Content is king in digital marketing and creating the right kind of content eases your job in a significant way. How to create the right kind of content for your website and how should you market that content are some of the main points that need some consideration. The only way to create the right content is to understand the needs of your customer and this is what ‘Marketing’ is all about. Content creation strategy helps you to create the right content for your target audience in a planned and organized way.
Content Creation Strategy
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is the overall process of creating and distributing content through eBooks, articles, videos, infographics, webinars, newsletters, picture galleries and social media updates for your brand or business in order to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. Content marketing can either be B2B or B2C, but the ultimate purpose is the same- To Drive a Profitable Customer Action. According to the Content marketing Institute survey for the year 2023, around 71% of the content marketers believe that content marketing has become more important for their organization over the last year, and this signifies the importance of content marketing in digital marketing.
What Differentiates a Good Content Creation Strategy from a Poor Content Creation Strategy?
Companies or businesses that have an excellent content strategy in place practice these 3 things:
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- They produce better quality content.
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- Cover articles/stories that their competitors have not yet covered.
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- Use active promotional strategy for their content.
How to Create a Strong Content Creation Strategy?
Know Your Brand
The first job involves finding out what are you selling and who are your customers? As a retailer you will not have too many problems answering this question, but for a B2B business answering this question might be a little tricky. Like if you are selling coffee equipment, then you should write a blog or an article on ‘How to use the coffee equipment properly to make a perfect coffee?’ or if you are in the digital marketing B2B business then you can write an article on ‘Using SEO Strategy to Rank Higher in Google Search Results Pages (SERP)’. In the B2B business you need to write a lot of content around your specific industry, so that you cater to a larger audience base. In short, your content should be innovative and should cater to the needs of your customers.
Find the way the customers buy your product or service
Once you know what you are selling and who you are selling it to, you have to start moving towards understanding how customers buy your product. To achieve this successfully you have to start building a funnel. The logic behind it is the fact that you need to map your content to different phases of the sales cycle of your product. So, if you are an ecommerce company like Amazon your sales funnel would look something like this:
Consumer Sales funnel- Dress Your Image
Awareness
The customers don’t know your product. So, if you are a new entrant in the ecommerce industry then you have to market your products and services to the customers. Banners, social media posts, advertisements, Likes, Tweets, Pins, Reels etc. are some of the ways to achieve this target.
Consideration
The customers know you but there are various other brands that are competing with your brand in the market. You should now focus your content on- Why your brand is better than your competitors’ brand in the market? Try to educate the customers about your brand with your focused content in blogs, social media posts, videos, or nurturing emails.
Conversion
The consumer is ready to buy your product, but now you need them to complete their purchase. So, you have to use promotional, and discount offers, and the content should focus on creating and sending targeted emails.
Loyalty
Focus on content that keeps the customer engaged with the company and its products and services.
Perform a Content Audit and Use Whatever is available at hand
Every business owns some or the other reliable pieces of information like videos, or images or a fabulously written article. You should first perform a content audit and find out what pieces of content already owned by you are popular and can be used for either your social media pages or your blog posts. You just have to digitize the content and you are good to go with some part of your content creation strategy.
Create an Editorial Calendar
Why do you need an editorial calendar? The answer is simple as an editorial content helps you to plan and organize your content in an efficient way. For e.g., if you own an ecommerce company then you need to plan your content at least 2 to 3 months ahead for the upcoming calendar events like Christmas. For that particular event you might have a certain target to achieve like getting a greater number of customers or reaching out to a certain number of subscribers. So, create a calendar based on that and along with that use a project management system like the Basecamp. This will help you to manage and update your content on a regular basis at a set frequency level.
Market Your Content
So, now you have the content calendar and the right content for the right target audience, but how can you push that content on the web. You have to use the right keywords with the passive strategy in mind, where you choose high search volume keywords with low or medium competition. This way you can look at ranking higher for those keywords. SEO strategy should be used to pull organic traffic to the website, but you should also have a good amount of budget for paid marketing services like Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
Keep Posting Fresh Content
SEO is not the only thing that can pull up the ranking of your webpages, as along with that what you need is quality and fresh content. Google has always followed a unique practice of changing its search and indexing algorithm after a certain period, and with the new algorithm updates only high-quality, unique and fresh content will reach higher rankings on SERP.
So, Content creation strategy requires creating unique and fresh content for the target audience. The content also needs to be marketed, so you should always maintain the right balance between the budget for content creation and content marketing for successful results.
