Are you looking to take your content marketing strategy to the next level in 2023?
Whether you're a small business owner, marketer, or content creator, this guide will provide you with the insights and tools you need to succeed in the ever-changing landscape of content marketing.
As technology and consumer behaviour continue to evolve, so do the best practices for creating and distributing content.
Today, we'll explore the fundamental principles and strategies you need to know to stay ahead of the competition and achieve success with your content marketing efforts.
What is content marketing?
What is content marketing? Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and engage your target audience so you can drive customer action.
Understanding of your target audience is key to doing effective content marketing. After all, you can’t drive that audience to action if you can’t build a relationship with it.
And you can only build a relationship with your audience if you know what content will address its needs and interests. Without that, your audience won’t even give you time of day!
With the right content, you can get results like improved brand awareness, increased sales, better customer loyalty, and ultimately, higher revenue.
Types of Content Marketing
There are many types of content marketing available. As we’ve written before, though, you can’t just pick some to use willy-nilly.
Content types and platforms have different strengths and weaknesses. You have to match them to your target audience and the goals of your content marketing campaign.
Of course, you may need to use different types of content to resonate with different audiences and on different platforms. It also depends on the resources available to you for creating and distributing the content.
At any rate, the most common types of content marketing are online, social media, infographic, blog, podcast, video, and paid ad content. Most businesses use a combination of these for their content marketing.
Think about which type lets you provide the best value to your readers. Sometimes, that means using a combination of content forms, e.g. putting visual representations of data or stats in written articles, or augmenting a text post with a video.
Choose the type that’s most likely to engage, educate, and entertain your audience. It’s the best way to run an effective content marketing campaign.
Pillars for Developing a Content Strategy
To create a successful content marketing strategy, you need to understand the main pillars of content marketing. These are a set of principles that form the foundation of your content marketing strategy.
In brief, every comprehensive content strategy should include goals, a target audience, ideal content types, selected channels and a plan for content creation, distribution, and promotion.
Let’s go over each pillar in detail so you know how to form your content marketing strategy in 2023.
1. Strategy
This pillar is all about defining your goals, target audience, and unique value proposition. It also includes determining the types of content you should use to connect with your audience and align with your brand message.
At its simplest, this pillar is about clarifying what you want to achieve and how you plan to achieve it. Everything else follows from those two things as detail.
2. Audience
This involves identifying your target audience and understanding its constituents’ behaviour, needs and preferences. One of the best ways to do this is to create marketing personas that represent your ideal customers or audience members.
What’s a marketing persona? It’s essentially an archetype of your ideal audience member.
In other words, it’s not a real person but a fictional one who’s a collection of real people’s traits. You use it as a reference in your content marketing plans when trying to figure out how to tailor content to your target audience’s interests.
3. Content Creation
The key to successful content marketing is to create valuable content that resonates with your target audience and to distribute it effectively. This pillar covers the first half of that.
Your goal here is to develop high-quality content that educates, entertains, or inspires your audience. You may brainstorm, plan, or even explore various types of content for this pillar, from blog posts to infographics.
We’ve written about the content creation or development stage before. If you want more tips on how to do it, read our previous article on the topic!
4. Distribution
After the top 3 stages, the next step (and pillar of your content marketing) is distribution. What does this mean? Simply put: putting your content out there!
Content distribution involves publishing your content on various channels such as social media, email, websites, and other platforms.
It also technically includes using paid advertising to reach a wider audience, as that’s just another form of content distribution.
Now, distribution is more complicated than most people think, at least if you want to optimise it. For example, while you can publish a social media post at any time you like, there may actually be specific times when it’s more likely to get engagement.
We’ve covered this before in our article on the publishing stage of content marketing, so check that out if you want more details.
5. Analytics
Finally we come to the last component of your content strategy. This pillar involves tracking and measuring your content success and the effectiveness of your campaign.
As such, this has to do with monitoring traffic and certain metrics – ones like engagement, conversion, and ROI.
Analytics matters because it lets you see how your strategy is actually performing relative to your goals or expectations. It can tell you when you need to tweak something or when something is working well enough to merit increased investment.
Note that it’s a good way of tracking changes or trends that affect content consumption too. As technology and consumer behaviour change, content marketing trends do as well.
Hence, keeping a pulse on your performance relative to trends can give you a lot of flexibility and help you stay ahead of your competition.
Get started on your content marketing for 2023
This knowledge should give you a decent start on putting together your content marketing plans for the year. If you still happen to need help, however, there’s no shame in that – most business owners do!
Shoot us a message. We’ve helped many businesses plan and execute effective content marketing strategies on various platforms, from social media to blog sites.
Contact us for a chat for your digital marketing needs and we’ll talk about how we can do the same for you.
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