyze what’s working for other brands, start by reading their blog posts and following them on social media.

Step 5: Develop a Content Marketing Plan

Here are a few simple tips to help you get started with a content marketing plan and improve your chances of success.

• Create a content bank of ideas that can be used for future posts. This can be anything from blog topics to videos, infographics or podcasts.

•  Create a content calendar with the topics and timeframes when you will post them on social media and your website. Keep in mind that people prefer short and frequent doses of information rather than long articles.

• Identify which type of content resonates best with your audience – either informational or entertaining. Some brands do both well while others focus exclusively on one type. Either way, it’s essential to know who your audience is before creating any content so you know what they want to read about.

• Plan out each individual piece of content in advance so there’s no wasted effort.

Step 6: Do a Website Audit

A website audit is a critical step in the process of creating an online presence for your business.

There are many free tools and guides to help you do this, including Google’s Webmaster Tools, WMT’s Site Auditor, and Moz’s Open Site Explorer.

This is a great opportunity to see what your competition is doing, where they rank in search engine results pages, and how well they are engaging with customers.

Step 7: Create Unique Original and the Best Content Possible

It’s not enough to create content that’s just a re-hash of what everyone else is doing. Consumers are becoming more and more savvy, so if you want your business to stand out, you need to create original content that resonates with the needs and interests of your target audience.

Step 8: Optimize your Content for Different Platforms/ Channels

You want your content to be as available and accessible as possible.

But how do you know where your customers are? And which social media channels are best for your business?  Which ones should you use in tandem with others?  Which ones work better than others? What’s the goal of each one, anyway?

I recommend beginning by checking out some general tips about social media marketing before jumping into any particular platform or channel. Here’s an article about establishing yourself on social media.

Once you have a sense of what kind of content is best suited to each platform, then it’s time to consider if they should be used together or separately.

Step 9: Publish and Promote your Content Everywhere

Publishing and promoting your content everywhere will help you get the word out to as many people as possible. Promote your content on social media, with email marketing, and with other channels that are a fit for your business.

Step 10: Measure the Effectiveness of your Content Strategy

In the end, you’ll want to measure the effectiveness of your content strategy by checking in with a variety of different analytics tools to see what works and what doesn’t.

In addition, it’s important to take note of how many people are engaging with your content and also how many new customers you’re getting.

A content marketing strategy is an effective way to grow your business. The best part about it is that you don’t need a huge budget to see results, and the process is fairly straightforward. Make sure to give yourself plenty of time for planning – developing a quality content strategy takes time.

Looking for help with defining your best content strategy?

Join me on a complimentary call and we can discuss the best strategy for your business.