What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
A content marketing strategy centers on delivering valuable content to a targeted audience in order to drive company business objectives. The goal of content marketing is not to be overtly promotional. Rather, it seeks to engage audiences and develop long-term relationships with customers by delivering meaningful insights, entertainment and observations. Quality content marketing can appear in a wide range of formats, including news articles, blogs, Q&As, videos and much more. This content is then distributed via a mix of third-party and company-owned channels, such as email newsletters, industry publications and social media sites.
Goals of a Content Marketing Strategy
Before you build out your content marketing strategy, you will want to take some time to consider what your content marketing goals and KPIs are. In order to do so, you should take the following into consideration:
-
Target Audience: Who will read your content? For how many different audiences will you create content? Your cross-platform content strategy should cater to more than one type of customer. Using a number of content types and channels helps you deliver content that is tailored to each audience.
-
Solve a Problem: Ideally, your product or service helps your audience by solving a problem in their lives. Your content should coach and educate your audience through this problem.
-
Differentiate Yourself: Your competitors most likely have a product that is similar to yours, meaning your potential customers need to know what is different about your product. Being true to your brand via authenticity in marketing can help you create your own space in your industry.
-
Content Formats: Figure out what formats you want to focus on. Once you identify the best formats for your business, you will then want to start creating budgets that assess what resources you need to execute this strategy.
-
Channels: This should reflect where your audience lives. If your audience prefers to watch longer-form video content, you may want to publish on YouTube. If your audience is a bit younger, and likes quick content, you may opt for publishing to TikTok and Instagram.
What's the Difference Between Content Marketing and a Content Strategy?
Many marketers conflate the terms content strategy, content marketing and copywriting, but they do have some distinct differences. Content strategy is the research and planning that happens in order to launch a content campaign. It can be thought of as a roadmap for your content marketing tactics and answers questions like, ‘Who are we targeting?”, “What mediums do we want to use?”, and “What goals do we want to achieve?”. On the other hand, content marketing is the actual scheduling, publishing, and promotion of content.
Content Marketing Strategy vs. Content Tactics
Tactics are the individual components of a campaign used to achieve an overarching goal. The content strategy is the overarching goal and consists of these individual tactics. Tactics can include content syndication and website content. A cross-platform content strategy would focus on a goal (leads, awareness) and the plan to execute that goal.
What is Included in a Content Strategy?
Several components are included in a content strategy. These include KPIs, marketing channels, rate of production, topics, and editorial calendar, and content formats. To develop a comprehensive strategy, marketers must first decide on a marketing or business goal and align their tactics to achieve this.
Why Do You Need a Content Plan?
Marketing teams with a documented strategy tend to be more successful. In fact, 65% of the most successful content marketing teams have their content plan documented (compared to 14% of the least successful teams).
A content marketing plan can align your teams on a predetermined goal. This will also help marketers create better and more focused content that can cater to the product, sales, and business objectives.
Types of Content Marketing Formats
1. Blog Posts
Blog posts are articles that live on websites. If this type of website content is going to be part of your marketing plan, you should publish regularly in order to attract new visitors. Blog posts should include valuable content so your audience is inclined to share.
2. Ebooks
Ebooks are used for lead generation, where website visitors can download after submitting a form. They are typically more in-depth than blog posts, and are published much less frequently than other content.
3. Case Studies
Case studies let you tell customer stories - building credibility in the process. Case studies are very versatile because they can take many different forms. The goal of a case study is to demonstrate how your products help real-life companies to succeed.
4. Infographics
Infographics help organize and visualize data for customers in a more compelling way. This is a great content format to use when trying to share lots of data in a clear, easy way.
5. Videos
Videos are an engaging content medium that is great to use for social media platforms and websites. Videos require a much larger investment of time and resources, but since visual content can offer a large content marketing ROI, it's a medium worth looking into.
6. Social Media
Once you begin regularly publishing website content, you may want to start thinking about a social media strategy so you can effectively distribute your content. Posting on social media is crucial to amplifying your brand's audience reach - delivering your content where you know your customers spend their time.
7. Email Marketing
Email marketing is an effective way to build your database while connecting with prospects and customers. Email campaigns should deliver value to the recipients by addressing challenges. Consider curating news stories and licensed news content to help your audience stay on top of industry trends or highlighting other assets that they may find valuable.
8. Thought Leadership
Thought leadership content marketing can come in a wide variety of formats, ranging from webinars to white papers to blog posts. For B2B organizations, this form of content may be the most valuable, since decision-makers at their target organizations are rapidly consuming it.
