Marketers understand that engaging with customers online is becoming increasingly difficult. There are various strategies for engaging with customers using content marketing. Everyone knows the lasting benefits of content marketing in terms of SEO (search engine optimisation), but it all starts with a content marketing strategy plan.

Step 1: The Plan

The Plan is our content marketing strategy. When we talk about having a content marketing strategy, we need to first review ourselves as a company. It is important to go back and ask some important fundamental questions, such as:

• What is our core company message?
• How are our services unique or different?
• What is our unique value proposition?
• Who are our customers, and what are their characteristics?

Once you have an answer to these questions, you can begin to ask other questions that specifically relate to your content marketing strategy. These can include:

• What are we trying to achieve with content marketing?
• How are our customers receiving, reacting, and engaging with related content online?
• Who are the (internal and external) stakeholders for our content marketing strategy?
• How are we going to measure the results?

For successful content marketing, devise a goal-oriented strategy with measurable benchmarks. A lot of successful organizations such as Microsoft engage in this process.

As you make a content marketing strategy, you will want to feature original content that shows you know and own the material rather than simply repackage ideas from other sources. Some people think that means they should only write about themselves. Actually, content marketing involves providing potential customers with the information they need, so that they associate your brand with industry excellence and authority.

Step 2: Know Your Audience

With a framework in place for your strategy, you can focus on your audience and think creatively to plan your content. A useful tip is to create effective an effective system with guidelines for this task. This approach requires supplying information that falls under at least one, and preferably all three, of the following categories:

• Educational
• Helpful and/or informative
• Entertaining and/or interesting

Remember to assess your audience and understand which of these categories is the most important to them, as well as how they will consume the content online. This way you can draft unique stories and content ideas that will help them meet their goals.

 Step 3: The Program

Business is all about processes. This also applies when you are working on a marketing plan or a specific content marketing strategy. From a general concept, your content marketing strategy will specifically come down to answering the following two questions:

1. What is your process for implementing your idea?
2. Where will you distribute your content?

The distribution of your idea can take a variety of forms, including infographics, blogs, articles, case studies, videos, newsletters and podcasts. It is particularly effective if you can reinforce any of these items with your other content. For example, you can write a blog about a video promoting your services and then include link to the video to encourage more visitors.

Distributing your content will affect how quickly your idea spreads online. You will keep the material hosted on your website, but you need to plan where else it should appear (e.g., YouTube, trade websites, blogs, and so on). Have a plan for what channels you will distribute your content on as soon as possible. While an aggressive content marketing campaign will have items created and distributed within a few weeks, the resources your business allocates to fulfill such campaigns will likely take longer to establish.

Whether creating, executing or distributing your content, think about potential business partners who can assist you with marketing based on their experiences. Review what organisations and companies you know, especially the marketing content they use for their website and social media. Their advice can help you avoid potentially fatal pitfalls.

Step 4: Measure

No matter how well you handle all of these steps, the ultimate success of a business content marketing strategy depends on convincing your executive team leaders to buy into your plan. That means you need to have effective metrics.

Your executive team leaders are the ones who will be asking you, “How is this going to generate leads for us?” Therefore, you will need analytics to show precisely how your proposed strategy will reach out to and retain newcomers. It is important to develop measurements for your content marketing efforts.

The final content presented should be associated with your brand by subtly highlighting what you provide—keeping in mind that it is not an advertisement—and why they need to use you as the solution for whichever topic you are discussing. If all the steps listed to this point are followed properly, you should be having plenty of visitors searching for your company as a result.
Content marketing is essential for engaging with your customers in the online marketplace. Avoid performing it at your own risk, because helping your customers by showing them you know what you are talking about is always an asset to any business.

Marketing needs to be agile, fluid and flexible. Read about the 5 traits of agile marketing in our blog post here.