







Collectively, content is based on a collection of blogs, tweets and web pages that work in conjunction with a businesses’ goals. However, the important elements of content management are also the social outreach, branding, and quality content in the grand scheme of things.
Developing a content marketing strategy is crucial if you are looking to be successful in digital marketing. In this article, we will outline some of the key areas that any content manager or strategist needs a solid understanding of in order to run a successful digital marketing campaign.
Make a Plan
To make a successful strategy, it is vital to create a calendar. Just like an editorial calendar for a traditional publication, a content calendar can help to guide your strategy throughout a given timeframe. You should also add special dates here, like major holidays and events that are relevant to your industry. You’ll probably also want to leave some “blank” spots to incorporate, for instance, unpredictable but relevant events or trending topics that you need to create content for last-minute.
You can also use this calendar not only to plan what you’re posting, but where. Having a multimedia strategy and even including outreach like guest posting and PR is crucial these days. Consider where different distribution channels will fit well into your sales strategy along the timeline of the following months.
Understand the Content Marketing Sales Funnel
A sales funnel, also called a purchase funnel, is the visual representation of the customer journey, depicting the sales process from awareness to action. It is essentially a broad-based term that describes the buyer’s decision-making journey, with the three key phases being awareness, evaluation, and purchase. Anyone involved in sales and marketing needs to pay close attention to this process in order to gain a better understanding of what makes buyers move through the funnel.
To some extent, content marketing is considered outreach, which means it’s something that sits at the “top” of the sales funnel. To an outsider, it may seem as though this aspect of digital marketing is “far” away from the actual money-making or sales part of the funnel.
Content strategists should always be thinking about four critical stages of the funnel:
Outreach: attracting new customers
Conversion: convincing customers to buy
Closing: making the sale
Retention: establishing brand loyalty and returning customers
The “top” of the funnel is where brand awareness and lead generation happens. It’s where you have the opportunity to cast a net over the broadest possible customer base and not only build your audience, but also engage with them to understand more about your entire strategy. But a great content strategist or manager will understand how to engage customers through every part of the funnel and ideally keep them cycling through the funnel.
View Your Content as Data
A content strategy is not about the number of blogs written per month, how much time should be spent doing Facebook Live, or whether or not a company should be writing a whitepaper. It absolutely is about quality, but all of these things are not exactly what strategy is about - they are components, but they aren’t really what will guide your strategic approach.
A great content marketing strategy can engage audiences at every turn, and in order to do this, a good strategist needs to know how their content is working. When you know exactly how to spin your content so that it’s effective in one phase, then you can use that information as you move into the next phase in the funnel.
Your strategy will be guided by analytics. The job of the strategist is to meticulously monitor, track, watch and report on the numbers in order to continuously refine and adjust towards better conversions. You will need to track where your customers are “coming from,” and where they are “going.” In other words, you need to be continually assessing traffic patterns.
Repurpose
As you consider distribution, you’ll want to bear in mind the different purposes that different types of content have and how this can affect your marketing and how you can use various combinations of content to save time and resources. You may want to consider, for example, establishing authority via guest blogging, composing blogs in tandem with email series, and using social media to build tribes and groups.
It’s completely reasonable and efficient to develop a strategy based on chunks of content that can easily be repurposed through different channels and for different purposes. So, as you develop all of your content (think multimedia), consider the ways that it can be easily converted into the future.
Establish Specific Direction for Your Content
Let’s say you are a content strategist or manager, and you have a solid framework of content and writers at the ready. You’ve developed a strategy, you know the funnel, you have a calendar. You’ve established, in a general sense, what you want to say.
Many businesses already have a bunch of content and a team of writers on hand to create it; these are essentials, as are a set of tools for analytics. But it’s important that strategists understand which piece of the marketing framework different types of content falls into.
iRepublic is an affordable and easy website builder which offers affordable web design in the Philippines that can help you make the most out of your e-commerce website to grow your business. See how we can work together and see how we can build fast websites for small businesses and how we can build business websites that are functional, modern and affordable! Contact us today to learn more!