Do you want to grow your online presence? Are you looking to find a cost-effective way to get in front of your target audience?

 Developing a content marketing strategy will help you meet your business goals.

An effective content marketing strategy allows you to plan and create content that establishes you as an expert in your field, builds trust with your audience, and can lead to conversions.

Do you ever have trouble coming up with fresh ideas for content?
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Set Goals

The first thing you want to do when creating a content strategy is to determine your goals. Without knowing what you want to achieve, it will be difficult to plan the rest of the strategy.

 Ask yourself: why are you producing content and creating a content marketing strategy? What results do you want to see by publishing content? Is it to show your expertise and build trust or to add more subscribers to your email list?

 Get specific and write your goals down so you will be able to come back to them.

 Knowing your goals before you start planning, it will be easier to plan your overall strategy.

Get to know your audience

To create a successful strategy, you have to identify your target audience. You can’t create valuable content without knowing who you want to engage with and serve.

 When determining your target audience consider their:

 ●     Demographics- Gender, Age, Education

●     Challenges- What are they struggling with?

●     Motivations and Goals- What do they want to accomplish?

Whether you are new to content marketing or a seasoned expert, identifying your target audience helps you to create relevant and valuable content.

Content Audit

Before creating any new content, you want to perform a content audit. Content audits help keep track of your existing content.

To get started, you’ll want to gather all your content and categorize it in a spreadsheet. Some categories should include in your audit are content title, author(s), publication date, and the type of content.

An important category you'll also want to consider in your content audit is your metrics. You can view your metrics to see how well your content is performing using Google Analytics.

Performing a content audit will allow you to get a better idea of what content you need to create, update, or delete.

Create a Content Calendar

When creating a content calendar, start by writing down any holidays, launches, or other important dates you have planned. Keep these dates in mind to support your business goals and create relevant content.

Are there any dates you need to be aware of when planning your content?

Next, you need to decide how often you will publish your content. If you are just getting started, keep it simple, and publish content one time a week.

You will also want to consider what day of the week you’ll publish your content. Do you want to publish on Mondays so that you can promote it during the week?

Pro tip: Focus your strategy on 90 days at a time. By planning quarterly, you can focus more on your business goals.

Now, let’s say that you decided to publish one post per week for the quarter, which means you would need to plan 12 posts.

The key to a successful content marketing strategy is being consistent. You'll be able to grow a loyal audience by creating QUALITY content for them regularly.

Brainstorm ideas

After you have identified your existing content and how often you'll publish, it’s time to decide on new content to produce. Here are some tools to help you get started:

●     Buzzsumo

●     Google

●     Answerthepublic.com

Create Content

Before you start creating content, take a look at your content audit. Do you have any content that you could repurpose? Repurposing content is a time-efficient way to create content without reinventing the wheel.

Whether you are repurposing or creating fresh content, you'll want to identify the content format you'll use. Popular content formats that you can use in your strategy include:

 ●     Blog Posts

●     Videos

●     Ebooks

●     Podcasts

●     Case Studies

Remember to think about your audience when creating content- don’t waste your time creating content that isn’t relevant or valuable.

Publish and Promote Content

After creating your content, schedule your work to publish on your chosen day.

While you can publish your content in real-time, scheduling allows you to get ahead and show up consistently for your audience.

After publishing your content to your website, promoting it is an excellent way to get more eyes on the page. Social networks that business will often post on include:

●     Facebook

●     Twitter

●     Linkedin

●     Pinterest

●     Youtube

●     Instagram

If you are just getting started promoting your content, focus on only one or two platforms.

It is better to build a solid presence on one platform than to be sporadic on several platforms. You can always expand your promotion strategy to include more social media platforms later.

Analyze Content Performance

One of the most important steps in a marketing strategy is to analyze how well it performed. Remember those goals you set in the beginning? Did it meet your goals? How well did your content perform?

This information will show you what performed well and what did not. Using this data, you can make improvements to your strategy for the next quarter.

Creating a content marketing strategy requires organization, time, and creativity. Building your strategy from the ground up can be a daunting task. But if you follow this process, getting started will be easier than you think.

If this all sounds amazing but you think you’ll need some help putting it all together…

👉 Book a free consultation call

If you enjoyed this article, you may also like: Create A Year Of Content In One Day - A Step-By-Step Guide

~ Becky O’Neill, Author
Founder of Specialized Business Services LLC

Are you ready to make real progress in your business?

Working with an expert when making important decisions in your business is a powerful tool to create significant growth and lasting change. It really helps to see things from a fresh perspective and consider ideas and concepts that may not come to you on your own.

If you would like to explore working with me, I invite you to schedule a Discovery Call. 👇 Don’t wait. I only take a very limited number of clients at a time.

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