Posted on 10.12.11

Five Essentials for a Successful Online Content Marketing Strategy

by Kyle Akerman

Have you decided to invest time and money in an online content marketing strategy but are not sure where to begin? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

There are many important pieces to a successful content strategy. Let’s simplify things by concentrating on the five most essential actions you need to perform for content strategy success.

1) Define the Purposes and Goals of Your Content

You use content in many different places on your website: Home, About Us, Portfolio, Products, Services pages as well as in a blog. And you may also offer content on any number of social media sites. So how do you know if your content is having any kind of effect on your business? Well you don’t know if you have not determined any goals in advance.

Some examples of these goals could be:

• To increase sales leads
• To make sales
• To educate and build a position as subject matter expert
• To increase brand awareness
• To increase community engagement

2) Identify Your Audience

Who are you trying to reach with your content? What problems do they need solved? What benefits could they receive from your product or service?

To more easily answer these questions you need to segment your audience into what David Meerman Scott calls “buyer personas.” Each buyer persona has a different set of needs and seeks a different set of benefits from your product or service. Identifying these buyer personas will make it much easier to determine the needs of your customers and how your product or service can solve their problems. Side note: The “buyer” for you might be a donor, volunteer, etc.

If you work for a university, for example, your buyer personas would include prospective students, the parents of prospective students, current students and alumni. Once you know your buyer personas you can create content that specifically targets the needs of each of the groups.

3) Determine the Type of Content You are Going to Create

What type of content will your audience be most likely to consume? This could be blog posts, videos, or podcasts. Define specifically how your content will add value for target users/customers and devise some ideas for how best to create that content. Keep in mind, you will have to find a balance between the content your audience likes the most and the content that you are able to produce with your available resources.

4) Create an Editorial Calendar

As a content producer you need to take on the mindset of a publisher. And as a publisher you will need to create and deliver your content on regular schedule as much as possible. The easiest way to do this is to create an editorial calendar and stick to it. Use the editorial calendar to map out short and long term content schedules with delivery dates and topics to be covered.

Keeping a regular schedule will help you manage resources (time and manpower) and will make it easier for your audience to interact with your content. If possible, they should know exactly when to expect new content (daily, weekly, hourly, etc.). By publishing content at random times, your audience will need to guess when to visit your site for something new. Of course if they have subscribed to your RSS feed, they’ll get nice tidy messages in their Inbox alerting them to your new words of wisdom.

5) Measure and Analyze Performance

You need a way to measure your content marketing efforts or you won’t know what works and what doesn’t. This can be done using free tools such as Google Analytics, or paid tools offered from Sprout Social or Radian6. You can also analyze data from Facebook Insights, Hootsuite, Twitter or a slew of other platforms.

No matter what measurement tool you use, it will provide mounds and mounds of data, much of which may or may not be relevant to your needs. In order to save time and resources, analyze and report on metrics that tell whether you are meeting goals defined in the initial stage of the content marketing strategy. This is very important, especially if you need to justify your measurement budget to a critical decision maker.

Final Thoughts

Each of the five actions described above play a crucial part of your content marketing strategy. And you should take care to optimize each of the actions. Content marketing is a powerful online strategy that can make you stand out from competitors. But it takes time, thought, creativity and patience. You can’t think of it as a one-time thing. It is an ongoing process that, when executed properly, will pay tangible benefits over time.

So are you currently using a content strategy? What parts of your content strategy work the best for you? What things are you finding to be the most challenging? Let us know below.