Content marketing should be a vital part of your promotional efforts. It’s cheap, reliable, and builds trust with potential customers. However, there is so much of the stuff out there.
Everyone and their grandma has a website and are now content creation experts flooding the market with content. How do you deal with all this competition? How do you stand out in this sea of content?
In such a crowded market, the key question for the business owner creating content is how do I grab the reader’s attention? Out of all the alternatives out there, how do I make sure that mine is the blog article or the post that the reader seeks to consume?
In addition to these questions, businesses like yours also want to know how to make the most of the content that they have already produced. In this article, I explain how to create content that 1. Differentiates you from the competition; 2. Drives your business goals; and 3. Nurture readers from interest to sales.
What is a content marketing strategy?
A content marketing strategy is simply a plan to make sure that your content is created and distributed to achieve your business goals. Some business owners build their websites, with no thought as to how they should use content to promote their business goals.
Some of them have blogs. But these blogs are haphazardly structured or written. Some website owners are even more interested in writing the content that they are interested in as opposed to content that their readers are interested in. In any event, you should always keep at the back of your mind the following question: How does my content contribute to my business goals?
This question should be central when formulating your content marketing strategy. A content marketing strategy does not necessarily simply revolve around a blog. It should be a holistic approach that includes:
Articles on your blog
Service pages and landing pages
Social media
A content marketing strategy means configuring a productive relationship between content on your blog, service and landing pages, and social media. This relationship creates a network that becomes a content funnel.
This content funnel captures customers at every stage of the customer journey. In short, it works to ensure that your content acts as an engine to generate leads and sales.
How to create a content marketing strategy
Creating a successful content marketing strategy begins with deciding your long-term goals and specific short-term strategies to achieve them. In addition, you need to know who our target audience is. That is the only way you know the type of content that you should write.
Different audiences have different expectations, even when we’re talking about the same product or service. For example, an audience on LinkedIn will expect content with a more serious tone than an audience on Twitter. Now that you know your audience, what next?
The next steps include creating a content funnel and distributing content effectively. This means deciding what content to write for what market segment at what stage of the buyer’s journey. It also means figuring out an efficient system to distribute, link, refresh, and repurpose content between your website blog, social media, and service and landing pages.
1. Establish long-term goals and short-term objectives
Establishing long-term goals could mean many things. It all depends on you the CEO or entrepreneur. Where do you see your business five or ten years from now? This could be in terms of several benchmarks:
Projected revenue
Projected sales
Projected market share
Projected website visits
Brand awareness
Most companies focus on a profit motive. That means revenue and sales. Others focus more on dominating the market through increased market share or awareness, which may not always translate into profit. For example, you want at least 100,000 website visits a month within one year.
How do you even begin to come up with a strategy to achieve this? You should first do the research. You can hire someone or do it on your own to determine what goes into garnering 100,000 website visits a month.
Now that you have established your long-term goals, the next step is the short-term objectives that wil take you there. This means what pragmatic steps to take to bring you closer to the achievement of these goals. It’s not nearly as hard as you think.
You can simply select a website or series of websites that have achieved the metric of 100,000 visits or more and see how they do it. There are several SEO tools that allow you to do this. They include:
Ahrefs
SurferSEO
SemRush
Etc.
After discovering that website, then you should study their content, their service pages, and how their website is structured. Based on this research you come up with a content plan. Your research should reveal information such as:
What topics to focus on
How many blog articles are required to be written
How long should the average blog be
How much of the content should be TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU
You should think long and carefully about the approach to take. You have to balance your goals carefully against each other. For example, how important are website visits versus sales? After all, it is wrong to assume that more visits results in more sales.
Most visit to a website are information-driven or what we call top-of-the-funnel or TOFU content. This means customers just want to acquire knowledge and have no intention of making a sale.
For example, if you have a website selling packaged single-origin coffee and you decide to write a blog about the history of the cafe. The people who land on your website to read that article likely won’t make a purchase. They’re just interested in the history of cafes.
