New to inbound? Here's the beginner's guide to creating a content marketing strategy that works.

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How content marketing can help organizational goals?


Content Market has never been more popular. Over 92% managers believe that Content is a valuable asset for the company.If you want to shift focus on creating content, first thing first, you need to understand your marketing and business goals. Organizational goals are allied more with content marketing than you think. So whether you want to build trust and rapport with your audience or draw new prospects, content marketing is always effective. Most enduring businesses thrive because they solve problems and when you understand your prospect’s problems, you understand how to guide them solve their problems which then gives you the core of your marketing message. Which in return will help you find the benefits you can provide. Content marketing can be summarised in two words, customized and conventional.

Benefits could be anything like techniques, tips, tricks, methods, approaches. Further, content marketing also helps overcome the pain points like the price of your product or service by demonstrating how implementing your solutions saves money in the long run. It also helps you improve your relation with your existing customer and enhance loyalty. Content that describes the experience of what it’s like to own your product or use your service paints a picture of life with your product or service. Content marketing is an effective tool in creating or improving brand awareness and conversions. Use your content stream to dispense new ideas. And who knows, in the process, you may be attracting potential partners. Eventually build your reputation with search engines.


Difference between content marketing and ads

You may think that advertising is similar to content marketing but there is a vast difference between the two. Content marketing focuses on providing the customer value through either educational or entertaining content that the customer is actively in the lookout for. Advertising on the other hand is about distributing your brand message to customers regardless of whether they need of your product at the moment.

Additionally, content marketing gives customers the freedom to seek out their desired content whenever they may please whereas advertising may pop up at any moment whether or not the customer or reader is interested. Content marketing is currently the preferred marketing approach because it offers something valuable to consumers. It can educate readers or viewers about a certain industry, teach them how to make the right purchasing decisions, or simply entertain them. This can lead to increased customer engagement and loyalty. Unlike content marketing, traditional advertising typically includes only information on the product or service it intends to sell. Choosing a marketing strategy may be difficult especially when there is cost involved. In comparison, content marketing is more affordable than advertising.

How to create a content strategy

  • Determine your goals
  • Research your audience
  • Do your keyword research
  • Content ideation and speculation
  • Create videos and visual content
  • Leverage social media and identify your best platforms
  • Build an ideal library and create your cadence
  • Create a weekly or monthly posting schedule
  • Engage with your customers
  • Follow Google’s EAT formula
  • Create content that is tailored to voice search
  • Have a distribution strategy


Determine your goals

Determining why you want to create content is the first step to creating a content strategy. Brand managers can embark on content creation spree based on their needs as a brand. This can include: Increasing traffic to your website, SEO, raise product awareness, build relationships or a combination of all.


Research your audience

Learn about the different personalities of your audience. What questions is your audience asking? What problems do they have that you can help solve? How can you provide value? By knowing the answers to these questions, it ensures that not only you are writing content that you love, but also that people want to hear about it, which will help you rank higher as well. And you’re probably also trying to figure out the problems people have.

SEO tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, UberSuggest can show you the questions people type. These are the issues, problems people are having, and by looking at the keyword base, you can figure out the problems people have and then write on those topics.


Do your keyword research

The SEO tools also have a big laundry list of suggested keywords that you could go after. This tools may help you find popular topics in your space.

Additional tip: Don’t just go for popular keywords, go for the keywords that are high in CPC or conversion list. Keywords that have a high CPC tend to convert better and generate more income for your website owner.


Content ideation and speculation

It is very important to know your customers. Come up with topics that captivate your audience. A good place to start is to check out the type of contents that your competitors are creating. You’ll get a rough idea of what’s working and what isn’t.


Create videos and visual content

It is no mystery that visual content is taking over the web. From Instagram to Facebook to YouTube, its all super popular. And if you don’t want to do videos, you can also try a podcast or you can even try info-graphics; its a way where you can use images to tell the story and that really works as well. You can see a trend in which videos are becoming more and more popular and its a better way to relate to the audience, to your brand and helps you build a deeper connection. Using videos on landing pages will increase conversions by 86% hat is why you should definitely start creating videos today if you already haven’t started.

See also: Check out these creative content ideas for Tiktok.


Leverage social media and identify your best platforms

If you’re not clouting on social media you’re missing out on huge opportunities. A key social media marketing hack for your content marketing is to identify the most suitable.And you can add my link to the anchor social media marketing hack. Identify the most suitable platform/s and get out there already. Communicating, interacting and engaging with your audience takes it to the next level. You can create engaging contents, go live to be in the books of your audience.

Build an ideal library and create your cadence

It is very important to pare your content down into sort-able categories. Quotes, hashtags, ideas, tips, reviews, photos, etc., should be organised in its place. Use criteria like content topic, type, in that way, it makes searching easier. Build a schedule or a calendar for your post as in when to post what in which platforms.


Create a weekly or monthly posting schedule

Posting schedules are very important to keep your content in track. You can also schedule your drafted post in advance via tools like Loomly, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, etc.


Engage with your customers

User-generated contents, going live are ways to stay connected to your customers and audience. This helps to target individuals and drives the game to a whole new level.


Follow Google’s EAT formula

EAT stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness”. Make sure you post relevant content to stay in the customer’s mind. Google's EAT principle is used to determine a webpage or website’s overall quality value. For example, if you’re a restauranteur but you start creating content on health or financial issue, your content will not be credible no matter how well-built content it is or how many backlinks you built for it. You must focus on your expertise.


Create content that is tailored to voice search

It is estimated that 65% of 25-49-year-old’s speak to their voice-enabled devices at least once a day., and the number will only rise as people always lean to easier ways, so you should use structure data markup. And when you do this on your website, it’ll help you to get into the rich snippets. When you get into the rich snippets, it also helps Google pull your listings, your results for voice searches that way your brand is getting out there and you can keep getting more traffic. This is important because with devices like Google Home and Alexa are becoming very popular, and this trend continually increasing. You must be prepared for it. The last thing you want to do is see 70-80% of the searches being voice search and then you start optimising for it. You want to do it before it gets to that point.


Have a distribution strategy

Creating content is only half the battle. You must process a distribution strategy in place to get your content to its intended audience. While paid marketing services like Facebook and Google ads might seem tempting, it is important that you let your content shine organically. After all, the hallmark of good content is that it pulls people in rather than you pushing them out. According to SiegeMarketing over 51% of content is found through SEO. This is why you should make sure you have an SEO strategy in place to raise your content to the frontlines of Google page rankings. For social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, research your hashtags and use it wisely to maximize visibility.

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