MICHAEL J. ROHDE
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​How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

5/9/2017

 
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A successful content marketing strategy will grow your audience and enable you to increase your potential customer base. This article will walk you through the basics of developing a content marketing strategy along with an overview of how it fits within the buying cycle. 

For a closer look at an introduction to content marketing, please read my earlier post here.  ​
Developing a Content Marketing Strategy
One of the first things you’ll want to do when developing your content marketing is to learn the overall goals of the company. For most start ups, the overall goal of the company might be taking the product to market, or in most cases, simply to grow. Content marketing fits in great with both of these overall goals in that you can use your content to both educate consumers on your product and to increase awareness of the product through different mediums—forums, blogs, websites, webinars, infographics, etc. 
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Determining Your Audience
After you learn your company’s overall goals, you’ll want to discover who your audience is. For example, are you looking to target middle aged parents looking to buy a new car or developers who are looking for a solution to their problems? Either way, you want to learn their pain points. For my client Carjojo, their customer’s pain point is negotiating the best price when buying a new car; their comfort point is that Carjojo can either do the negotiating for them, or at least, provide data to help them do their own negotiating. One way to determine your audience is by looking at  who participates in your forums, or who replies on Twitter, or who likes you on Facebook, or who comments on your blog post, and so on.

D
eveloping Themes around Your Audience
Now that you have an idea of who your audience is and you know their pain and comfort points, you can develop themes. You can showcase these themes through introductory blog posts that describe upcoming features to help your customers with their pain points. Good blog post topics also describe your product’s features that make current customers happy.
This is also a good time to develop an editorial calendar, which I discuss in this post.
​Fitting Your Content Strategy Within the Buying Cycle
Here, I provide a quick outline of how your content strategy will fit within the buying cycle. For a closer look at this topic, you can read my earlier post, Understanding the Buying Cycle. 
  • Phase 1: Introducing your product to the customer
    • Blog posts
    • Host webinars
    • eBooks
    • Intro videos
  • Phase 2: Educating the customer about your product
    • Infographics
    • Demo videos
    • Data sheets
    • Case studies
  • Phase 3: Converting the prospective customer to a paying customer
    • Testimonials 
    • Reviews
  • Phase 4: Retaining the customer
    • Follow up communications
    • Requests for feedback
    • Newsletters
    • Forum support
This outline should provide you a general overview of how content marketing fits within the buying cycle.
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Using Metrics to Determine Overall Impact
Before you start publishing your content, you’ll want to have a good analytics program tracking your progress. For example, Google Analytics can be easily applied to most online platforms and will instantly start providing key insights as to who is on your site and what they are doing there. It’s a good idea to watch several different key indicators to get a feel for what your audience is doing, but it’s best not to focus on any one metric in particular, and don’t get hung up on why there was a spike on Tuesday and a slump on Thursday. It’s better to look at overall trends when determining how to adjust your strategy. You might get a good idea of what’s working and what’s not working after collecting about a month’s worth of data, but you’ll see the larger picture when you have six months to a year’s worth of data.

By following this content marketing strategy, you should increase awareness of your company, which should help the overall goal of your company. Don’t expect this to happen overnight. It will take daily updates, revisions, and close analysis of your metrics to make it happen.

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    Michael Rohde

    Spark Studios

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