You have too much content in your hands but do not know how to work with them. Do you want to create brand awareness or generate leads? Are you unaware of how to use blogs or images for a potential content marketing strategy? You are perhaps not alone in this! Many website owners do not recognize the ideal use of content to achieve their goals.

Interestingly, studies revealed that content marketing has increased by 49% in rankings and traffic and by 53% engagement rate of websites. 

Not to forget, in SEO, we always prioritize the quality of content for search result rankings and driving traffic. In 2024, content marketing is more lucrative than ever! Content is the foundation of any digital marketing strategy. It is the content of your website that helps in ranking and increasing visibility, which is the primary goal of SEO.

A well-written content keeps your audiences informed about your business, reflecting your brand’s prowess. With captivating content you can improve your social media connections, encouraging more conversions and fetching increased revenue.

However, if you are struggling with how to manage and employ your content to generate sales or meet your business goals, this blog will guide you through. We have shared valuable content marketing tips to enlighten you with the best content marketing practices. So, the next time you decide to post content, keep these guidelines in mind for purposeful results.

Set Your Goals

Before even beginning to create content marketing strategy, you have to understand your goals. Why are you designing the content? What are your expectations from it? Or what do you intend to achieve from your content? To simplify it, you have to identify your objectives, which will help you to define your targets. 

You may have multiple goals, like promoting brand awareness, generating leads, increasing sales, etc. So, what you do now is organise these goals according to their priorities. It will enable you to determine the strategies you need to focus on immediately and the ones that can be left for the future. Streamlining is what you call this process. It sets out the foundation of your plan!

Comprehend Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience is one of the crucial elements of content marketing for beginners. It often concurs with your buyer persona and social media persona. The buyer persona refers to the detailed information of a set of people who represent your target audience. Similarly, a social media persona implies the data of your target audience derived from social media accounts. It is a fictional concept based on in-depth research of your existing or target market. 

When you analyse your buyer’s needs, you can produce more relevant and valuable content by understanding their likes and dislikes. In other words, your content will become more engaging and can successfully lead to conversions once you start prioritizing their preferences.   

*There is a 124% increase in sales leads with a targeted content marketing strategy (Skytap).

*56% of companies generated higher quality leads with buyer persona (Marketing Insider Group).

*In Intel, buyer personas surpassed campaign benchmarks by 75%. These were 48% more cost-effective than average campaigns (DemandGen Report).  

The above insights pretty effectively demonstrate the impact of buyer persona on content marketing. To refine your research on buyer personas, you can analyze standard demographics like age, gender, location, and income. Or you can conduct market research and revisit your audience parameters. It will help you to ascertain the recent trends.  

Research Your Competition

Who are you competing with? What is the market competition for your industry? Until you are aware of the challenges you will face from your competitors, you cannot implement a successful content marketing plan. It applies not only to the contemporary mode of competition but also to other sources like entertainment sites, news, references and so on. 

For competitive content marketing analysis, research the market thoroughly and make a note of the following things:

• Get a list of your content marketing competitors.
• Receive an insight into their content formats, level of content investment, and the relevance and significance of keywords and topics.
• Assess the quality and quantity of content based on engagement and popularity. You can review the likes, shares, and comments to understand content performance.
• Lastly, evaluate each piece of content, including tags, titles, descriptions, and topics. 

Thus, you will end up deconstructing your competitor’s content marketing strategies! It will help you to comprehend their strengths and shortcomings. Isn’t that a great work? You can utilize these inputs to formulate your content marketing best practices. As a result, there is a fair chance you can win over your competitors and gain an upper hand in the race! 

Create a Content Calendar

Once you have done your homework and have created some extraordinary pieces of content, it is time to publish them. But before letting them go public, you have one more work to do! Plan and organize your content to manage it effectively. You must note that you have to constantly keep publishing blogs, articles, guest posts, etc. to stay in the limelight. The audiences must always have new information from your company to retain their engagement. 

So, a content calendar or publishing calendar helps to schedule the publication dates, which streamlines the process considerably. It boosts productivity and ensures easy collaboration. You acquire consistency and increased ROI from content marketing, which earns you a competitive advantage. Apart from this, you can track your performance and productivity to modify your plans. 

According to Curata research, over 90% of companies now use a content marketing calendar.  

