Content Marketing Strategies: The Best Steps to Win New Customers

In order to be successful with content marketing, you must have a sound strategy in place. Here are a few tips on how to create winning content marketing strategies.

In order to be successful, you must have a well-thought-out content marketing strategy. By creating engaging and informative content, you can help your business reach new customers and boost sales. This article covers a few tips on how to create content that will win over your audience. 

Knowing how to create a content marketing strategy that represents your business and connects with your target audience 

Let’s look at them all step-by-step.

Producing Great Content

To create great content, you need to understand your audience, craft a strong message, and use the right mediums. Your content should be engaging, so make sure to measure and iterate your strategy regularly. With these steps, you’ll be on your way to producing amazing content that will resonate with your audience.

1) First and foremost, you need to know your audience. What are their needs and pain points? What kind of content will resonate with them? Once you have a good understanding of who your target audience is, you can start creating content that appeals to them.

2) Secondly, you need to know what message you want to communicate. What do you want your audience to remember after reading or watching your content? Make sure that every piece of content aligns with your overall brand message.

3) Another important aspect is knowing which mediums to use for delivering your content. Will written articles be more effective, or would videos or infographics be more engaging? Experiment with different formats and see what works best for your particular audience and message.

4) Even the most well-crafted message won’t matter if it’s not presented in an engaging way. Work on making your content visually appealing and easy to consume. Pay attention to the overall user experience on your website or blog, from the headline down to the call-to-action.

5) Lastly, don’t forget to measure the success of your content marketing strategy regularly. Keep track of how many leads or sales you generate from each piece of content

Identify Your Audience

If you want to create a content marketing strategy that works, you need to start by understanding your audience. Who are they? What do they care about? What motivates them? Once you have a good handle on who your target audience is, you can start crafting content that speaks to their needs and interests. 

But it’s not enough just to know your audience. You also need to have a clear message that you’re trying to communicate through your content. What are you trying to achieve with your content marketing efforts? Once you know this, you can start developing the mediums through which you’ll deliver your content. Will you use blog posts, infographics, videos, or something else entirely? 

Knowing your audience preferences will help you generate the type of content they like to consume. Do they like long, informative articles? Or do they prefer catchy short videos? Or infographics? 

Once you have all of this figured out, it’s time to start creating engaging content that will resonate with your audience. This is where many organizations struggle—coming up with ideas that will truly capture their audience’s attention. But if you keep your goals in mind and produce quality content, chances are good that the right people will take notice. 

Identify Your Message

Know Your Message – what do you want your audience to do as a result of reading your content? 
Each piece of content has a specific message. This could be anything from visiting your website to making a purchase to simply subscribing to your email list. Or maybe you want them to attend a webinar or why buying your product or service will help them. 

Be very clear on what you want people to do, as this will always be your most important metric. Tailor Your Content to Your Audience – What are their interests, what are their problems, what are their values and passions? This helps you to make direct, targeted, meaningful and relevant content. Creating content that exists only in your mind but doesn’t connect with your audience is worthless. 

Some content owners manage millions of likes and comments with great success but too often fail to deliver anything meaningful that gets people to buy. 

What are their interests, what are their problems, what are their values and passions? This helps you to make direct, targeted, meaningful and relevant content. 

Define Your Purpose

Your content purpose is the driving force behind everything you produce. It’s what motivates you to continue creating and distributing high-quality content that your audience will love.

If you don’t have a clear purpose for your content, it will be difficult to maintain a consistent strategy that produces good results. But if you know why you’re creating content in the first place, it’ll be much easier to come up with ideas and execute them effectively.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when defining your content purpose:

• Who is your target audience?
• What do you want them to do after consuming your content?
• What kind of tone and voice will resonate with them?
• How can you make your content more engaging?
• How often should you measure and iterate on your strategy?

Answering these questions will help you get clarity on what your objectives are and how best to achieve them. From there, it’s simply a matter of execution. So get started today by defining your content purpose – it’ll make all the difference in the quality of your output.

Define Your Content Market

When it comes to content marketing, the focus should be on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — with the goal of eventually driving profitable customer action.

The next step is determining which mediums will best allow you to reach your target audience. Do they spend most of their time on social media? Are they active in online forums or discussion groups? Do they prefer long-form articles or quick, digestible video content? 

No matter what mediums you choose, your content must be engaging and interesting if you want people to stick around. Keep your tone professional yet personable, and make sure your visuals are eye-catching and easy to consume. 

Research Your Content Market

Your content marketing strategy should be designed to reach your target audience with your desired message using the most engaging mediums. 

You want to know your target audience because you want to deliver your content where they are most likely to see it and engage with it. That is your market. You don’t need everyone to engage with your content. Foremost, you want your content to reach the people most likely to be your client or customer. 

Introduce them to your brand, share your expertise and provide outstanding value. 

What is the overall goal of your content marketing efforts? Once you have a clear objective in mind, you can start thinking about the best ways to get your message across. This might mean creating blog posts, infographics, eBooks or even webinars. The sky really is the limit when it comes to mediums. 

