What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing can be described as the act of creating valuable content and then publishing it as well as distributing it on various channels such as blogs, news articles, books, websites, etc. with the objective of increasing your exposure to your potential customers.

When you are making content and then posting it on different mediums, you will be able to create brand awareness among your potential customers. Later on, if they ever need your products or services, they will remember you due to your content.

Content marketing also promotes brand loyalty and increases the trust of the consumer. However, for it to be effective, you need to make sure that you have a sound content marketing strategy. In this post, we are going to be looking at a comprehensive guide on how to create one.

The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

• Set Short-Term and Long-Term Goals

When creating a strategy, it is important to know what you want to achieve through it. This is where you set goals.

The goals you set should be achievable and must not be vague. For example, your goal should be to increase the quarterly earnings by 30% instead of just “increase the quarterly earnings”.

Long-term goals are those that are achieved over an extended period of time such as months or years. Short-term goals, on the other hand, are the targets and objectives that are accomplished for the fulfillment of the long-term aims.

To aid yourself in this process, you can use a Goal Management Framework such as:

• S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound)
• C.L.E.A.R (Collaborative, Limited in volume and duration, Emotional, Appreciable, Refinable)

• Establish Online Presence and Content Channels

What good is content if nobody knows that it exists? The next step of your content marketing strategy should be to establish an online presence.

To do that, you need to have a professional website. Your site can contain your brand information, brand story, and blog where you publish informative and valuable articles.

You will need to optimize your site to boost its ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs).  Doing the SEO of a site is another topic altogether and warrants an ultimate guide of its own. Here, you can check one out by clicking on this link.

If you have the budget, you can hire professionals to do your SEO for you. We will still discuss some of the relevant SEO details in this article as they are related to content marketing.

You will need to establish some content channels to post your content. Content channels you may use are:

• Blogs
• Guest blogging
• Community publishing
• Podcasts
• Press releases

Publishing on these channels will improve your brand exposure.

• Invest in Content Creation and Content Optimization Tools

Since this whole strategy is about content marketing, it makes sense that we invest in some tools that help us to create that content and optimize it.

It is no secret that the internet has a lot of material on it. This makes it difficult to create unique and fresh content because there might be something already out there that is quite similar to what you want to create.

Here you can use some content optimization tools such as a paraphraser to make your content look fresh and new.

Optimizing your content has the added benefit of improving your SEO as well. Content relevance and originality are one of the factors that search engines use to rank a website.

• Focus on Content SEO Friendliness

Content SEO friendliness means that your content should be optimized for both humans and bots that crawl the sites for indexing.

Optimizing for bots means that you use the right keywords in the right places such as the title of your page/blog posts, the first paragraph of a blog post, and your anchor text.

Optimizing for humans, on the other hand, means that the site should have understandable and readable content. You should not make your content difficult to read because not everybody is highly proficient in their language.

By making your content easy to read, you will make it more accessible. This means more exposure in the long run. You can pair this tip with the previous one and use some content optimization tools that give very helpful tips/suggestions to make your content more SEO friendly.

• Keep Your Content Free from Plagiarism

Plagiarism is bad for your content marketing strategy in many ways. First of all, it is unethical. In most countries, it is also illegal.

Plagiarism is also the theft of intellectual property; hence it has some serious consequences.

Let’s look at some ways plagiarism negatively affects your strategy.

• Duplicated content is detectable by search engines and they will penalize websites for publishing such content. Penalties include reduction of rank and removal from the search engine index.
• Readers do not like to read plagiarized content. It is unappealing, and repetitive content is boring.
• You could be legally pursued for plagiarizing content if the original author wishes to do so. At the very least, you will receive a “Cease and Desist” notice.
• Your reputation will fall and people will lose trust in your brand.

So, as you can see, plagiarism has many consequences.

To avoid getting duplication in their content, writers can use online tools to check for plagiarism. There are many reliable plagiarism-checking tools available online (both free and paid).

If any duplication is found in the text, then you can either edit it out or cite its source to avoid plagiarism.

• Regularly Publish Content and Update Old Material

It is vital in your content marketing strategy that you regularly publish content. A lack of content from a brand can be the cause of unease in its readership.

People have a positive outlook on active brands that produce content regularly. It gives them something to anticipate and as such, they always remain interested.

When you stop publishing content regularly then your brand will quickly fade from the minds of your audience and it will be difficult to get their attention again.

Similarly, you can update your older posts to keep them fresh and up-to-date. This is more applicable to any old “How to” guides and reviews of services or products. An updated version of old content can spark interest and keeps your old material relevant as well.

Conclusion

And there we have it, some tips and advice on how to start your content marketing strategy.

Setting realistic and achievable goals will help you stay focused. Once your goals are set, you need to start making yourself known by blogging, guest blogging, community publishing, etc.

Investing in content optimization tools will make sure that your content is always interesting and accessible to your readers. Keeping your content SEO-friendly will make it appear higher in the SERPs.

Making sure there is no duplication in your work, and regularly publishing as well as updating old content will help your brand stay relevant and authentic in the market.