Before we take on a new client, there’s always the discussion of “How exactly do you do what you do?”. Because we want to be able to easily share these ideas with our potential clients, we decided to write them down for posterity.
Now, before we dive into the strategy flow, there’s a step 0, so to say, to our approach. First and foremost, we like to get to know the business. By that I mean start reading and writing about topics in that industry, have lengthy and complex talks with the company representatives, discuss sales and marketing with their dedicated teams, maybe even interact with a few of their clients. This allows us to have a clear understanding of the industry we’ll market to, the business we’ll be strategizing for and the people we’re going to work with.
From there we research the SEO context, social media channels and content opportunities, from which we derive our SEO, content, email and social strategies that we integrate into an integrated Digital Marketing Strategy.
Back to the content strategy – This is a brief overview of the process we go through when creating a new content plan, following the inbound methodology.
1. Keyword research and SEO audit
This is the starting point of our strategy. Following the inbound methodology, we track down and analyze what people are actively searching for. By identifying keywords and topics in that industry, we get a sense of the type of content prospects interact with. After combing through all of the broad and long tail keywords, we choose a list of 4-5 keywords that we’ll focus on in our content.
Then we move on to a SEO audit of the website in question and its content. After matching performing keywords with customer intent, we proceed to optimizing on-page and off-page SEO.
So far we have a keyword strategy in place and an SEO strategy.
2. Onto the content creation
Before we dive into the actual content creation process, we define buyer personas and their buyer’s journey. This allows us to identify the type of content we will be creating for every stage that our prospects experience: Awareness, Consideration and Decision.
While we’re creating our content strategy, we’ll set up the company blog and landing pages for existing content offers, as well as an email drip campaign that delivers the right content, to the right leads at the right time, in order to maximize conversion rates.
At this point, we’ll also want to link our content management platform with a CRM platform that allows us to track, score and nurture the leads coming in through our content marketing efforts.
3. Promoting our content
In order to distribute and amplify our content, we set up social network accounts and create a Social Media strategy. Based on our buyer persona and buyer’s journey, we’ll analyze which channels we should focus on, what type of content we should promote on every channel, the frequency, tone of voice and curated content we’ll use in our posts.
Our Social Media strategy will also focus on creating and engaging with communities where our prospects can find educational, relevant information.
4. Down the funnel we go
The biggest part of our work is lead generation but, for some clients, we’re asked to dive into the sales part as well, nurturing those leads until they become customers.
In order to do that, we design content offers that focus on converting leads, we help the Sales team understand the buyer’s journey and maximize the advantages of inbound marketing, we create email campaigns and customer delight campaigns that can generate referrals.
5. Measuring and optimizing
Throughout this entire process, we set goals, determine success rates and constantly optimize our efforts in order to achieve our client’s business goals. We use the agile methodology to create a dynamic team flow that delivers results.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: How To Create A Content Strategy For Your Business
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