Be sure to measure and assess your progress regularly so that you can make necessary changes to ensure success.

Research Your Audience

Audience research is critical for any content marketing strategy. Without knowing who your target audience is, it will be difficult to create engaging content that resonates with them. Likewise, you won’t be able to effectively measure the results of your efforts without first understanding your audience.

There are a few key ways to go about researching your audience. First, consider what demographics you want to target. This can include factors like age, gender, location, and interests. 

Once you have a good idea of who your target demographics are, you’ll be able to better determine as to how much time they’re willing to spend on your content. Then, you’ll be able to better target your content based on what content they’re most likely to consume. 

Each of these steps is crucial to creating content that will be effective.

Content Strategy vs Content Marketing

When it comes to content marketing, strategy is everything. Without a clear plan for what you want to achieve and how you’re going to get there, your efforts are likely to fall flat. 

Content strategy is your plan for the type of content you create for your target audience. Delving deeper, your content strategy wants to touch every point on your customer’s journey toward making a purchase. 

You want to regularly produce content that speaks to your potential client’s concern and illustrates how your business is the solution.

Once you plan what content you will create and the schedule for producing the content, then you’ll create your content marketing which focuses on how and where you deliver your content.

Content marketing is all about creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience—and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. 

Your content marketing strategy should be designed to help you achieve your business goals, whether that’s generating leads, boosting sales, or something else entirely. To do this, you need to consider what kind of content will best serve your purpose and who your target audience is. 

Plan Content Distribution

Once you’ve planned what content you will create and what type of content appeals to your audience, you need to distribute your content out on the online world. 

Of course, you want your content on your website, but you also want to consider distributing your content in other avenues where your target audience spends time online. That’s why it is important to know about your audience. Sending your content to the right place will greatly enhance your online reach. 

For example, if your audience consists of business professionals, you can benefit from distributing your content on a professional platform like LinkedIn. 

At the same time, you don’t want to waste time, energy, or money distributing your content where your audience does not spend time. That same example professional audience probably does not spend a lot of time on TikTok. So why waste time creating mini-videos? 

Select the mediums that will work best for delivering your message and reaching your target audience. Will a blog post suffice, or do you need something more robust, like a video or an infographic?

Your distribution plan rests on the audience and market research you’ve done.

Promote Your Content

Finally, you can promote your content in places like social media and with paid advertising. 

Your promotions should highly target your audience demographics. It’s another reason to do your audience research. If you are spending marketing and advertising dollars, you want to allocate that budget to a highly targeted audience. 

Track Metrics

Regularly measuring and iterating on your strategy will help ensure that your content marketing efforts are as effective as possible. This will result in higher leads, engagement, and conversions.
Use tools such as Google Analytics to track the funnel of your website traffic, or a service like Hubspot for lead generation.

Use tools such as marketing automation software to keep track of your sales funnels and identify where each stage is at in the process. Use Lookback to keep track of when users entered your site, read a particular piece of content, or completed a particular action.

If you are considering the purchase of a lead-generating piece of content to promote, such as a white paper or an eBook, you should analyze that plan to ensure that you are attracting the right audience.

You want to make sure that you are sending your content to the right audience and you’re not spending an unrecoverable amount of money getting readers who are just passing by your site.

Content Marketing Strategy Example

Every business has a unique message and a unique target market. You will base your content strategy on what is quality content for your audience and where they are most likely to engage with your business.

Your content strategy will comprise what fits for your audience. There is no one size fits all.

But here are some examples of types of content you can produce. You need to research which types fit your target audience best. Adobe recommends the following as the best types of content to engage consumers.

• Blogs. Blog posts are highly useful for search engine optimization (SEO), since search engines begin driving traffic to the brand’s site based on the success of its blog posts.
• Articles. Articles can be submitted to third-party media channels. This allows you to be seen by media followers and use their existing distribution.
• Videos. Using videos, tutorials, demonstrations, and other video content allows you to engage in a more engaging multimedia experience that can be shared and posted on various other channels.
• Social media. Social channels allow customers to embed content directly into their social media feeds, which makes them valuable for short-form content.
• Newsletters. Emails are an efficient and low-cost means of sending newsletters. There is a higher likelihood of people seeing content in their inbox than with other channels.
• eBooks. B2B industries are particularly likely to encourage customers to download material to share with their colleagues. In exchange for an email address or customer contact information, you may use eBooks to collect data.
• Podcasts. This is a common way for people to consume content on the go. The podcast industry has grown hugely in recent years, with 41% of people in the US having listened to a podcast in the past month, according to Statista.

Perfect Your Strategy

Content marketing is a great way to get your business in front of new customers, but it can also be a daunting task.

If you’re looking for an easy way to increase your SEO rankings or just want some help creating some compelling content, give us a call. We’re happy to offer our services as an expert in both SEO and content marketing so that you can create an effective strategy that will work for your company no matter what stage of development.

We’d love to help you map out a strategy that connects with your target audience.

Schedule your free consultation call.

Christian Pyrros
Managing Director
Erfolk Digital Marketing