Sawaram Suthar / 5 Mins Read
Updated: February 21, 2023
Companies who DO have a content marketing strategy are most likely to feel that their content marketing efforts are successful. Content strategy delves deeper into the “creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”
Your traffic is highly dependent on your content.
There is no substitute for a well-rounded content marketing strategy, especially for ecommerce businesses that want to generate inbound leads. If you want to grow, you’ve got to take a look at the kind of content that you’re creating for your store visitors.
In this article, we take a look at the steps you have to take to create a proper content marketing strategy that converts consistently.
Before you even start brainstorming what blog posts you want to release, you’ve got to determine who your audience is. Even if you just have a singular product or service line, chances are you won’t just have one type of customer.
To determine your target audiences, take into mind the different customer profiles that you will be catering to. It’s easy to do that by asking yourself questions such as:
When you know precisely who your prospect or customer is, it becomes easier to personalize content, and personalized content appeals more to them and ultimately results in more engagement with your brand.
Bonus: It’s almost important to understand where your target audience dwells. If you have a product that would be appealing to Gen-Z’s, TikTok would be the ideal platform. Or if it’s for the professional world, apply LinkedIn marketing strategies to leverage the power of the largest professional platform.
Once you know who your audience is, it’s time for you to start setting goals.
Here’s what.
Goals will help determine the direction that you want to take, and it also helps with setting the budget. If you can’t afford a fancy content marketing campaign, you might have to adjust your goals.
How many people do you want to reach? Are you aiming for more conversions? What’s the point of your content marketing campaign; is it to inform, convert, or both? Do you want your website’s bounce rate reduced? When do you want to realize these goals?
Once you’ve got the answers to these figured out and set your goals, it’s time to start putting measures in place to track them. This means being familiar with setting up campaign URLs on Google Analytics, monitoring campaigns on Facebook Insights, and checking out performance indicators on other media platforms.
You need to do this to monitor your progress because it allows you to be flexible with your marketing campaigns, adjust goals as necessary, and find out if you’re successful with your efforts.
Content isn’t just text and images.
It can be tutorial videos, whitepapers, case studies, augmented reality applications, quizzes, games, and other forms of interactive media. The choices are limitless.
Take a look at the different buyer profiles that you want to target and think about what appeals to them. Stop thinking of selling your product outright in the content that you produce, but rather strive to solve a particular problem or help your customer.
By doing this, you build a repertoire with the people that you are trying to reach, and when the time comes for them to want your product or service, you’ll be the first one that they’ll want to tap.
Think about how many companies have released free case studies or how many vloggers have released tutorial videos on YouTube.
You don’t necessarily want any of their products in the beginning, but they’ve effectively left their mark with you because they were willing to give out information for free. This means you create content for the top of the marketing funnel.
To start doing this, you have to brainstorm the types of topics you want to cover. After you do that, determine what form these topics will take. Instead of a tutorial, you can give out a tool that will help them out.
For instance, digital marketers often give out spreadsheets that help their audiences.
One of the common misconceptions of content creation is the costs involved.
The truth is it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.
You can repurpose old content, create infographics by doing a little research, write a blog post yourself, film yourself via screen share application figuring out how to solve a problem, or even ask your users to contribute to your blog.
There are a lot of possibilities that you can explore when it comes to content creation. However, when creating content, put your end-user in mind. Think about how it will appeal to them and how it will enrich their lives.
But don’t forget this.
Your content calendar is going to be one of the most potent parts of your content marketing strategy. It guides the content creation process and ensures that tasks are done regularly.
Make sure that you have enough time to prepare content, release, market, and monitor it. Stick to your calendar and keep a tight schedule.
Make sure that you follow proper search engine optimization practices for search engines to recognize your work. At the very least, you should conduct keyword research done so that you can aim to rank for keywords with the right intent, be it transactional, commercial, informational or navigational.
This also includes having the proper titles and meta, using proper alt-text, a variation between bullet points and numbered lists, etc.
Content marketing is competitive.
Just because you’ve posted it on your website doesn’t mean that your job is over. It’s time for you to tell the world about your content. If you have optimized your content correctly, it should be gaining some traction in the SERPs, but it’s not always the case. It’s a competitive market, and search engines have more than 200 ranking factors!
You need to get the content in front of your prospects using other means.
Here are a few examples:
By following these simple steps, you can be on the way to better rankings and content that can boost your inbound marketing efforts.
Remember this.
Content marketing is still one of the most powerful ways to get prospects to try out the services and products that you offer. If you can find the ideal platform at the right time to spread it out, you’ll gain some decent amount of coverage for the piece of content that you create.
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Sawaram Suthar (Sam) is a Founding Director at Middleware. He has extensive experience in marketing, team building and operations. He is often seen working on various GTM practices and implementing the best ones to generate more demand. He has also founded a digital marketing blog - TheNextScoop.
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