21% of thought leaders are reading four or more hours a week of thought leadership content. 55% are using this information to determine if they would like to partner with a vendor and almost half will give their contact information in exchange for this kind of content. You can read more interesting thought leadership statistics here.
The Benefits of a Content Marketing Strategy
Learning how content marketing can help you grow your business is the key to actually being able to take advantage of the benefits. There is a lot of value in using content marketing best practices within your strategy. Let's dive into what those are.
Increased Conversions:
Content marketing that addresses your customers’ needs can be a very effective tool for getting in front of key decision-makers and converting leads. There is a plethora of ways to generate leads through content marketing. Thought leadership poses a great way to gain trust with your audience. Nearly 1 out of every 2 decision-makers has shared their contact information with an organization after reading a piece of thought leadership content.
Building Credibility:
Content marketing, especially thought leadership or editorial content, can help a brand build credibility and trust with its customer base. Take business-to-business organizations, for example. A recent study conducted by LinkedIn and Edelman found that 75% of B2B organizations leverage content marketing to build trust with their target audiences. To ensure content marketing success, organizations must implement a strong B2B blog content strategy. 55% of decision-makers at these companies also said that they read thought leadership content to vet partnerships with vendors and other organizations. Credibility is especially important in industries such as healthcare and finance, where consumers are looking for accurate information to make decisions.
Creating Brand Awareness:
Content marketing works because it is a very useful tool for generating leads at the top of the sales funnel and boosting brand awareness among prospective customers. 86% of marketers cite growing brand awareness as their primary reason for using content marketing. The use of blog posts, publications and white papers can improve content marketing, brand resonance and establish your organization as a thought leader in the marketplace.
The Content Marketing Funnel
When executing a content marketing plan, it's important to also consider the funnel. This can be visualized as:
- Awareness: This is the first stage of the funnel. Content in this stage can be high-level, speaking directly to customer pain points and steering them in the direction of a solution.
- Consideration: For prospects in the consideration or (middle of the funnel) phase, thought leadership can help establish credibility. In fact, 47% of decision-makers are using thought leadership to discover new products.
- Convert: In the conversion stage, prospects are deciding if they want to move forward with your solution or not. Comprehensive sales demos, brochures, and comparison charts can all help a prospect convert.
- Loyalty: Once a customer has converted, it can be easy to forget about customer retention, especially if your department is not directly measured on this rate. However, engaging with current customers is important, since acquiring a new customer can cost a company between 5-25 times more than keeping a current one. For this stage, relevant news articles, industry trends, and other valuable information can help you maintain a good relationship with these consumers.
Building a Content Strategy Framework
For companies embarking on creating a comprehensive strategy for their content marketing, it’s important to establish a framework that can be repeated and updated based on the company needs. A content strategy framework will include analyzing the target audience, establishing goals, creating an editorial calendar, and measuring results. Below we’ve included steps to help your team build a successful content strategy and framework.
9 Steps to Building Out Your Content Strategy:
1. Define Your Target Audience:
One of the first steps in developing an effective content strategy is defining and understanding your target audience. Identify your primary audience — as well as their values and pain points — by developing detailed buyer personas. Buyer personas are composite characters that represent your target audience and illustrate their buying habits, demographics and goals. This information is critical for crafting the topics and formats that will best cater to your audience’s needs and deliver the most value to them.
2. Establish KPIs for Your Content:
Once you’ve identified the audience for your content, the next step is to determine how you’ll measure the success of your content. To do that, you must define your key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs can include metrics such as sales revenue, brand awareness or search visibility. However, it's important to also establish how the success of each piece of content will be determined. For example: If the goal of the blog is to improve awareness, website views and clicks should determine success and not sales metrics.
Comparing the performance of various types of content, topics and calls to action can then help you narrow your approach and craft the highest impact content.
3. Establish Distribution Channels and Formats for Your Content:
Be sure to distinguish between the channel and the tactic when creating this plan. For example, social media and content marketing are often intertwined, but social and content marketing should be approached differently. Social is just one channel to be considered. Content marketing, on the other hand, is a tactic that should be used across a wide variety of channels. These channels should be selected based on how successful the content performs, engagement rates, and where your target audience is.
Determining where to distribute your content can be just as important as the content itself. To find the right platforms for your brand, try experimenting with different channels and researching where and how your audience consumes content. Some popular channels for marketers include email, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. According to a survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, email, social and blogs are the top-three most popular distribution channels for B2B marketers.
