What You Need to Do within Your Content Marketing Strategy Before Content Creation

The content marketing strategy you plan on employing should be descriptive of your goals, plans and activities in such a way that anyone interested in contributing can have a roadmap of how the content should be developed.

Define Your Goals

From the start you should clearly define a goal, so that your tasks and activities lead towards the accomplishment of the goal. Having a clear destination will help you in identifying tasks, focus on them and will make it easier to measure your progress. If you don’t have any goal, how will you be aware of your success?

Goals pertaining to content marketing strategy can be business related, such as increasing revenue, marginal returns or profitability. More specific e-commerce goals can mean increasing the conversion rate or increasing the average time spent by visitors on a page. More broad marketing goals like brand building and online presence can also be at the base of a content marketing strategy.

In order to attain content with a high conversion rate, it’s important to couple content with unique selling points of your product or business. Content should showcase why your brand has an advantage over competitors and how it can help its customers.

Try to formulate your goals to be “S.M.A.R.T”:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Action-oriented
• Realistic
• Time-sensitive

This will lead to you creating highly relevant and specific goals.

Define Your Target Audience

It is hard to imagine how big the internet really is, but this should be enough to understand that you cannot target it all. It just doesn’t make sense. Effective campaigns are created with a target market in mind. It is essential to correctly identify your target audience and serve the right content to them.

If you can decompose your target audience and segment it into different niches, your content marketing strategy will become high converting machine. It’s difficult to delimitate ideally your group, but for example you can start with looking at keywords users are searching for or devices they use when they search. These and other aspects of target group segments are a good foundation for creating content that is relevant for your target group.

Most importantly, you don’t have to stick to one target group. More often than not, target groups can complement one another. There can be a main target audience and several sub-target groups to which you can appeal to with new content. A practical tip is to describe each target group as a person — it’s much easier to identify traits that are common to the whole audience.

In order to identify and define a target group use analysis tools. For example, Google Analytics or Facebook Insights can give you a great deal of insights. With a bit more effort, but a lot of precision, customer surveys provide useful information that can be generated by email, in person or on the phone.