You can’t expect for success to come served on a silver plate. The key of successful content marketing is in having a strategy. Consider the road to success as a marathon with obstacles, and a strategy both your map and your ticket for removing those obstacles. Now that we’ve stressed out the importance of having a documented strategy, all you have left is to build it. Don’t worry, we won’t live you unprepared. Read on to find out how should this process look like.
For an efficient content strategy, you’ll need the right tools and the knowledge of how to use numbers and data you’ve been provided in order to make sure you’re on the winning side. When conducting the research and analyzing the results, it is crucial to understand the importance of four W’s (who, what, where and why). These factors are the critical components which can make or break your strategy: audience, trends, media and competition.
The first W – Audience (Who)
The audience is one of the most important factors; they are, after all, your potential clients. The whole point of creating content is to provide useful and interesting information for people you are trying to reach, and you can’t do that unless you know who your audience is. Some research tactics you might use to get to know audience assessment are keyword research, brand impression, expert interviews, etc. This will help you acquire knowledge about your audience’s preferences, by seeing what’s shared and cited by them. For this step you may use many online tools and sites, as Statisfy for business, which offers polls and a chance for you to put your own questionnaire.
The second W – Trends (What)
For this step you should analyze the most engaging content in your space and use that data to identify content patterns which will most likely be appealing for your audience. The content you are offering should educate and engage your audience. By monitoring what your audience is interested about and offering some deeper knowledge of it, you’ll successfully master this W. Some of the tactics you should be using are angle identification, sentiment analysis, sub-topic identification, etc.
The third W – Media (Where)
Smart content marketing means choosing media your target audience is already using. So take your content where the audience is, instead of trying hard to lure the audience on some new website. Whether you’ll choose some info-portal or social media is up to your audience. This assessment must include how you should create content for different media, and among the techniques you are supposed to use are paid media analysis, social engagement analysis, industry publication analysis, etc.
The forth W – Competitors (Why)
The main Why behind content marketing is getting the upper hand on the competition. It is, after all your business goal, to have more business, and less competition. This step is all about discovering opportunities that have not yet been used by your competitors. This research might involve sentiment analysis, keyword gap analysis, content inventory, etc.
You’ve seen what you should do. Just remember, the success lies, not only in creating the strategy, but documenting it and following it.
Dan Radak is a web hosting security professional with ten years of experience. He is a coauthor on several technology websites and regular contributor to Technivorz. Currently, he works with a number of companies in the field of online security, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies.
What content strategy’s do you use? Talk to us in the comments.
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