The Process of Executing a Content Marketing Strategy

Once your content marketing strategy is set up and you start executing it, it’s important to stay consistent in order to achieve an impact. Studies show that most potent results will be seen in 6–12 months with a regular weekly schedule of publishing content. Hence the working process plays an important role in getting the best results out of your efforts.

Idea Creation

Idea creation is usually a team-wide effort, gathering the best ideas from everyone involved. Common setup for ideation is via spreadsheets, project management platforms or roundtable discussions.

Whenever you lack ideas, use other sources for inspiration. Look at other industry blogs or publications to spur creativity and see what is relevant to readers. Comments are a great place to observe feedback from readers and understand what topics you should cover.

The process of idea creation should start early and continue often. Consistency is more important than quality, although both should be prioritized in the long term.

Analytics

Content marketing is a complex side of a business and can’t be mastered in a short time-frame. Understanding your target audience requires multiple iterations of idea creation, publishing and testing.

In order to have an efficient process of iteration, make sure to set up analytics systems for all your online properties. If your company is larger, the IT department can assist with this. If you are smaller company, connecting a service like Google Analytics with your website is relatively simple.

With analytics, you have multiple sources of data from which to draw insight. Web traffic, bounce rate, unique visitors, and time spent on site can all help determine the effectiveness of your strategy.

Distribution

Ultimately, content marketing is a channel of communication with your audience. Creating a platform to share your content is highly important and its purpose is to enable interaction with your followers.

Social media shines in this regard. While before the process of publishing was relatively short and static, now it has become more dynamic and enables engagement with users.

Each social platform is specific in the features it offers to users. It’s important to understand the strengths of each platform and what type of users will be active on each. Twitter, for example, only allows 140 characters of text. However, the news-feed style of the platform allows for quick, frequent updates on developing stories or for blogs with frequent publishing schedules.

Thanks to the diversity of social platforms, it is possible to create specific strategies for each of them, making social media marketing a whole domain on its own. Small and big companies should recognize the importance of social media and allocate resources to effectively use each platform to their potential, distributing content in a way that enhances their online presence.