Hence, content marketing is not limited to content creation but, it also includes the effective management of the same. Content calendars are available in multiple structures incorporated within the project management software. You can effortlessly track the performance of your various content arrangements. 

Promote Your Content

So, now you are all set to publish your content! All your hard work is going to get public across the digital platform. Recheck your content before publishing it. Check the quality, which should be relevant and informational, and put the keywords strategically to ensure search engines can easily index it. It will make your content more visible, attracting increased audiences.

Remember, publication is not enough to drive traffic. You must promote your content through various channels. Promotion is essential because:

• It creates brand awareness and reputation.
• It enables you to become a part of the conversation.
• Others can share your content via multiple sources.

As one of the vital steps to develop content marketing strategy, enhanced exposure through promotion is imperative. How do you promote your content?

• Social Media-You can directly share on your page or to somebody else’s. 77% of businesses use social media for promotions. While 76% of social media users have purchased products or services after they saw something on the same. Instagram (74.70%), Facebook (71.20%), Twitter (42.90%), LinkedIn (35.70%), Moj (29.50%), and Pinterest (29%) are popular social media platforms in India.
• Email Broadcast- Whether you send a newsletter or a drip campaign, you can share your content in whichever way you prefer. 
• Blog- A blog is probably one of the best places to promote your content because it will stay! Newsletter subscriptions, articles, or eBooks, everything is going to live on your blog.
• Online Communities- Quora, Reddit, and Growthhackers are the popular online communities that have secured a credible spot in the audience’s mind. Through these communities, you can answer queries and link your content as approving evidence. 
• Rewards or Referral Programs- Often, you may have noticed referral ads like subscribing to a channel or referring to a friend and receiving a discount or reward. Such promotions are beneficial because recommendations always earn the vote of confidence! 
• Guest Posts- A potential way to generate backlinks is guest blogging. You can link your post with your website which will drive traffic from other reliable sources. Guest blogging can result in a 20% increase in traffic to the guest blogger’s website (Social Marketing Writing). Also, the majority of 65% of backlinks are achieved through guest posts (Outreach Monks). 
• Paid Ads- Paid ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter are an incredible source of pushing your content close to your target audience. These ads can do wonders, provided you have created gripping content!

Track Your Results

Finally, you have reached almost the end of the discussion. The last step to create content marketing strategy which is influential is monitoring and improvising. You will have to track the performance of your content to understand its effectiveness and explore the scope of improvements. To derive effective results from your content, regular monitoring is essential.

As discussed earlier, the goal of content marketing varies from business to business. So, the performance metrics differ according to the objectives. It depends considerably on the following KPIs:

• Revenue Generation
• Brand Awareness
• Audience Engagement
• Audience Retention
• Leads Origination

Therefore, assessing these KPIs will help you learn what is working and what is not working for you. It is a prerequisite to refine and upgrade your strategy over time.

Wrapping Up

Content market strategy is more than creating and publishing content. As you can derive from the points above, it involves a lot of planning, organizing, and scheduling, which goes behind the success of an influential scheme. Thus, it is not a single shot; it is a continuous process. From establishing the foundation of your strategy to managing your content, you will not miss out on anything if you carefully follow the content marketing guide. We hope you will soon develop a robust plan and pave your way to achieving your goals! After all, content marketing costs up to 40% less per lead than paid search.

For more such insightful discussions, sign up for our newsletter or download the free content marketing checklist from www.blackmarlintechnologies.com

 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q. Is content marketing effective?

Ans. As a part of the overall digital marketing strategy, 73% of B2B marketers and 70% of B2C marketers use content marketing (Content Marketing Institute). Studies also reveal that 91% of businesses accomplished success with content marketing (SEMrush). So, yes, content marketing is substantially beneficial to build connections and reach your target audiences who can be your prospective leads.

Q.  What is the goal of content marketing?

Ans. The goal of content marketing varies from business to business. Primarily, it focuses on creating and promoting informational and relevant content consistently to attract and retain a specific group of audience.

 Q. What are the core elements of a successful content marketing strategy?

Ans. The fundamental elements of an effective content marketing strategy are the goal of content marketing, audience personas, competition analysis, content management, promotion activities, and tracking KPIs.

 Q. How do I measure the success of my content marketing strategy?

Ans. The fundamental metrics to measure the effectiveness of content marketing strategy are web traffic, audience engagement, content sharing, leads and conversions, and revenue generation.