4 Ways to Develop an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

1. Define Your Goal

First thing’s first, you need to define exactly why you will be developing content for your business. Why do you want to produce content? What will you hope to accomplish? What types of content will you use to achieve our goals? By answering a lot of these why questions, you will begin to define and establish a goal for your content marketing strategy.

2. Conduct Persona Research

After defining what you hope to accomplish with your content marketing strategy, you will need to clearly define your content's target audience – the buyer persona. The buyer persona will be a fictionalized ideal of your best customer. When you know who you are writing to, it will make it much easier to conceptualize topics and put them in terms that your audience will understand.

3. Decide What Content You Will Create

As important as it is to understand who you are creating content for, it’s also important to decide what type of content you are hoping to create. Different pieces of content will accomplish different things, so you need to understand how each works. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most popular types of content:

• Blogs – A tried and true method of informing and educating your audience, the blog is as traditional as it gets in the digital era. However, it’s important to understand how effective blogs can be for lead generation and brand recognition for your organization.
• Videos – With the aid of technology, video production has never been more accessible or more cost-effective. Video is a great tool for simplifying complex topics and driving engagement and brand awareness.
• E-Books – As a long form content piece, e-books are a great way to get very specific about different aspects of your organization. E-books are great for services, products,
• White Papers – When it comes to generating content about your industry as a whole, white papers are a great resource for your audience. Use statistics and pull quotes to support your copy.
• Email Campaigns – Email campaigns allow you to drive your audience directly to the website. You can keep your audience informed on the latest advances in your industry as well as any new innovations from your company.

4. Publish and Manage Content

Finally, you need to set up a publishing cadence for all of your content. Blogs are a weekly contribution, so it’s important to keep to the cadence that you set up. As for any other pieces of content, trial your pieces with A/B testing to figure out what works best. At the end of the day, finding a process that fits your business is more important than maintaining some sort of industry-wide consistency.

How Marketing Eye Can Help

Marketing Eye is a results-driven marketing agency that specializes in elevating the marketing efforts of small to medium-sized businesses. We work with you to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges your business faces and develop a marketing strategy that meets your needs. Our marketing experts are uniquely equipped to design an effective content strategy that achieves the goals of your organization. Contact Marketing Eye today to learn how we can help you.