Want success with content marketing?
You need a content strategy.
One without the other never works.
I repeat…
Never.
You can’t build a house without blueprints, tools, and a plan. Similarly, you can’t build your content marketing without a stellar strategy.
[ss_click_to_tweet tweet=”You can’t build a house without blueprints, tools, and a plan. Similarly, you can’t build your content marketing without a stellar strategy. Learn how to build a #contentstrategy in six steps 🚩” content=”You can’t build a house without blueprints, tools, and a plan. Similarly, you can’t build your content marketing without a stellar strategy. Learn how to build a #contentstrategy in six steps 🚩” style=”default”]
The strategy directly influences the strength, solidity, staying-power, and capacity of your content marketing.
The strategy will help you plot a path that leads to ROI. The strategy ensures you get the exact results you’re looking for.
Results like:
- 55% more website visitors
- An average of 434% more Google-indexed pages – holy visibility, Batman
- 3x the leads you’d get with paid search
- 97% more inbound links
- If you’re a B2B, 67% more leads per month…
- …Or 88% more leads if you’re a B2C
I could keep going. The truth is out there, and it’s saying that content marketing nets results.
But, only if you have a strategy.
And, a strategy requires some fundamental, ground-floor rules that will help you map out what to do to get where you want to go.
You can’t just “do” content marketing. Following strategic rules requires more work, but a little extra time and brainstorming can take you a long, long way toward better ROI.
Ready for the rules?
6 Practical Rules to Swear By for Creating a Killer Content Strategy
1. Find Your Uniqueness – and Own It
The first thing you need to do when you start building your content strategy is figure out what makes your brand different from the rest.
- What is your unique selling point?
- Why should anyone care about what you’re doing?
- What differentiates you from your competitors?
The unique spark that ignites your business motivation, goals, and direction is your differentiator.
Inspiration for How to Differentiate Your Brand
Take a look at how the brand A Color Story differentiates itself:
It’s an image-editing app. There are literally thousands of these in the Apple and Android app stores.
So, what’s special about this one?
One word: color.
This is an app that sets itself apart by its fundamental purpose. It wants to help you create photos that are crisp, clear, and vibrant.
Their competitors (VSCO, Afterlight, Aviary, and even Instagram’s proprietary image filters) are all about moodiness and images with subdued colors, a retro-film look, and dark shadows.
The best example of this is shown off on VSCO’s feed of user-created images:
They all seem to be slightly blurry, moody, desaturated, or soft-focus. It’s digital imagery that’s trying to pose as film photography.
A Color Story, meanwhile, easily swoops in with its brand differentiator.
What’s more, the app owns its uniqueness.
Look at those juicy colors. From its logo to its branding to its website, color is splashed everywhere. It’s a stark contrast from the competition, and it’s memorable. It works.
For your brand, you have to find out what sets you apart in a similar fashion.
Then, own your uniqueness. Lean into your differences. They’ll guide every step of your strategy moving forward.
You Know Who You Are – Now Stride Forward with Brand Goals
Once you know who you are as a brand beyond a shadow of a doubt, you can more easily set achievable goals.
- Where do you want to take your unique voice in the industry?
- What do you hope to get out of content marketing?
- Do you already have a leg up on some leads/customers, or are you starting from square one?
Get the lay of the land, then figure out where you want to take this endeavor.
Most importantly, set goals and a starting point so you can measure your progress later.
2. Find Your Tribe
Your brand won’t be able to connect with every single type of person under the sun. That’s impossible.
Only a select group of people are going to want to buy what you’re selling, read what you’re writing, and listen to what you’re saying.
This is your tribe.
If you can pinpoint exactly who these people are, you can target them more effectively.
And, the better you target your audience, the better chance you’ll have of turning them into brand loyalists and customers.
The right traffic is always better than a ton of traffic.
[ss_click_to_tweet tweet=”The right traffic is always better than a ton of traffic. @JuliaEMcCoy” content=”The right traffic is always better than a ton of traffic. @JuliaEMcCoy” style=”default”]
To hit that sweet spot, you have to find your tribe. You gotta know your audience.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Who is your ideal customer? Develop a few buyer personas based on your answer. (You can have more than one type of ideal buyer.)
- What are their demographics? (Age, gender, occupation, location, income, family size, etc.)
- What matters most to them? (Get to know their lifestyle, hobbies, and preferences.)
- What problems might they have that your business solves?
To really understand your audience, pretend you’re going on a blind date with your ideal customer. Get to know them with help from surveys, market research, or plain ol’ talking – either one-on-one or with the help of social media.
Just know them as well as you know yourself. This will be a vital tool moving forward with your strategy.
3. Research How to Connect with Your Tribe
You know who you need to reach and who would be interested in your business. Now it’s time to connect with them.
One of the easiest ways to target the right traffic and funnel it into your business website is through long tail keywords – after all, they make up 40% of all web searches.
