Running the game: 5 essential elements of a winning content marketing strategy
Great content is the beating heart of every digital marketing strategy. Without it, your website and socials would remain confused and lost, with your followers feeling much the same.
But you can’t just start making all kinds of content that doesn’t fit your brand – you have to clearly define your goals before developing your championing content marketing strategy.
With this in mind, here are five imperative elements of a winning content marketing strategy, and why you should incorporate them into yours!
- A well-defined brand identity
If you are incorporating multiple departments into producing your content you have to ensure that they are all aware of what your brand is about. This is an essential element of brand identity and has to be conveyed clearly to your audience.
Research brands you like and decide what it is you like about them: is it their attitude? The themes they use? Is it just the way they market their product to the defined audience? You can then go on to provide this information to those partaking in your content marketing strategy.
- What do you want to get out of your strategy?
Content marketing has multiple defined goals that you could be seeking to achieve. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want to increase sales/conversions? Are you looking to increase your local following?
It’s important to define what exactly is at the heart of your marketing objectives, as this will help your content team develop a marketing strategy that can help achieve those specific goals.
- Define your audience
Your content team has to know who they are targeting, otherwise they could create some seriously misguided content that confuses your actual audience. So, you have to do some marketing analysis to define exactly who you are trying to sell your product.
Essentially, you have to conduct marketing research based on the following indicators:
- Age
- Household income
- Gender
- Education
- Job role
- Location
- Family status
Not only this, you have to define the following behavioural and cultural traits:
- Consumer needs
- Media choices
- Cultural influences
- Personal values and goals
- Purchasing frictions
- Concerns
You want to learn about your audience and reveal insights that your competitors may not be understanding. This way, you can easily set yourself apart from competitors who are failing to meet their target demographic.
- Marketing research and data collection
Data and research are the absolute fundamentals of understanding your target audience. This can be historical data (sales data, studies, surveys, brand interactions, website/SEO demographics etc). Third party data or original primary research – but you will probably blend all three together!
Third party sources and social listening are a great way to collect useful and unbiased information about your market which can then be used in conjunction with internal analytics and interviews.
- Ongoing analytics
Because what’s the point of doing all this digital work if you’re not going to see how it’s going down the track? It’s imperative to know how your marketing efforts are going so that you can make any necessary alterations for things that aren’t working so well.
You can gather data from your SEO and social media analytics platforms, as well as listen to audience feedback regarding what they like about your product/pages and what could use improvement. This way, you can mould your overall content marketing strategy into something that your audience truly resonates with, as well as something they want to return to!