Content Marketing

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant content. The goal is to
grow, engage, and retain your audience.

A well-executed content marketing strategy is a great way to promote your brand. And, ideally,
make your business stand out when it’s time for consumers to make a purchase.

Let’s dive into what a content marketing strategy is and how to build one (with some examples).

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing strategy is all about creating and distributing content to grow your
audience. Some content marketing examples include:
 Blog posts
 Emails
 Newsletters
 Social media posts
 Podcasts
 Ebooks
 Videos

Why Have a Content Marketing Plan?

A content marketing strategy helps you achieve specific goals, define clear success metrics,
and create processes for specific improvement.

This is more effective than haphazardly producing content and hoping it does the job.

In fact, 78% of marketers who felt their content marketing strategy was exceptionally effective in
2021 had documented their strategy. 

Other benefits/Advantages of a content marketing plan include:

 More online visibility: The more consistently you post, the more customers you can attract.
Provide educational, useful content that addresses users’ pain points.

 More leads: Because a good content marketing strategy drives traffic, it can also drive leads 

 More authority: The more useful content you share over time, the more people in your niche
will see you as an authority figure

  More customer engagement: Loyal customers are often repeat customers. Engage with
those who comment or respond to what you share.
 More budget: If you can prove your marketing success, it will likely be easier to ask for a
bigger marketing budget in the future

5 Elements of a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy

An effective content marketing strategy should have these five core elements to be successful: 

1. Audience personas
2. Brand story
3. Content marketing mission
4. Business case
5. An action plan

1. Audience Personas

It’s difficult to tell your brand’s story if you don’t know who’s listening. That’s why the first step is
to identify the audience you’d like to target.

Here are a few ways to do that:

 Survey your existing customers

 Research industry trends
 Identify who you don’t want to target
 Keep tabs on who your competitors target
Once you have your audience in mind, you can use our free Personas tool to put them into
writing.
 A formalized persona will help you clearly and succinctly communicate your audience to your
stakeholders. And anyone involved in brand messaging.

Start by exploring these persona examples for inspiration. 

2. Brand Story and Positioning

A brand story is a summary of your company’s history, mission, purpose, and values. 

Defining your brand story can help you identify the right messages and topics to address with
your content. That helps you choose the right direction in your content marketing strategy.

Your story should focus on:

 The hero of your story (your customer) and their goals and challenges
 Your brand’s personality
 The purpose of your brand and key brand values
 The way your product and your content can help reinforce all the above and empower your
hero 

Keeping your brand’s story in mind when making content will create a consistent experience for
your audience and build the right image on all your content marketing channels.

Here are some questions to help you brainstorm your brand story and positioning in the market:

 Who are my existing and potential customers? What are their goals?
 Who are my top competitors? How do they market their brands?
 What is my brand’s unique value?
 What problems does my product solve?
 What makes my product a better choice over my competitors?
Use your answers to shape the main pillars of your brand story.

You can also use this free brand storytelling template to complete this step and document your
efforts. 
This step can be especially beneficial for small businesses and startups that can leverage their
unique backgrounds and identities.

3. Content Marketing Mission Statement and Owned Media Value Proposition

Owned media refers to any digital marketing channels that you have control over. Like your
website or social media.
 To establish your brand as a credible content publisher, define your owned media value
proposition. 

In other words: 

What unique value does your brand’s content provide? (This should be unique from your
competitors’ content.)

This will help you create a content marketing strategy that sets you apart from your competitors.

Another important item to include in your strategy is your content marketing mission statement.
It should summarize why you are creating content and provide information on who can benefit
from it.

Make sure your content marketing mission statement includes the following elements:

 Your audience: Who are you creating content for?

 The benefit: What information or answers will you provide?
 The outcome: How will your content help your audience achieve their goals?

Here’s an example:

“Our content is where digital marketing managers find multimedia information about SEO and
content marketing so they can help their companies grow via organic channels.”

4. Business Case and Content Marketing Goals

Providing value to your audience is an integral part of a successful content marketing plan. But
in addition to attracting new readers and followers, content marketing should drive your
business forward.