More often than not, your target audience will be searching for the products, services, or information you provide through those longer, more specific search strings. Best of all, the more specific the search, the closer the person is to buying.
Use long tail keywords to target exactly the type of people you need to see your content. Your content can then help move them toward your desired action – whether that’s a sale or just signing up for your email list.
Source: Business 2 Community
Finding the right long tail keywords requires knowing your audience, putting yourself in their shoes, and thinking about what they might search for.
Using these basic queries, you can then do keyword research to help you pinpoint the exact phrases you should use in your content.
Check out these tools and articles to help with your keyword research:
- How to Optimize Your Blog for SEO and Engagement from Business 2 Community
- Mapping Keywords to the Buyer Journey from Search Engine Land
- The Lazy Writer’s Guide to 30-Minute Keyword Research from Moz
- How to Do Keyword Research with SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool from SEMrush Blog
4. Understand Your Content Building Blocks
Your content building blocks are your content cores. These support all of your content creation from the ground-up.
Where will you host your content? What types of content will you create? How often will you publish?
Answering these questions definitively will help you stay consistent with content creation, which we’ll address in a minute.
For a good example of a brand sticking to its content cores, look to the American Kennel Club.
Their resources blog is hosted on their domain, AKC.org. This is a recommended best-practice because you’re in complete control of your content when you host it yourself.
Generally, AKC sticks to blogs for their main content type, though sometimes they sprinkle in a news article about various dog shows.
Finally, AKC’s publishing schedule is regular and predictable – they post once or twice a month, no more, no less.
Why is this so important?
For one, consistency is how you create compounding posts – ones that continue to reel in traffic and leads long after you’ve hit “publish.”
HubSpot has a well-known example that illustrates this. 70% of its monthly traffic does not come from the current month’s posts.
It comes from posts published months, even years earlier.
The only way to earn compounding returns on your posts, though, is to publish consistently: same frequency, same place. Knowing your content cores and setting them in stone before you ever publish will help you maintain that much-needed steadiness.
5. Create Unbelievably Good Content
There’s a lot of rules to follow before you can start creating content. (See previous rules #1-4.)
The whole point of this process is ensuring that the assets you produce are valuable and reach as much of the right traffic as possible. And, yes, your content pieces are assets, but only if you make them as good as you possibly can.
If solid, unbelievably good, caramelly-rich content isn’t at the center of this content strategy chocolate bar, you’re in trouble.
At this point, you have to be totally up-front about your capacity for content creation:
- Do you hate writing, or lack the skills to do it? Is time your enemy? Hire some writing help, somebody like a freelancer who can take your ideas and flesh them out.
- If you can write but are strapped for time, post as often as you can consistently. It’s better than nothing.
Flimsy content that, quite frankly, sucks won’t have legs to stand on. All the research and brainpower and planning in the world won’t help it get anywhere.
Do yourself a favor and invest in great content, stuff that pulls its weight long past its publish date.
6. Help Your Content Get Somewhere Great
Content without planning and promotion behind it is like a plane without wings. It can’t take off and soar without the right help.
The two wings you need to help make your content fly are effective promotion and strategic publishing.
Effective Content Promotion
Promotion can help you get the word out about the blogs you publish. This will help them gain traction so they work better for you as marketing assets.
For instance, 81% of marketers who did at least 6 hours of social promotion per week saw significant increases in site traffic. Social media promotion, in particular, is overwhelmingly credited as one of the most important factors for success in content marketing.
Luckily, there are lots of ways to promote your content.
Curata has a great list of content promotion tools you can use, including email and social media, to help spread the word.
Content Marketing Institute has an article about content promotion strategies that may be helpful, too.
Want step-by-step training? I teach video demos and actionable training on content promotion here.
Strategic Publishing
You’ve made a commitment to publish your content consistently, but what about strategically?
As it turns out, strategic publishing can give your content a boost nearly as well as promotion.
The only way to achieve strategic publishing, however, is with an editorial calendar.
With the help of an editorial calendar, you can have your blog topics planned out days, weeks, or even months in advance. That’s especially helpful for planning timed or seasonal posts that coincide with holidays or other special dates.
Bottom line: The editorial calendar is your number one tool when it comes to planning, tracking, scheduling, and strategically publishing your content. Don’t leave home without one.
Great options for blog calendars:
Bottom Line: Strategy + Content = Whoa
Building a content strategy is something you cannot skip if you want your content marketing to get anywhere.
That’s why we’re calling the above points rules and not tips or suggestions.
“Rules” connotes something more serious, something rigid and undeniable.
The gist is, if you skip any one of these rules, there are going to be consequences.
You’re far more likely to fail.
Content marketing needs each of these steps to fly high with ROI.
Don’t sell yourself short. Invest in content strategy education and implementation and get the ball rolling.
