Seven Strategies for Creating a Successful Content Strategy

The article discusses in detail the significance of content marketing and the top seven strategies on how to build a successful content strategy. 

Content marketing is considered one of the most effective forms of digital marketing. Incorporating top quality and interactive content can improve business reach, engage and convert ideal customers. In addition, it also helps showcase their level of expertise within the industry and make people aware of the value of services offered to customers. Investing in top-quality content writing services can help generate the right and valuable content and optimize it to improve a website’s search ranking. 

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

In simple terms, content marketing is the process of marketing a brand using top-quality and valuable content. Content marketing helps retain existing customers, capture prospective ones, and build a relationship with the target market. Content marketing strategy on the other hand, is a specific set of tactics used in the development and management of content. It uses various forms of media, including blogs, videos, podcasts, and/or social media posts to achieve specific business ends. Companies utilize content marketing to build an audience and achieve top quality leads, faster conversions, and increased revenue. 

Creating a Successful Content Strategy – Key Tactics

Creating a successful content strategy involves careful consideration of several important factors. Top quality, informative content with the target keywords, high-quality back links help improve search engine visibility. Here discussed are some top strategies to create a successful content strategy – 

• Have Clear Goals for Content Strategy – Content is created for a specific purpose and this purpose needs to be clearly defined. Some of the common goals of a content strategy include - boosting brand awareness, generating leads, converting users, attracting past customers, improving search ranking results and more. After clearly defining the goals, it is important to determine whether a content strategy is actually the best way to achieve them. Never assume that content is the best option in every situation. For instance, content may be of little use in converting users at the bottom of the sales funnel; however, it could be invaluable in bringing users onto a website in the first place, by boosting brand awareness and organic lead generation. Therefore, always focus on creating specialized content. 
• Research Your Target Audience - The content strategy will only be effective once you identify who your target audience is. Valuable information can be achieved by checking what types of sites the prospective users are already visiting, which content they engage with, and which social media platforms they share content on. Understanding what content works best and where it can be useful in the long run will help you narrow down the content strategy. 
• Focus on Niche Area – A lot of content online is either plagiarized from elsewhere or simply reposted or doesn’t provide any real value. Most people don’t see 99 percent of this useless content because it doesn’t appear anywhere near the top of SERPs. To avoid making the content lost in that pack, create content that is unique, has a distinct voice, and, most importantly, offers genuine value to readers. In fact, the more specificity in the content and the higher focus on the niche area, the greater will be the chances of establishing a brand as an authority in that field.
• Develop the Right Content Mix – Customers are the heart of each content marketing. Therefore, every specific strategy designed must be focused towards their particular interests. Right from the content’s voice and tone, to the types of content created and different channels used – everything must work towards this end. In fact, finding the right keywords, creating quality content and identifying the channels that can be used to distribute the content can be challenging. There are multiple channels to distribute different types of content. For instance, shorter content is great for Twitter, while long form will perform better on LinkedIn or Medium. Videos are great for YouTube, images go high on Instagram, and infographics are good on almost any network. 
• Create SEO-friendly Pages – Create rich content that is optimized for search. This means people should easily find or locate the content that you posted. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ensures that a website page is “search friendly,” and shows up at the top of search engine results. Including relevant keywords in the content is one of the most important measures that can be taken to build SEO-friendly pages. Several tools (including Google AdWords’ free keyword research tool) can be used to optimize a blog, website and other channels. However, overdoing the same can prompt search engines to penalize the content and place it lower in search rankings. Always strike a clear balance in this area.
• Editorial Calendar – Figure out the best time to release or publish each piece of content. This will again vary based on the target audience and platform. As regularly publishing content is a time-consuming task, create a content calendar to keep everything on track. Always work a few months ahead or even the next quarter (depending on the industry and resources) and have enough content in the pipeline ready to go. 
• Analysis on Progress – It is always important to check whether you are on the right track towards achieving the content marketing goal. Make a list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs, or “metrics”) and benchmarks to achieve. For instance, if the content goal is to generate 10 daily comments on each blog post, there are several tools that can be used. Once the specific content strategy gets implemented, it is possible to use measurement data to do “course corrections” by regularly reviewing and adjusting goals or tactics.

The rapid evolution in digital marketing has made content marketing quite challenging. Developing a clear content marketing strategy can be beneficial for a company or business in multiple ways. It will help improve online visibility, boost the company’s image, and improve sales and lead to conversions. In order to build an effective content strategy, it is important to define goals, identify target audience, analyze competitors’ content, narrow down the keywords, create a content calendar and find tools that will help manage and streamline content production process. A professional digital marketing services company can develop quality content that can help your website achieve top ranking on search engines.