A Guide to Successful Content Marketing

Content marketing is crucial in today’s digital marketing landscape. An effective content marketing strategy is practical, effective and useful, providing businesses with several long-term benefits. If you’re beginning to devise a content marketing plan or you’re simply looking to adjust your approach, here are some tips to ensure that it’s up-to-date, innovative and engaging!

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy involves managing all the tangible media that you create including written, visual, downloadable and more. Developing a consistent content marketing strategy shows consumers who you are and how you stand out in your industry. When done right, this will help you grow your business.

Benefits

Some of the top benefits of content marketing include:

• Continuous on-site content
• More visibility in search engines
• Website will remain relevant
• More traffic on your website
• More traffic on social networks & higher follower count
• Increased conversion rates
• Strong brand reputation
• Closer relationships with clients
• Decreased marketing costs & higher return on investment

When creating your content marketing strategy, here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

1. Who is reading the content?
   – Determine the target audience as well as the number of audiences that you’re creating content for.
   – Use a variety of content types and channels so that you can engage with several different types of audiences.
2. How will your product/service benefit your audience(s)?
   – What problems will your product/service be solving?
   – Educate your audience and reinforce solutions.
3. What makes your business unique?
   – How do you stand out from your competitors?
   – Demonstrate reasons that your company’s product/service is worth making an investment in.
4. How will you format your content?
   – Some ways to format your content include: infograpics, videos and blog posts.
5. Where will you be publishing your content?
   – Determine which channels you will use to post your content. Some channels include: owned properties, website, blog and social media platforms.
6. How will you manage creating and publishing content?
   – Decide who’s creating what, where it’s going to be published and the time of the day that your content will go live.

How to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Establish Your Goals

Ask yourself – what do you expect to come out of developing a content marketing plan? Establish your goals prior to planning content in order to determine the best possible strategy.

Conduct Research

The most important aspect of planning a successful plan is to define your content’s target audience. This is referred to as your “buyer persona.” It’s vital that you complete this important step, especially if you’re a new company who’s just starting out. Knowing your buyer persona will allow you to produce more relevant and valuable content.

If you’ve already been creating content for a while and aren’t experiencing the success you expected, consider targeting a new group of people or expanding your target audience. Take the time to consider how you can improve by conducting market research on an annual basis.

Content Audit

Several businesses begin marketing their content by uploading blog posts on a consistent basis. This is a great start, however, you shouldn’t stop there! Consider developing other pieces of content that you can post on your website and different platforms.

Businesses who have been posting online for a while should run a content audit to determine how the past year went and how you can improve to reach new goals and remain competitive.

Content Management Systems

Choose a content management system that allows you to create, manage and track your content with ease. Content management requires regular content creation, content publication and content analytics.

A common and effective content management system to use is WordPress. With WordPress, you’ll have the advantage of being able to plan, produce, publish and measure your results all in one spot!

Types of Content Marketing

There are several platforms and tools that you can use to create a successful content marketing campaign. Some of the most popular ones include:

• Blog Posts
• Ebooks
• Case Studies
• Templates
• Infographics
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Social Media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Youtube, TikTok & more!

Contact UV Designs

Strategic content marketing is cost-effective, safe and valuable for anyone in any industry! The sooner you begin your marketing plan, the sooner you will see exceptional results and growth within your business. Stay tuned for more tips on our next blog!