Creating a documented business case will help you or your team better understand the benefits,
costs, and risks of implementing a content marketing strategy in your company.

A business case is a project management document that outlines why particular tasks should be
executed and how their benefits outweigh their costs.

To get started, identify the business goals your company needs to achieve and figure out how
content marketing will bring your company closer to those goals. 

Additionally, what resources do you need to invest in your content strategy? And what results do
you want to generate?

This will allow you to come up with a firm budget for content creation and marketing.

You can track approved tasks in a project management software like Asana:

 5. Action Plan

Finally, add your main content marketing campaigns and projects to your content plan.

Using a formal content plan will help you think through each content marketing strategy step
individually.

Make sure to cover the following while content planning:

 Choose content topics for each campaign

 Determine which content formats you will produce
 Pick the channels for content distribution

7 Steps to Creating a Complete Content Strategy 

Long-term planning allows you to anticipate challenges and allocate resources effectively. 

Follow these seven steps to develop and implement your content marketing strategy in order to
meet your business goals.

Document your plan and any important notes so you can share with important stakeholders.
This could be on a slide deck, Google document, spreadsheet, or another format that works well
for your business model. 

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Determine Your Audience

The best starting point for any content marketing plan is to determine your target audience.

Buyer personas will form the base of your strategy. But keep in mind that your audience isn't
only made up of buyers.

Your audience will also include people who begin interacting with your brand long before they
make a purchase. So it’s essential to distribute content that will attract potential
customers before they begin the buyer journey.
To get data on your audience, you can use a tool like Market Explorer.
Analyze your market category. Or “Find Competitors” by analyzing your own domain. Then, set
your location and click “Research a market.”

Find the “Audience” report to see your market audience in detail. Such as their demographics,
socioeconomics, and social media preferences.
 Becoming a valuable source of information can help you build a community of brand advocates
who will boost your brand awareness.

The Empathy Map

An empathy map is a collaborative tool used to visualize what you know about a particular user
or persona.

Its goal is to create a shared understanding of user’s needs and aid in decision making.

Empathy maps are split into four quadrants: Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels. Like this:

Empathy maps work best when you have real data from users. Read your reviews, look up tags
related to your brand on social media, search for your brand name on forums, etc.

Here’s how to fill in each quadrant:

 “Says” quadrant: Should include verbatim user quotes from reviews, interviews, forums, etc.
 “Thinks” quadrant: Infer what the user thinks but isn’t vocalizing based on research from
filling out the “Says” column. Are they annoyed by their experience? Or confused by a
product?
 “Does” quadrant: The actions a user takes (leaves a site because of poor user experience,
shops around to compare prices, etc.)
 “Feels” quadrant: A user’s emotional state. For example, if they leave your site because of
poor user experience, they’re probably frustrated.

Once you fill out your empathy map, use your inferences to come up with specific goals.

Say your customers are largely frustrated that they can’t find specific information on your
website. That should inform your future content strategy.

By adopting your customers’ perspective, you can step back and improve their experiences
based on what they say, think, do, or feel.

Step 2: Analyze Historical Content Performance and Establish Your Content Marketing Goals

Before creating content, it’s important to establish your content marketing goals. 

Here’s how to start:

1. Consider your company’s high-level business and marketing objectives. For example, you
may want to become the No. 1 solution for improving time management and have a specific
marketing revenue goal for this year.
2. Consider how content can contribute to these bigger goals. In this case, what type of
content will bring new users?
3. Identify the content marketing metrics that matter to you. What will success look like in
numbers? Define success metrics for each piece of content you plan to create and share.
You may come up with primary metrics and secondary metrics for each goal: 
 Your primary metrics might be the revenue generated by content marketing, organic traffic,
and number of leads
 Your secondary metrics could be rankings and shares

Goal-Setting Frameworks

Let’s look at a couple of goal-setting frameworks that can help you set your content marketing
goals:

 SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) 

 CLEAR goals (Collaborative, Limited in volume and duration, Emotional, Appreciable,
Refinable)

SMART goals are great for keeping you on track and measuring success because they are
more rigid.

