The importance of having a strong content marketing strategy

You may have heard the phrase “content is king” and let’s just start by saying that it is true. Just look… you are reading this content that is telling you about content marketing.

Why is content king?

Because it offers your customers something in return. The importance of having a strong content marketing strategy is building your brand and business by offering your users something valuable and relevant.

What is content marketing

The basic definition of content marketing is “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately to drive profitable customer action.”

In basic terms, it is a clearly defined strategy that is designed to give your customers valuable content that will make them interact with your brand and hopefully turn that interaction into a sale.

What do we mean by valuable, relevant and consistent?

Valuable content offers those people who read your site’s blog or videos something worthwhile and positive out of it. For example, if this content is valuable it will give you a basic idea about why a content strategy is so important and how it will help your brand and business. Your customers must feel like they have learned something and been entertained in some way.

Relevant content means it must address what your customers want and what they are interested in and what they need. They don’t want random content, they want specific content connected to what you are offering and you are being a trusted expert for them.

Consistent content means that you develop a certain style, voice and look that matches your brand and when your customers interact with your content, they know immediately that it is related to you and your brand.

This familiar voice, tone, style gives your customer a consistent trusting voice that they can believe in therefore strengthening your content.

Developing your content strategy

When it comes to writing content, it cannot be random. If it is random, it will fall flat on its face, no matter how good the content it. You need a clearly defined strategy so you know what content will be written when, how long it will be and when it will be released.

There are five stages to a strong content marketing strategy.

Planning is all about determining your objectives. Your objectives for your business, your brand and then your marketing objectives. You will have to plan what part content marketing will play in your overall marketing strategy and what other parts of the overall strategy it will compliment for example, social media.

You have to decide what audience you are targeting for your content marketing so that you can write specific content that will be good for them. If you do not plan this correctly and try it with random posts, then it may backfire. Make sure you know what audience you are targeting and tailor the content for them.

Now with content development, you need to have planned exactly what you are going to say with your content. This is where you set your consistent tone and style and get your message across by offer something valuable and relevant to your business.

Implementation is how you distribute your content. You can do it through your blog, guest blogging, YouTube and also how often you update it. Is it once a week or twice a month or every day?

From this point, you monitor the results and see what works and what doesn’t and alter your plan regarding what you find.  You can see what your customers think of it, whether they react positively or negatively and alter your strategy and content accordingly.