By Jayne Schultheis - A successful content marketing strategy can help your company achieve its business goals. But how do you get started? Read on for eight steps to create a content marketing strategy that delivers results.

Why does your company need a content marketing strategy?

The simple answer is that an effective content marketing strategy delivers results. The benefits of content marketing include increased organic traffic, improved brand awareness, an engaged target audience, and improved authority and expertise in your industry. One 2017 report found that content marketing generates three times as many leads as outbound marketing but costs about 60% less.

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Digital marketing efforts have disrupted and outpaced traditional marketing. You can't build an impactful brand presence with a newsletter sent by snail mail. Instead, you need a marketing strategy that identifies and uses several content marketing channels. You might include SEO content on websites, content promotion on social media, email marketing campaigns, or all of the above.

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Amid the vast quantities of generic AI content, savvy marketers are moving towards a more robust content marketing strategy. Cranking out content that no one ever sees is a recipe for failure. Instead, AI can be used to determine the most effective way to both craft and distribute your content to be read by the right people. That is the way to gather leads and increase sales.

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‍The bottom line: a content marketing strategy can deliver solid results for less money than outbound marketing. That's why content marketers are investing a considerable amount of resources into these efforts.

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What are the essential elements of a content marketing strategy?

A successful content marketing strategy will incorporate these eight elements:

1. Know your mission, vision and values
2. Identify your target audience
3. Audit your existing content
4. Choose a content management platform
5. Establish appropriate KPIs
6. Create an editorial plan
7. Publish your work
8. Analyze your results

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Know your mission, vision, and values

You can’t begin to craft a successful content creation strategy, if you don’t know who you are and what your central mission is. When somebody asks you what your company does or what problem it solves, you should be ready with a clear, succinct answer. That will give your marketing backbone and character.

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If you’re a seasoned industry leader and you’re struggling to develop a content strategy, go back to basics and remember your company “why.” Look at your mission and values. Remind yourself of why you’re doing the work you do. Then make sure your entire content team catches that vision so they can create. content that resonates with your end user.

Identify your target audience

You can’t craft a compelling message if you don't know who you are trying to reach. Think about who your end user is and how they interact with your brand. You might have more than one target audience.

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Do competitive research to help form your strategy and find potential partnership opportunities. With Rellify's integrated AI capabilities, you can discover and analyze what your competitors are using to reach your target audience. We also will help you find gaps in their content that you can exploit. In the initial stages of topic ideation within a custom Relliverse™, our AI crawls the Internet in a targeted way — building a database of all the content surrounding your niche product/service and showing how it is resonating with online searchers.

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This type of research provides valuable information about what your target audience is looking for. It also can help you understand where they're most likely to encounter and positively interact with your content.

Audit your existing content

Before you embark on a new content strategy, you need to undergo a content audit on the assets you already have. Does this content line up with your goals? Is it appealing to your target audience? Is your content repurposed for channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and direct mail — where your audience can find you? What’s working, and what’s not?

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‍Content audits typically break down into three distinct categories: the content itself, the placement of your content, and the audience fit (i.e., is your content reaching the people you want to in the way that you want to?)

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Which social media posts have performed well with your audience? Which blog posts are reaching potential customers through organic search? If you’ve done paid search, evaluate those metrics — what worked and what didn’t? You might find after a content audit that you should remove or repurpose underperforming articles.

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Your content audit should also include a technical SEO audit. That’s where you make sure your page speed is fast and performs well on mobile search and desktop.

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Rellify provides thorough audits of website content as a service for clients, providing insights and suggestions to help inform strategy. Not only do our experts look at technical SEO, they also can evaluate your content's effectiveness when it comes to the topic ideation and messaging itself. Once you know what's working and what's not working, it becomes much clearer how to shape your marketing strategy to drive sales.

Choose a content management platform

A content management platform can be an instrumental component in organizing and delivering content for any digital marketer. Here are three examples of content marketing platforms that can help you achieve great results:

• Atlassian (including Trello/Jira/Confluence). These platforms help simplify communication between team members, especially when scheduling posts, recapping meetings, or brainstorming new ideas.
• WordPress. The most widespread publishing tool. WordPress allows you to schedule, write, and publish articles. You can also add plug-ins for extra analytic data.
• Rellify. The first-ever content intelligence platform, Rellify helps users from the content ideation process all the way through analytics by combining the best attributes of human expertise and machine learning

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Set key performance indicators

Now, it’s time to figure out which key performance indicators (KPIs) really matter for your goals. Choose a few to focus on, like improving your return on investment (ROI), lowering your cost of acquisition for new users, or increasing your Google impressions and click-through rate.

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If you choose too many KPIs, you risk getting overwhelmed and not accomplishing anything. Or, if your goals are vague, like "making more money," you won't be able to interpret the results usefully.