The format that your content takes can also have an effect on how it resonates with audiences on different channels. The same content can be formatted in a wide range of pieces that include videos, white papers, e-books, articles, photo galleries and much more. Comparing different formats using A/B testing methods can help you determine the optimal content mix for your organization.
4. Have a Documented Strategy in Place:
Taking the time to clearly define the strategy behind your content and goals is a critical step that many marketers miss. In fact, 64% of B2B content marketing teams do not have a content strategy in place. A documented plan can help your team focus its efforts, define what success looks like and ultimately have a bigger impact on business goals. According to a survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, 62% of marketers who said they were successful at content marketing had a documented strategy in place.
B2B content marketing best practices include marketing objectives, KPIs, timelines, market research, and distribution and internal communications strategies. When formulating this strategy, it is valuable for your team to consider conducting a content audit to determine which assets are currently available and where there may be gaps.
5. Establish a Content Team:
Content marketing is a team effort. Define roles for each team member, including who is responsible for content creation, content ideation, graphic design, managing distribution, collecting data on results and which content creation tools you will want to use.
The unfortunate reality is that many marketers have nonexistent or very small content marketing teams. If you have a limited team, determine which content marketing tasks should be handled in-house and which content marketing tasks should be outsourced.
Your team can also consider getting a copyright license. Publications such as The New York Times, offer these licenses making it easy to get access to world-class journalism and thought leadership content. Your team will be able to leverage world-class writers and leaders without wasting time in navigating the complexities of getting copyright permission.
6. Get Input Across Departments:
Content marketing teams should work together with business development, sales and product teams to determine additional topics. Product and sales teams will have insights into how the products are used and hear feedback from prospects and customers. Additionally, by incorporating insights from these departments, these teams can get aligned on how to better reach business goals to improve content marketing ROI. When product, sales and marketing teams work together, teams will create better content that resonates with the target audience.
7. Determine what Languages are Needed:
For teams developing a global content marketing strategy, it's important to determine which languages will be needed for marketing materials. Teams will then need to determine which materials will be translated and which will need to be created based on those local markets. They will also need to determine how much content they want to license to scale their content marketing efforts in these regions.
8. Leverage Content From Thought Leaders:
Licensing articles, graphics and media can also be a great way to incorporate high-value content into your marketing strategy without straining your resources or budget. Through content licensing, outsourced pieces, and republished content, brands can leverage articles written by globally renowned thought leaders on a variety of topics, helping these companies to establish their credibility in the marketplace. High-quality content can make a real difference in building out a marketing strategy, and publishing content quickly can help you further connect with your target audience. 78% of B2B marketers who saw increased success in their content marketing efforts cite higher quality and more efficient content as being key factors. Curating content from influencers or credible publications can also be a great strategy to demonstrate thought leadership.
9. Measure Results
In order to determine if tactics should be reused or how successful the strategy was, teams need to measure results. Results should be measured according to the KPIs created at the beginning of the strategy.
Examples of Companies Using a Content Marketing Strategy
AdvisorStream
AdvisorStream looked to expand its content marketing strategy via the use of licensed articles. Delivering trustworthy content marketing materials is crucial because it helps to drive brand credibility and provide users with valuable information. Between January 2020 to June 2020, they were able to improve lead capture by 260% and improve views from licensed content by 200%.
ESPN
ESPN used TimesMachine, a browser-based digital replica of every edition of The New York Times published between 1851 and 1980, to expand their content marketing strategy. This allowed them to contextualize storytelling with precise historical detail of events both on and off the field - resulting in over 3,000 tweets about the events of the 1927 season.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing has solidified itself as a critical tool for marketers when it comes to building loyalty and engaging new prospects in a meaningful way. In fact, 70% of marketers are now actively investing in content marketing. Additionally, content marketing can support your digital marketing efforts by strengthening your credibility and creating trust with consumers, ultimately growing your business.
Before you get started with a content marketing solution, however, it's important to spend the time necessary to create a robust marketing strategy that follows content marketing best practices by defining your target audiences, establishing your KPIs, determining your distribution channels and planning out the development of your content. Consider how you can license material from leading publications like The New York Times to incorporate into your content mix, and how you can use expert voices from these publications to build your brand credibility.
To learn more about how content licensing can augment your marketing strategy, explore these helpful resources from The New York Times Licensing Group:
