How to Create Powerful Content Marketing Strategies

A lack of effective content marketing can hurt your business in more ways than one.

Statistically speaking, 60 percent of successful businesses owe their success to proper content marketing strategies. The opposite is also true; 40 percent of businesses fail due to the lack of a strong content marketing plan.

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Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

Creating content marketing strategy doesn’t have to be hard. Here are some tips to help you plan your strategy:

• Identify Your Audience

This is usually the hardest step. Start by identifying commonalities in your existing customer base, then create personas for them and other demographics you would like to reach.

Check your analytics, do competitor analysis, and send out surveys to existing clients/past customers.

• Target Channels

Each demographic has their preferred social media platform. For example, those 25 and under are more likely to be on Instagram, while those 45 and up are on Facebook. Knowing how your audience engages with your brand online is key to creating a strong content marketing strategy.

Choose the channel that is most beneficial for promoting your content. Make it a priority, while identifying other channels that can also be used to boost traffic.

• What Content Do They Like?

Talk to people in forums, do surveys, send email newsletters and address feedback. For example, people on LinkedIn like to read articles, Facebook users are more into short videos.

Don’t waste time creating the wrong content for the wrong audience. The best thing you can do is dig out information about the type of material that your audience likes and doesn’t like.

• Choose The Right Strategy

There are many strategies to choose from. You can incorporate all of them, but the most important thing here is for you to know the one that suits your brand the best. Here's all the ways you can create powerful content marketing strategies:

Effective Storytelling

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Almost every other strategy revolves around storytelling. In any marketing campaign, a good story must be incorporated for your product to sell. The best brands know this key and they have perfected it. For effective storytelling, it must be:

• Authentic: Originality in storytelling is what drives sales. Create a unique story that is eye-catching and relevant to both your brand and your audience.
• High Quality: A good story for your marketing must captivate and inspire your audience. However, if you can include humour, your chances of success will be exceedingly higher -- it may even go viral!

Call-To-Action

If your content has a call to action, then your goal is to tap into the buyer’s emotions and persuade them to convert. For example, this can be making a purchase or signing up for an email newsletter. Use words like you, free, guarantee, results in order to influence them.

Interactive Content

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Interactive content is a content marketing strategy that involves providing your target audience with something uniquely interesting to them. For example, it can be a quiz, an infographic, or even a short video.

Infographics are proven to be one of the most effective forms of content marketing.

It's easy to see why. Here's what makes infographics effective:

• Information: The content you create for your audience has to be unique. Depending on your audience, the delivery of the information can be formal or casual. For example, if you're an insurance broker, you can create an infographic on car accident statistics.
• Graphs: Back up the points you make in the infographic with researched statistics and graphic representations like a bar graph.

Interviews

Conducting an interview where basic questions concerning the brand are highlighted can be very effective. People may stumble upon the interview and find valuable information about your brand and the products you offer.

Curated Content

Curated content involves using RSS to automatically have your blogs posted on other sites. This can be done with the RSS plugin on WordPress and by identifying sites with relevant audiences to increase the reach of each of your blog posts.

Video Content

Videos are extremely effective for driving engagement on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. Creating a product promotional video or any other related video can also drive conversion. Let’s face it, people like visuals and a video is often more valuable than a blog post when driving awareness.

Giveaways

Everyone loves "free." The target is usually people who are ready to buy similar products; for example, if you are in a grocery store, you might see free samples, then be directed towards the product in-store. If you replicate this strategy online through social media or with email marketing, then you will have a high-converting strategy.

Webinars

Live videos that informative and instructional can be extremely beneficial for your brand's authority. In a webinar, you can present information (charts, presentations) to an infinite number of viewers and teach them new skills.

Podcasts

Podcasts are great for forming a deeper relationship with clients, customers, and prospects. Start by planning what you want to talk about in your podcasts, create a calendar, then promote the podcast across social media and on your site. The trick here is to get subscribers to your podcast that are hooked on your messaging.