Understand your business objectives—and how your content marketing strategy will align.
Ensure they align with your content marketing objectives. Content should never exist in isolation. It should serve a larger strategic purpose for your business, whether driving site traffic, generating leads, or increasing brand awareness. Importantly, to ensure content always directly contributes and ties back to business objectives, content teams will need to collaborate with other business functions across the organization and set clear KPIs to measure the impact of each piece.
#1 - Content marketing strategy starter questions for your team to ask and answer
Conduct upfront research to align you content marketing strategy with target audience expectations.
Understanding your target audience—their preferences and priorities, their challenges and the things that keep them up at night—is critical for creating content that will resonate with them and that will entice them to act. All too often, organizations skip this step, don't conduct thorough enough research or don't pull in all the right stakeholders from the company to create a holistic understanding of their buyers. This research is absolutely vital for content creators, though, helping them tailor various content types to meet the specific needs and interests of the target audience—and ultimately, helping to reach (or ideally exceed) the team's set KPIs.
#2 - Content marketing strategy starter questions for your team to ask and answer
Determine critical content types, channels, topics, etc. as part of your content marketing strategy.
When creating a tangible and adaptable content marketing strategy document, it's important to consider the evolving needs of your target audience, industry trends, and business goals. The document should serve as a roadmap for creating, distributing and measuring content that aligns with your overall marketing and business objectives. The following elements should be included:
- Content types that interest your target audience and align with business goals, such as blog posts, infographics, videos, case studies, webinars, podcasts and social media.
- Content channels that will reach your target audience, including website, email campaigns, newsletters, events, advertising and social media.
- Content topics that speak to the interests of your target audience, such as their pain points, interests, industry trends and gaps in your existing content. These answers should become clearer during your upfront research.
#3 - Content marketing strategy starter questions for your team to ask and answer
Align on your execution approach, leveraging a modern CMS to streamline the entire process.
It's important to leverage the right tools and technologies to execute your content strategy effectively and efficiently. Legacy systems might slow you down, but a modern content management solution (CMS) can help fix that. Today's CMS solutions offer content templates and workflow automation to streamline the end-to-end content process. They support true personalization and provide targeting capabilities to ensure content reaches its intended audience with the right message. They also support distribution and multi-channel publishing as well as content governance and security. Modern, flexible CMS solutions can help ensure everything stays on course in content management.
#4 - Content marketing strategy starter questions for your team to ask and answer
Measure everything, and apply insights to refine your content-marketing strategy.
Measure everything and apply insights to refine your strategy. Remember the KPIs you set at the beginning of this process? It's critical to always be tracking those so that your team can pivot as needed if goals aren't within reach. Whether measuring engagement, conversion, audience, SEO, or social media metrics, have an always-on measurement approach in place and leverage those insights to refine your strategy as needed.
#5 - Content marketing strategy starter questions for your team to ask and answer
Following these five steps and truly honing in on the basics that make content strategies successful will always be important, no matter how many industry changes and trends are on the horizon.
Our platform streamlines the entire process by providing planning, collaboration, performance assessment, brand consistency, and analytics features (to name a few) so that you can create content that resonates with your audience and more easily achieve your content marketing goals.
Interested in learning more about how Brightspot can help you create and execute a content strategy for your business? Let's connect!