Content marketing in 2021 offers an incredible amount of opportunities. Businesses can use it to boost their results in many ways. By creating relevant content and delivering it to your customers, you can improve your online reputation and build a community. While doing this, you’re growing advocates of your brand. And that’s something every business wishes for.
As things are with digital marketing tactics, content marketing is a lot more than just creating and distributing content. In fact, this term involves an entire strategic approach. Its’ purpose is to attract and engage a clearly defined audience. And the end goal is to generate profitable customer action through the process.
By following our definitive guide, you’ll get all the in-depth information you need to create a successful content marketing strategy for your business.
The Four Key Elements of Content Marketing Strategy
To be successful, every content marketing strategy must have four core elements. Here we’re talking about positioning your brand, owned media value proposition, business case, and strategic plan. So, let’s see why each of these is so important and how you can implement them.
Positioning Your Brand
The first thing you want to do is to position your brand in the market. If you do it properly, it will help with providing a consistent experience for your audience. Additionally, this builds the right image of your brand through all accessible content marketing channels. So, to help you a bit with brainstorming regarding the positioning of your brand, we’ve come up with a few questions you should ask yourself.
- Who are my customers now, and who are my potential customers?
- What kind of content and experience are they looking for?
- What is the competitive landscape in my niche?
- How my top competitors market their brands?
- What’s unique about my brand?
- What makes it a better choice compared to my competitors?
- How can I highlight my brands’ personality?
Owned Media Value Proposition
If you want to establish your brand as a relevant content publisher, you need to define your owned media value proposition. You want to determine what kind of unique value you can provide with your content. Find out what differentiates your content from everything else that can be found online.
It’s a good idea to do analytics research on your audience to identify the type of information they’re after. After that, analyze your competitors’ strategies and try to find your editorial niche. However, make sure not to focus on your rivals too much. Instead, channel your resources and time towards unbranded media. Here, we’re talking about online magazines, industry blogs, and influencers’ video channels. It’s hard to build backlinks when you have a brand new site, and all mentioned media sources can be a great place to expose your content.
Business Case
The most important factor of a successful content marketing strategy is to provide value to your customers. But, in addition to attracting new leads and followers, this tactic should also drive your business forwards.
Determine what are your business goals and figure out how a strategy can bring you closer to them. Calculate how many resources you need to invest in your content strategy and what kind of results you can expect from it. That’s what content marketing in 2021 is all about.
A well-thought business case will help you understand all the benefits, costs, and risks you’re going to face. Also, it will convince decision-makers of its value for the company.
Strategic Plan
Now that you know what your goals are, you should focus on how you’ll achieve them. And for this, you need a strategic plan. It should involve everything we talked about so far. In it, you should specify who you want to reach, how you want to deliver the content, and how you will measure the results.
For this occasion, we asked the experts from the Link Department content marketing team to share a couple of insights with us. So, here are some tips and tricks on how to create a perfect content strategy plan.
Additional Tips
Audit Your Existing Content
If you already have a site with plenty of content on it, you want to perform the audit check before you start developing your strategy further. The thing is that there are simply too many pieces of information for your audience to click on nowadays. So, it makes no sense to create new content if you don’t know what works from what you already have.
Collect all your existing content and analyze that data from it to understand what state it’s in. This way, you can easily learn what kind of content attracts the audience and brings the best results. You’ll also learn what you need to improve.
Set Clear Goals
To keep your goals achievable, make sure that each content piece works toward meeting them. Start with goals related to your overall vision before you move on to identifying all the long-term and short-term examples. Long-term strategic goals are more important than specific operational goals in your plan, so make sure to treat them that way. For instance, you should know if your SEO is effective, but it’s okay to put creating quality content in front of it if that’s what your customers want.
We’re sure that many of you are aware of traditional goal-setting frameworks like SMART. But, for this purpose, we think that framework CLEAR (Collaborative, Limited, Emotional, Appreciable, Refinable ) can perform much better. Therefore, make sure to consider using it instead.
Conclusion
Although the methods for delivering content to audiences are constantly changing, the core principles of content marketing in 2021 remain the same. Therefore, focus on developing a top-notch strategy based on trustworthy data, and you won’t have any problems along the way.