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The first task when defining your KPIs is determining your baseline performance. That will give you a foundation for setting realistic goals and gauging the results. Remember, the KPIs for your KPIs is that they be achievable and measurable.

Create an editorial plan

The Rellify platform helps you organize your editorial plan with its scheduling feature. Our interactive calendar enables clear and efficient organization and movement of your content from its planning phases to publishing and monitoring.

Your editorial plan serves as the backbone for creating and distributing relevant content. It will help you:

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• Stay on track with publishing content regularly.
• Develop your marketing budget and stick to it.
• Measure your KPI.
• Avoid publishing too many articles on the same topics.

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Publishing editorial plan

If you plan on blogging long-form content, choose a few core topics you want to write about and determine how frequently you wish to post. This is where Rellify's topic ideation can be helpful. It will show you the most relevant topics for your target audience and categorize them appropriately.

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Social editorial plan

Once you have completed the editorial component of your content marketing strategy, you can start planning your social editorial calendar. If you’re selling a physical product, your blog articles will likely have strong visuals to be shared as social content, so they’ll probably be appropriate across all social channels. Look for user-generated content from people using your product and reshare them on visual platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. Pair your visual content with great copywriting or give a behind-the-scenes look at your company.

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Be creative and unafraid to switch things up with this part of your content marketing strategy.

Create and publish your work

The next part of your successful content marketing plan is to create the content.

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Rellify specializes in helping to write content that will engage readers and rank at or near the top of online searches. Start by implementing AI-assisted content ideation and keyword clustering within a custom Relliverse. That enables you to craft content that's exactly in line with the information your target audience is searching for. Our writing platform furnishes the tools that allow people to generate content with AI at the touch of a button or write it themselves with various AI-powered tools.

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Remember to use a Call to Action (CTA) in your articles. They are vital for increasing conversion rates. This can be as simple as “Buy Now!” or “Click to Chat!” To write a good CTA, start with exactly what you would like the consumer to do. This could be download, shop, subscribe, click, order, or something else. Be persuasive and create a sense of urgency. Making something a “limited time offer” can motivate potential customers to act right away. Your web design should make it easy for a consumer to respond. The website should make it obvious where to click or where to find the form you would like them to fill out.

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Don't be afraid of innovation. Create multimedia assets by incorporating video, quizzes, polls, infographics, and photographs. Mix up the forms of your content to include e-books, Q&As, how-tos, guest blogs, live chats, customer testimonials, success stories, case studies, and others. Creative marketing efforts can help you stand out from the competition. It doesn't have to be expensive, either. You can re-purpose content you already have.

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For example, rather than publishing this article and relevant graphics once on the website, we’ll share links on LinkedIn. One week we might share an infographic, another a quote, and another one might be a link to the full article. Publishing the same content in different ways across different channels is a great way to maximize its impact.

Analyze the results

What gets measured gets done, and considering the blood, sweat, and tears that go into high-quality content, you want to make sure it’s working. The analysis isn’t about eliminating failure but understanding what works, what doesn’t, and why.

You’ll have several approaches, depending on your content marketing plan. These may include:

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• Google Analytics. This tool will let you know how different blog posts and articles on your website are performing. Other tools might also be able to give you SERPs data, but Google Analytics tends to be the most accurate.
• Hubspot. This platform can provide you with lots of insights, depending on which features you’re using for your marketing strategy. Hubspot can give you data on article views or social media insights, if you’re using it to publish your content. It also provides robust information on email open and click-through rates.
• Rellify. Rellify is proud to offer our robust "Monitor" feature. Provide the appropriate URL for your new content and when it is indexed by Google, we’ll start monitoring — all within the Rellify platform.
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Monitoring results helps keep existing content relevant. Doing keyword research periodically can yield big dividends since the terms your customers use will change over time. Simply updating a post by refreshing the keywords can help keep it at the top of search pages and yield a more steady stream of high-quality leads to your website.

How can I improve my content marketing strategy?

Carefully review these eight steps to see which parts of your content marketing strategy seem to be working well and which parts need improvement.

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Unfortunately, you never quite finish improving your content marketing strategy. Sometimes Google will change a key algorithm and your traffic will unexpectedly plummet. New technology or social platforms might impact the way you disseminate content. Or you might find that your consumers’ preferences change.

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Whatever the case, no matter how outstanding your content marketing strategy is today, it might need tweaks tomorrow. Be open to staying on top of your messaging and the surrounding digital marketplace.

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Rellify your content marketing strategy

Keeping up with all of the necessary components of a content marketing strategy can be challenging, from content creation to planning to analysis. So if your content team needs help, be sure to contact the experts at Rellify. We combine the best of human expertise and machine learning to deliver a strong content marketing strategy and results for our clients. Rellify's groundbreaking Relliverse™ uses machine learning to provide a thorough and custom digital roadmap for achieving your content marketing goals. Interested in a demo? Contact one of the experts at Rellify today!

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