As a blogger, you may try as much as can to distance yourself from certain aspects of digital marketing, like to create a content marketing strategy for your website. You brush off the idea that you are not a marketer; you are an enthusiast of your trade and are only here to cash in on the hyped internet money-bank.
As if what you are doing is remote from content.
What you are doing, already, is creating content.
Why Do You Need to Create A Content Marketing Strategy for Your WordPress Blog
A content marketing strategy only helps you to bring order and guidance to the efforts you are already engaged in.
I can easily guarantee you, in exception to the extremely lucky, bloggers who succeed have some plan they follow. They don’t just wake up, wish content into their blog, and hope they will make money.
Without a plan, you will perish eventually.
A content marketing strategy your go-to manual for everything content for your website.
In this article, I will breakdown the five essential aspects of a Content Marketing strategy that you can implement today.
If you are scared of attempting this, don’t be, you are not alone, many companies you know don’t have content marketing strategies.
If it helps, think of this logically.
Why did you create your blog?
To make money online. To journal your experiences. To build your brand as an authority in your field.
How do you think you will achieve those goals?
- People buy the goods you are promoting on your blog.
- People signup to your mailing lists.
- Increased engagement with people on your blog.
- More leads and contacts added to your sales funnel.
Thinking that way leads you to seek answers. Writing down the answers helps you create what now becomes your content marketing strategy.
Five Areas You Need to Figure out for Your Content Marketing Strategy
Here are five areas you need to figure out for your content marketing strategy.
1. Who are you, and what do you bring to the table
Start by asking yourself some questions.
Who are you? Why would the world care about you?
What is the purpose of your blog?
What differentiates you from your competitors?
2. Define your target audience
As you have already seen, whether your goal is to make money online or to build your brand, you need people – the audience you are targeting.
Get this one right, and every other effort will naturally fall in place.
Ask yourself.
- Who is your typical customer?
- What is their age bracket?
- Are they predominantly male or female?
- Where do they reside?
- In what income group do they belong to?
- What are their struggles?
- What is their buying journey in seeking solutions to their struggles?
- Where do they find these answers from?
Working through this helps you create a persona of your ideal target customer.
When you have the customer clearly defined in your mind, and on paper, you can move on to the next stage.
3. What content appeals to your audience?
The first big word in Content Marketing Strategy is Content.
You know your purpose; you know your audience. Now figure out what content answers the questions your audience searching for.
Good content places the customer ahead of your needs because it knows that if a customer finds value in your content, they will naturally reciprocate by engaging with you.
Good content, leads to action, profitable action to your blog, whether it is a sale or a subscription to your mailing list.
However, as we have already noted, that will only happen when the content is laser-focused on the needs of your audience.
The guide to creating good content is by looking at your customer persona and creating solutions to their pain points.
Your Content marketing strategy then guides you on how you will create that content. There shouldn’t be any guesswork on where you will get the content and who is responsible for it.
- Will you create original, authentic content? (You should)
- Will you curate content in your niche and industry?
- Will you accept guest posts?
- Will you use user-generated content?
When you have the source of content, what formats are you going to deliver your content in?
- Newsletters and mailing lists?
- Blog posts and article? (obviously)
- Videos,
- e-books
- Info graphics
- Case studies.
- Podcasts
- Social media posts
- Memes
4. How do you intend to distribute and amplify your content?
Of course, you already have a blog. That is one of the channels you use to distribute your content.
However, if you, took time to understand your audience, you should have figured out where they spend most of their time.
A successful content marketing strategy is one whose content reaches its customers through the channels they frequent.
That is the whole purpose of the strategy. To figure out who your customers are, where they are at, and how your content offering can help them.
The type of content you create will typically dictate what channels you are going to use to distribute your content.
Your blog will act as the central pillar of all your content marketing efforts. You then, repurpose this content for other channels your audience is engaged in.
- Video content, for instance, will naturally belong to videos sites like Youtube and Vimeo.
- If you plan on creating newsletters, then you think of email marketing channels.
- If your demographics are made up of a younger audience, then, social media sites should be included in your distribution.
- While, a blog targeting business executives, presence in sites like LinkedIn makes much sense.
The cousin to content distribution is content amplification.
Chance is that you may not succeed off organic traffic alone. It would help if you found ways to amplify the reach of your content.
Your content marketing strategy should include how you will push your content further to your audience.
- Will you use Influence marketers? Who are they?
- Will you create Display ads or boost your posts?
5. Finally, monitor and measure
The last thing you need in your content marketing plan is to know how you are going to measure the performance of your content marketing efforts.
How will you know what is working and what is not? How do you measure success anyway?
If you got right your purpose and goals at the beginning; If you created a robust customer persona of your audience; If the content is identified and its distribution certain. Then you will not struggle to monitor and measure the performance of your content marketing efforts.
What tools are you going to use? What monitoring and analytics tools do the platforms you are distributing your content through offer for monitoring and measurement?
Conclusion
Get all these ideas on paper, and you will have a solid content marketing strategy.
Soon you will discover that it is not an easy task; most bloggers don’t have content marketing strategies, so do some of the big brands you know.
This article, hopefully, will help you to craft a document that you can use to pattern your content efforts on.
With it, you should be able to know who you are, who your audience is, what are their headaches and kind of content helps cure the pain, and finally, in addition to your blog, how you can reach out to your audience.
You may also want to learn how to SEO the content on your WordPress website.