Content marketing is an excellent way to attract, engage and delight your target audience online.
Creating and sharing valuable content that solves problems, educates and entertains your potential and existing customers can build trust and loyalty.
But how do you create a content marketing strategy that works for your business? How do you know what type of content to produce, where to distribute it, and how to measure its impact?
This post will guide you through the steps of developing a successful content marketing strategy for acquiring organic customers. Let’s get started!
What is content marketing and why is it so crucial?
Content marketing involves strategising, producing, disseminating and publishing content via various platforms, including social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, press releases, print publications and other mediums. The aim is to engage with your intended audience and enhance brand recognition, sales, loyalty and interaction.
Content marketing is vital because it helps businesses to:
- Inform your leads and prospects about your products and services.
- Boost conversions by providing relevant and persuasive information.
- Build relationships with your customers resulting in increased retention and advocacy.
- Establish yourself as an industry leader and a trusted source of information.
- Improve your SEO rankings and organic traffic by creating high-quality and keyword-optimised content.
- Reduce your marketing costs by generating evergreen and reusable content.
Set your content marketing goals and KPIs
The first step in developing a content marketing strategy is to set your goals and KPIs (key performance indicators).
Your goals should align with your overall business objectives and be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
Your KPIs are the metrics that you will use to track and measure your progress towards your goals. They should be quantifiable and relevant to your content marketing activities. Some common KPIs used by marketing agencies are:
- Website traffic: the number of visitors who land on your website from different sources.
- Bounce rate: a measure of how many visitors leave your site after only viewing one page.
- Time on page: the average time visitors spend on each website page.
- Conversion rate: how many visitors complete a task on your website, such as completing a form or purchasing something.
- Social media engagement: the number of likes, comments, shares and followers your posts receive.
- Email open rate: the percentage of readers who open your email campaigns.
- Email click-through rate: the proportion of individuals who click on a link in your email campaigns.
Define your target audience and buyer personas
The next step in developing a content marketing strategy is to define your target audience and buyer personas. Your target audience is the people most likely to be interested in your products or services. Your buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research.
By defining your target audience and buyer personas, you will be able to create content that resonates with them and addresses their pain points, challenges, goals, motivations, preferences and behaviours.
Marketing agencies use various methods to determine your target audience and buyer personas, such as:
- Conduct market research: Research your market to understand your potential customers’ needs and what motivates them to buy. You can collect this information from surveys, interviews and focus groups.
- Identify demographics: Identify the demographics of your target audience, such as age, gender, income, education and location. This will help you understand your ideal customers and how to reach them.
- Identify psychographics: Psychographics are the characteristics of your target audience that go beyond demographics, such as their personality traits, values, beliefs, interests and lifestyle.
Run a website content audit and gap analysis
Running a website content audit and gap analysis is essential for ensuring your website’s content is high-quality, relevant and engaging for your target audience.
- Take inventory: Create a spreadsheet to catalogue all of the content on your website. Include the title, URL, content type and metadata for each piece of content.
- Assess content quality: Evaluate each piece of content for quality and relevance.
- Analyse traffic and engagement: Use analytics tools to track traffic and engagement metrics for each piece of content. Determine which content is driving traffic and which is underperforming.
- Identify gaps: Determine which topics and types of content are missing from your website.
- Develop a content strategy: Use the audit and gap analysis results to develop a content strategy. Determine which topics and types of content to create or improve to better meet your target audience’s needs.
- Use SEO: It is essential to align your strategy with search engine optimisation (SEO) practices. This involves researching relevant keywords and phrases that drive traffic.
How to distribute and promote your content across different channels
You must use various tactics like email marketing, social media, SEO and paid advertising to reach your target audience. After all, there is no point in creating content that isn’t seen.
Other tips include using remarketing ads to promote your content to people who have already interacted with your brand. In addition, build relationships with influencers in your niche. You can also collaborate with other brands and use podcasts to attract new audiences and grow your base of subscribers. A dedicated digital marketing agency such as Activate Digital can help.
Case Study: Activate Digital’s Content Marketing Strategy for City Explorer
Background: City Explorer is a sightseeing bus company based in Liverpool that offers bus tours. As a local business, they were looking for a way to increase their visibility online and attract more tourists to their services.
Strategy: Activate Digital worked with City Explorer to develop a content marketing strategy as part of an ongoing SEO campaign. One of the critical components of this approach was to create a blog post centred around the keyword “things to do in Liverpool”, which had a high search volume. The blog post was informative, engaging and optimised for SEO, ensuring it would rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Results: Over time, Activate Digital continued to update the blog post with new information, making it a go-to resource for tourists visiting Liverpool. As a result of the consistent updates and optimisation efforts, the blog post eventually became a dedicated page on the City Explorer website. The page now ranks number one in SERPs for keywords that tourists searching for things to do in Liverpool will likely use.
Our content marketing strategy for City Explorer demonstrates the power of creating high-quality, optimised content to drive traffic and increase visibility online. By focusing on a keyword with a high search volume and regularly updating the content, we created a valuable resource that not only provides helpful information to tourists but also drives business for our client.
Start Your SEO Project
Are you looking to improve your online visibility and attract more organic leads? Activate Digital is an experienced SEO agency that offers a comprehensive suite of SEO services, including on-page and technical optimisation, content development, link building and performance analysis. Everything is designed to help you climb search engine rankings and increase traffic.
If you’re ready to take your SEO strategy to the next level, contact us today to learn more about how we can help your business thrive online!