But if you need more flexibility or are in an agile/fast-changing environment, the CLEAR
framework may make more sense.

CLEAR objectives are evaluated like so:

 Collaborative: Your goals encourage teamwork

 Limited: They are limited in scope and duration
 Emotional: They inspire and motivate your team
 Appreciable: They are broken down into smaller micro-objectives
 Refinable: They can be redefined as needed

Step 3: Audit Your Existing Content

A content audit is the process of organizing, analyzing, and improving your existing content. 

It can help you get the most out of your existing pages—which means you could save resources
on creating new content.

Some benefits of updating content include generating more organic traffic, ranking higher in
search engines, and boosting engagement.

Performing a content audit also allows you to better understand what kinds of content formats
and topics resonate with your audience.In fact, 65% of companies with very successful content
marketing strategies run content audits at least twice a year.
 Keep these questions in mind while auditing your content:

 Which content topics and keywords are performing the best?

 Which content formats generate the most engagement and conversions?
 Which channels drive the most traffic?
Use our Content Audit Tool to run automated content audits on your website.

Once you run the audit, you can track your content’s performance.

Step 4: Develop a High-Level Editorial Plan and Content Calendar

Planning your content schedule allows you to allocate your resources appropriately and ensure
you have time for all of your upcoming tasks.

Prioritize Your Actions

Prioritization is an essential element of content planning. 

The first thing you should do after selecting content topics is identify the most critical tasks. Or
the things that you can easily test.

You can prioritize in multiple ways, including the following:

 Potential traffic gains

 Which campaigns you’re focusing on first
 What resources you’ll need to create your campaigns
 When products or services are launching

Based on this information, decide which campaigns, topics, and formats should come first in
your plan.

Find Relevant Topics

When choosing content topics, consider the big picture. 

For example, what big themes do you want to cover this year?

Let’s say you run a company offering a time-management app. Your content marketing strategy
might focus on high-level topics like productivity and work-life balance.

This information should come from your audience research insights, as well as competitive
research..
 Try generating a list of themes that are likely to stay relevant long-term. 

When deciding whether a topic is worth pursuing, assess the following two things:

1. Its usefulness to your target audience

2. Its ability to impact the bottom line

Step 5: Develop Your Content

Now it’s time to create your content (finally). 

Use these strategies to help you create effective, memorable content that resonates with your
audience.

Focus on Originality 

Original content can capture the attention of your audience. Because it allows you to stand out
from your competition.

Step 6: Plan Content Distribution

To succeed in content marketing, you need to make sure your content reaches the right
audience at the right time.

This is where the content distribution strategy comes into play. 

To begin, visualize the media mix. See below how owned, earned, and paid media can work
together:

Content distribution is all about using various paid, organic, and earned channels to publish
and promote your content.

So when designing your strategy, list the core channels you will target, analyze their historical
performance, and develop ideas on what you can improve. 

Your knowledge of your customers should determine which channels should be in your mix.

But exploring new channels can also be a good idea. For instance, could you better leverage
influencer marketing opportunities and partnerships? 

However, ensure the bulk of your resources go to channels you know your audience prefers.
This gives you content the best chance of being seen. 

Based on our research, the most popular content distribution channels in 2021 included social
media (organic and paid), email marketing, and organic search.
 Step 7: Continuously Analyze Your Content Performance

Analyzing your content performance is the best way to understand what content resonates with
your audience.

It also helps you see whether your content marketing efforts are paying off. And helping you
meet your marketing goals.

But only 66% of marketers analyzed their content’s performance regularly in 2022.

Here’s how you can start:

 Set specific KPIs for every content piece: This will help you determine what your
benchmark for success is
 Set up Google Analytics: Track page performance and connect with Semrush’s Position
Tracking tool to get updates on target keywords

Below are the four essential groups of content marketing metrics you can track:

1. User behavior
2. Engagement
3. SEO outcomes
4. Company revenue