How to create a Content Marketing strategy?

Now that you know what Content Marketing is, understand its importance, and realize its benefits to your Paradox marketing agency brand, it is time to discover how to create and execute this strategy.

1. Create a buyer persona
   The first step to creating good content is understanding who you are talking to. But it is not about simple segmentation: it demands the creation of a character with all attributes of your target audience.

We call this character “buyer persona” and give it a name, social class, history, desires, problems, interests, and other particularities inspired by natural persons that bought from your company.

The concept of persona is more segmented than the concept of the target audience. Segmentation happens because you trace all your persona’s problems, crossing this information with what you offer.

This strategy results in content that answers their doubts, while it creates a bond between the brand and the audience.

THE ULTIMATE BUYER PERSONA GENERATOR

2. Define objectives and KPIs
   fter knowing your persona, you must define the strategic goals and the metrics you will use to verify if the campaign is reaching success.

Some of the most common goals for Content Marketing are:

increase traffic
generate more leads
increase sales
educate the market
wide brand awareness
create value
engage the audience
reduce Customer Acquisition Costs
increase the client’s lifetime value

When you know your goals, you can define the indicators to follow them. It is the Key Performance Indicators function. We use KPIs as metrics, such as a parameter to monitor the results reached with Content Marketing.

Remember that these KPIs must have a relation to the goals. See some examples below:

If you want to increase traffic, monitor the site’s traffic.
If you want to generate more leads, monitor the conversion rate on your site.
To increase brand awareness, monitor social media interactions like comments, shares, and reactions on social media platforms.
If you want to increase sales, watch out for the number of sales, ticket value, items by sale, etc.

If you want to educate the market, watch out for the number of new subscriptions on a newsletter, access to content pages, etc.
To increase clients’ lifetime value, watch out for how long they stay as your customer.

3. Consider the buyer’s journey
   The buying process goes by some steps called the marketing funnel. Inbound Marketing strategies are used to drive people through the funnel.

People usually start at the top of the funnel and go until the bottom, when they are ready to buy. The “bait” that attracts them there is Content Marketing.

4. Set a budget
   Budgeting is crucial to planning a solid digital marketing strategy, which is no less the case with content marketing.

But how much is too much (or too little) to spend on content marketing, and what are the most effective ways to set a budget right for you?

Every company’s needs are unique regarding how much to budget. However, the average company today sinks approximately 25-30 percent of its marketing budget into content marketing, so plan your content production strategy accordingly.

You’ll also need an idea of which types of content you’d like to produce moving forward and how much you can expect to pay to outsource each option.

5. Research
   Usually, the public’s first contact with your content happens through the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), and the best way to appear there is by using relevant keywords.

It would be best to research which words your audience writes on the search bar to find content like yours.

The keywords may be a long or short tail. The concept means that the more specific they are (long tail), the more precise the results and the more qualified the audience target will be.

6. Implement SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices
   Keywords are just one point in a strategy called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). These techniques are used to reach first place on search engine page results — such as Google.

The higher you rank on Google, the better the chances your buyer persona will find your blog, navigate the marketing funnel and close a deal with you.

For that to be done, your content needs to be optimized for those search engines, and, more than that, they need to deliver an excellent experience to the reader.

7. Diversify content distribution channels
   You can use different channels to promote your content, like blogs, social media, or email marketing.

It’s a way to get your audience to access your content when they are actively searching for a specific topic — or even if they’re not researching yet, they can receive your content passively.

Being present on various channels is a way to win coverage. Below, you can see examples of some of the most commonly used channels to promote content.