How to Establish a Strategy for Content Marketing

In this year,  content marketing  is becoming the main actor in any online marketing strategy of companies, and those who do not consider it that way are losing business opportunities.

To get into the subject … What is content marketing?

It is a marketing technique to attract new customers and keep current customers offering them interesting, useful and quality content to try to get closer to them and get their engagement, but avoiding the commercial part of the contents. Therefore, it is important to know the target audience and know what customers need and deliver it in a relevant and convincing way.

Steps to Create Content Marketing Strategy

Before going forward, you have to stop and think and ask yourself three simple questions: what are the objectives to achieve? What kind of content should be offered? In what channels should we act? The answer to these three questions will be given by the  content marketing strategy.

Indeed, we can not start offering content to users without having previously established a strategy, for this the first thing is to  set the objectives  of the company in these actions. We have to establish some measurable objectives that allow us to later see and confirm if the strategy has been correct or on the contrary we have to change the focus.

Once the objectives have been established, a phase of  research and market research is in order to obtain the profiles and segmentation of our target audience, the social media environment to find out what social networks are to be promoted or on which platforms we must distribute the content, The right search engines and of course our keywords.

Now we have the defined objectives and the information necessary to plan  the types of content and a calendar of creation and distribution of the same.

The  creation of content  is our next phase of strategy. At the stage of planning and research we have already detected the types of content that we have to generate, so it is the time for creators to produce elements of video, image, blogs, ebooks, gamification, studies, presentations, etc …

We now come to another important step in our content marketing strategy and its  distribution. Here we will have at our disposal a series of platforms to be able to distribute the content from YouTube for the videos, Flickr for our images, Slideshare for our presentations, WordPress or Blogger for our blogs, e-mailing … to mention the best known, but Above all we must use the appropriate platform to our contents.

They are already distributed, but now they have to be publicized through the  promotion through different social networks, collaborative links to blogs, bookmarks directories, forums, digital newspapers and media, etc …

Finally, we have the phase of the  measurement results. I think this part is the most important because if we do not measure the actions performed, we can never know if the strategy is correct, and therefore if we take corrective measures. For this, we will have to help us with the many tools of analysis and measurement of results in the different social networks and platforms used to execute our content marketing. Herein lies the importance of defining measurable and quantifiable goals and objectives at the outset.

Once we have finished this cycle we must go back to the beginning and start over, our strategies must have a continuous character and also adapt to the changing needs of users.

In short, we must not forget our content marketing strategies as they should be one of the most important parts of the company’s global marketing plan.

I await your comments and contributions on the subject.