An Actionable Guide on Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

Create a content marketing strategy that works- Follow these steps to get more quality leads, drive traffic, and get more followers

If you want to be a true professional in marketing, you must be aware of creating a content marketing strategy for whatever business you deal with.

You might be surprised by the fact that you actually produce content on your blog but it doesn’t bring any leads. Why does it happen?

It happens due to one significant mistake – your content is non-targeted.

In other words, you create good, high-quality content that isn’t related to your target audience. As a result, you get traffic to your website that will never convert into potential leads.

How to escape this dead-end?

By following the right strategy for your content marketing efforts.

In this guide, you will figure out a couple of actionable tactics that will help you master content marketing strategy that works.

Creating a Content Marketing Strategy That Works

Let’s start!

1: Start with a Keyword Research

Keyword research is the very first step that you must take before creating any content. It’s a fundamental step in SEO writing. It is a pretty annoying one but without the right keywords, you won’t be able to reach out to your target audience via content.

To give you a clear idea of how it should be performed, here is an example of this process below.

Let’s say you are an owner of the website that is specialized in coworking software. You know that your target audience includes small business representatives who are interested in opening coworking spaces.

Thus, you can predict a few keywords related to your niche specifically. It could be “coworking software” or “what is coworking”. It could be everything related to coworking in general. Your aim is not just selling your software. The purpose is to show your target audience that you embrace the entire niche completely.

However, you can’t build your content marketing strategy based on a couple of keywords. You must find as many keyword variations as you can.

You can use different SEO tools that can help you with keyword research. One of the best is Keywords Explorer tool from Ahrefs. For instance, a seed keyword “coworking” can give you lots of interrogative long-tail keywords that you can easily convert into content topics.

What’s more important is that this report provides you with some useful metrics that help you understand how each keyword performs.

One more way of how you can get keyword ideas is by running a competitor analysis.

2: Analyze Topic Ideas and Focus on the Most Potential Ones

Your niche can suggest hundreds of keyword ideas for your content. But your focus must be on those keywords that could be easily used for creating awesome topic ideas. And these topic ideas must be the most potential ones.

Ideally, the topic ideas must reflect the following components – low-competition, business value, and traffic potential.

To figure out low-competition topic ideas, you should get back to your previous report from Keywords Explorer and set up a few filters.

Nevertheless, no matter how it is going to be easy to outrank your competitors for certain keywords. If these keywords don’t bring a solid amount of traffic, it is not a good idea to use them for your content marketing strategy.

Hence, you should figure out how much traffic each keyword might bring you. Just scroll down the page in a Keywords Explorer tool report and draw your attention to a “Traffic” column within a SERP’s report.

By doing this procedure you will be able to narrow down the list of potential keywords and focus on those that would make sense in terms of traffic.

Talking about a business value you should realize that you must focus on those topic ideas that can help your customers resolve their problems.

3: Content Creation

Finally, when you have a list of topic ideas you can go ahead with creating content.

Sounds easy to accomplish, right?

However, it is quite difficult to produce high-quality content on a regular basis.

The sky is the limit. But if you want to impress your target audience with the topics that are always in demand, you must be able to expand each topic you suggest.

In this case, you can use the Content Gap tool.

For instance, you are sure that the keyword “what is coworking” is a good option for your content marketing efforts. You decided to write an in-depth post that covers this topic idea. The first step that you should take is to review top pages in SERP that cover the same topic. Afterwards, grab a few of the results and past these URLs into the tool to see the rest of the keywords these pages rank for.

Your task is to review the list of suggestions and find the subtopics that you could cover in your content.

You also want to ensure that your content satisfies your users’ search intent. This will help lower your bounce rate.

By following this scheme you will be able to produce perfect content without any issues.

4: Content Promotion

Having great content on your blog is just a part of the game. If nobody reads it, you won’t get the desirable results in terms of brand awareness and audience growth.

That’s why you must promote it.

There are five basic ways of promotion. Let’s review them:

  1. SEO: Search engine optimization helps you avoid promoting your content for people manually. It aims to deliver passive traffic from the search engines in the long run. Moreover, thanks to SEO efforts your content can be shared across social media channels and get the backlinks. All these factors will affect your content positions in SERP.
  2. Paid advertising: You know that there are two sides of the same coin. This can be applied for the paid advertising as well. Any paid ad can bring you traffic and positive results until it works. But when you stop it, the effect of it fades away. Despite the fact, online paid advertising is a good option for content promotion. Keep in mind that you will pay for completely trackable results like impressions, link clicks, and conversions.
  3. Content repurposing: Practice shows that content repurposing is a good strategy in terms of content promotion. It is not about social shares but spreading your content across different website platforms. By repurposing content you transform it into snippets of data, infographics, “how-to” tutorials, etc.
  4. Email newsletter: Don’t shy away from sending every new piece of content on your blog to your subscribers. It should be mentioned that an email newsletter is less effective in a promotional sense but it can bring some positive results as well. Focus on building an effective email list and growing your subscribers
  5. Tracking the Results: You should always track the performance of your content. It helps you realize if your efforts weren’t in vain and you will continue to get traffic.

Content Marketing Tracking Tools

When creating a content marketing strategy, you want to have some tools to help you in tracking the performance of your digital marketing strategy.

The first service that jumps to mind is Google Analytics. It is a standard analytical tool that is suggested to everyone for checking traffic numbers manually.

Another cool tool for tracking the rankings of your content over time is Rank Tracker.

Thanks to this tool, you will be able to see how the ranking positions of your keywords change. Based on these observations you can move your content marketing strategy in the right direction.

To Sum up

Creating a content marketing strategy that is actionable is a complicated and thorough process. It is not the thing that you can finish in a few days. This strategy needs in-depth analysis and step-by-step actions.

This guide has just represented the core principles of the entire strategy. But these tiny elements are the basis you must remember about.

If you have your own secrets on building a content marketing strategy, feel free to share them in the comments.

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Last update on 2024-03-29 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

Sergey Aliokhin
Sergey Aliokhin
Sergey is the Marketing Manager at andcards. In his spare time, he likes to study martial arts, play the bass, and spend his time with the family. You can drop him a line at LinkedIn
Sergey Aliokhin
Sergey Aliokhin
Sergey is the Marketing Manager at andcards. In his spare time, he likes to study martial arts, play the bass, and spend his time with the family. You can drop him a line at LinkedIn

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