2. Define your target audience
Knowing who you’re selling to and creating content for is quite important. Knowing your target audience means that you know all sorts of useful information about them. This includes:
The price they are willing to pay for your service
When they are most likely to buy
The type of tone that would appeal to them
The type of content that answers their pain points of needs
Let’s take the example of an academic editing website. Who would the target audience for this type of business be? The target audience would be anyone who needs academic editing services. This includes the following:
Students who have to write academic essays for coursework
Students who have to write dissertations and theses
Academics trying to get published in peer-reviewed journals
Students who want their college application essays edites
This type of information will allow you to decide what the character and nature of your website would be. Based on the list, the largest group would be students. This means your website should be designed to cater to their needs.
You should ask yourself what type of content would such a target audience require? Students at the college or university level would want to know how to write an academic essay. So, you write a series of articles about how to write an academic essay. For example, titles on your blog could include:
“Tips to Write a Great Academic Essay”
“How to Write a Winning College Application Essay”
“How to Write the Introduction to an Essay”
“How to Write a Thesis Statement”
You get the point. Knowing your target audience also helps you prepare for other things, such as peak season. If your business offers college essay writing services, then you should know that the demand for these services would be highest around the time of the year that students have to apply for college.
This would allow you to make other important business decisions, such as hiring a higher number of editors for that period. Also, the tone that you use for a young college audience will be much lighter and easy-going than what you would use for seasoned academics.
3. Create a content funnel
A content funnel simply means creating content that captures customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is based on the classic sales funnel also known as AIDA — that is, Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action.
A properly created content funnel caters to customers at every stage. Let’s take the example of the academic editing website. Customers interested in “How to Write a Winning College Essay” would not be interested in buying editing services. Instead, they would be at the awareness stage.
If the query ‘How to Write a Winning Collge Essay” lands them on your site, this means they become aware of the fact that there is a website that can help them solve this problem. Later if the student writes the college essay and is nervous about it not being good enough to get into the college of his dreams, they will research “the best college editing services” to determine if that could help.
This can go either one of two ways. Students who have never been on your site before wil simply do the search and land on your service page titled “College Essay Editing Services.” This represents BOFU content. At this stage, the customer is interested in buying.
However, the preferable option is that the same student who remembered reading your useful article on “How to Write a Winning College Essay” would have bookmarked your site and returned to purchase your service.
The fact that your website was able to provide useful information and answer a question means that you have developed trust. In short, you have connected emotionally with your reader.
4. Distribute your content effectively
Effective distribution of content is also key to a great content marketing strategy. There are several channels of distribution. You don’t necessarily have to choose one over the other.
Instead, focus on recycling or repurposing content. Let’s look at the various content distribution channels:
SEO-driven content
Email marketing
Social media
SEO-driven content to a certain extent takes care of itself. It is content that garners visits based on how well it answers searchers' queries. Email marketing and social media are different animals.
An effective content distribution strategy typically places SEO-driven blog content at the heart of it. Social media is a secondary channel that is used to gain new followers or to treat your social media audience to content on your site.
For example, a blog can be turned into a series of interesting posts that you can post on the LinkedIn timeline. This means you can make the most of your existing content.
Email marketing provides you with the chance to nurture searchers who haphazardly came across your blog via SEO into loyal followers and eventually leads.
This you do by having them sign up to newsletters or downloading free materials such as educational e-books in exchange for their email. In short, as mentioned earlier, you do not need to choose between different distribution channels. Instead, you synchronize and synergize them using contengt repurposing.
How EminentEdit can help with your content marketing strategy
EminentEdit offers content marketing services to make sure that your blog is an engine that drives leads and sales. Our content writing services include:
Writing SEO-driven blog articles
Copywriting for landing and service pages
Articles into newsletters
Lazily using AI and copy and pasting YouTube or podcast scripts to post on the TL won’t cut it. You need a professional writer and editor to make sure that your content is repurposed to achieve your goals.
EminentEdit provides content repurposing services that are:
More importantly, we are adaptable to your specific needs. | Get in touch with us for help in crafting awesome content. We know what you want to say. We help you say it better. |
At EminentEdit, our content writers and editors don’t think of content marketing as an afterthought. We ensure that your content works to drive your business goals. Contact us today to craft repurposed content that works — Let’s Go!
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, January 07). Creating a Winning Content Marketing Strategy In Four Steps. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/creating-a-winning-content-marketing-strategy-in-four-steps |
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