Your Guide to Creating a Content Marketing Strategy: What’s New and What Works

This episode of Content Conversations provides a comprehensive overview to developing a successful content marketing strategy, focusing on the importance of understanding your audience, crafting high-quality content, and leveraging SEO to drive traffic and generate leads. We dig deep into the need for a content strategy that goes beyond simply creating content and includes monetization, audience engagement, and data-driven analysis. We present a step-by-step approach to building a strategy, highlights key trends like the rise of video and user-generated content, and offer a list of valuable tools for research, technical SEO, on-page optimization, off-page strategies, and reporting. We also addresses common challenges like maintaining consistency, measuring ROI, and staying current with emerging trends. Get practical tips and examples to guide you through the process of crafting an effective content marketing strategy that can drive business growth. Main Themes Covered: - Content marketing as a conversation, not a sales pitch - Importance of a clearly defined strategy for content creation - Understanding your audience and creating content that resonates - Leveraging SEO, email, and social media to drive traffic - Measuring the success of your content marketing efforts Most Important Ideas/Facts: 1. Strategy is Key: - B2B content marketing is no longer a simple game of keywords; it’s a challenge of delivering laser-targeted insights laden from one human to another. - If you’re going to spend any time or money on your blog. You NEED to have a content strategy. 2. Know Your Audience: - Gain deeper insights by intimately knowing your target audience...Engage directly with potential customers for actionable insights. - The ideal reader is the one who buys your stuff. Identify who that person is, scale that, and you’ll never have an MQLs problem ever again. 3. Diversify Content Formats: - Content doesn’t have to be just the written word. It can be video, pictures...or any combination of creating value and placing it in front of your audience. - Expand audience reach with varied content formats...Maximize engagement through strategic long-form content. 4. SEO is Crucial: - Let’s talk about compounding growth. Let’s talk SEO. - If you’re writing content, search should be a major consideration before the content is written, when it’s being written and every day after the content is published. 5. Leverage Email Marketing: - Email is where we have total control of everything we put in front of those that sign up. - One of the main reasons you should be building content is to build your newsletter and further emails. 6. Use Social Media Strategically: - You can’t run content in 2024 without talking about social channels. - Not only can you post your lessons and insights from the blogs as social posts, you can prove messaging, ideas, opinions on socials first. Tighten them up, then move them to the platform you own. Your blog. 7. Focus on Monetization: - Traffic is great. Subscribers are even better. But what’s even more significant than this? Money. - There are thousands of great, unique, life-changing blogs that make no money. They are at best an accounted for overhead and at worst a considerable time and money sink for the business. 8. Measure Your Success: - How do we take this abstract concept that is content marketing and turn it into data? Numbers we can measure and monitor and ultimately improve. - Make it easy to see the numbers that support your team’s win at a glance. Are the tactics/sprints you’re using contributing to long term, measurable success? 9. Embrace Emerging Trends: - Video content is ascending in the marketing world more than ever. - Create authentic and relatable content – created by fellow consumers...User-generated content (UGC)...holds immense power in shaping brand perceptions and influencing buying decisions. 10. Overcome Common Challenges: Implement a content calendar and lev