In the past few years, content has pretty much dominated the market. Most brands have understood the importance of producing engaging content for its potential customers. Remember, it’s the content that you produce that educates your potential customers about your products/services.  

Today, I will tell a simple truth. Anyone on this planet can plan a content marketing strategy but not every strategy can be a successful one. This is because many individuals are not able to properly plan and focus while making a content marketing strategy. Rigorous planning and hardwork are required to create a great strategy.

In the very beginning, planning a content marketing strategy can give you nightmares. Yes, you read that right. After going through so many books and blogs about content marketing strategy, you may get a weird feeling where you are not sure about your next step.

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If you are one of them then, keep reading. In case you have already planned a content marketing strategy, it will only take you a few minutes to go through this article to find out any missing elements to improve your content plan. Below I have mentioned 6 steps that will help you to create a successful content marketing strategy.

6 Steps to create an awesome content marketing strategy

Identify clear objectives

Why do you want to create a content marketing strategy? To earn more money, isn’t it? Wrong. This objective (to earn more money) is not clear enough. Your objectives should be measurable and most importantly specific. This is because having an unclear objective makes it difficult to analyze the results of your content marketing strategy which at the end can be harmful to your business. According to Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, brand awareness, lead nurturing, lead generation etc are few of the objectives that marketers will focus on in 2017.

Conversions

Once you have set your objectives, it’s time to identify the important conversions. You need to pinpoint the areas that attract your customers towards your content and encourages them to take the responsive action. Once this is done, you can concentrate on creating content that is liked by your customers.

Target audience

Many writers believe that producing informative content is the key to success. Even if they are not directed towards a certain audience, if the content is engaging enough, people will like it. This is wrong. Without an active audience, only a few people will be engaging and sharing your content. This is bad for your business. You as a writer need to do proper research and understand your audience in order to produce quality content for them.

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Develop your content

Well, this is what you have been waiting for. After choosing your target audience, it’s time to make quality content. Remember, if you want to outrun your competitors then, you have to develop a content which is much better than your competitors. But how can we do that? According to a study by Sutter, you can brainstorm 50 content ideas that are suitable for your target market. Among them remove the tough and least important topics to get a list of the best content topics. Once the list is ready, put everything that you have got to create an awesome content.

Market your content

Today, there is so much content in the market. If you are not distributing your content correctly, it is very easy for your audience to miss your content. Content creation and distribution go hand in hand. You have to come up with suitable ways for your audience to see your content. You need to use both paid and organic promotion. Examples of organic promotion are SEO, Facebook posts etc. Examples of paid promotion are promoted tweets, Facebook ads, sponsored posts etc. You can also take the help of social media influencers to distribute your content. Remember, choose a particular distribution medium according to your needs. There is no need to get hyper and jump into every distribution channel.

Measure your performance

Evaluation is one of the most steps of a particular process. Once you have created your content and promoted it correctly, it’s time to see the effectiveness of your strategy. Did you fulfill your objectives? Was your content suitable for your audience? How many leads were generated? etc. After answering these questions, you get an instant feedback on your strategy so that you can make necessary adjustments if required. Evaluating your strategy should be an ongoing process so that you can make necessary adjustments wherever it is required. This will help to improve the ROI which at the end will be beneficial for your business.