In marketing today, it’s all about content. Beautiful ads that encourage potential customers to buy from you are no longer enough, you must offer more, give them information, entertainment, inspiration or knowledge they feel is worth their time. In turn, they might buy from you, follow your social media accounts, give you consent to market more to them, or just hand over those most valuable commodities of the 21st century: their time and attention (however short those may be). But before enrolling on the exciting, creative and challenging task of creating and executing a strategy for content marketing, think about whether you really need it and how you would go about planning and executing it.

Why is content marketing important?

There are many reasons why content marketing is important. You might need it to increase awareness, get more sales, or improve customer loyalty. In most cases, you might want it to do all of the above and more. But it’s important to be very clear about your main goal, because that will drive everything you do. For example, if you are new to the market and want to create brand awareness, you might use your content to share thoughts about your industry, or show that you understand what your customers need. If you want to generate sales, you should create more content that is related to your product, its features and benefits, or talk about your prices and promotions. One does not exclude the other, but when you really know what you’re trying to achieve, you will get a better idea of what types of content to produce, where to share them, and what to focus on.

How to deliver an effective strategy for content

Your content can come in different formats, including blog posts, articles, reports, white papers, videos, infographics, podcasts, and social media posts. This means you will need to write blogs, create visuals, edit videos or do some web design. Do you have the skills and the time to do it yourself if you’re a smaller business, or do you have access to a content team if you work within an organisation? If not, do you have the means to hire people for content production? AI tools can help you to write and design materials, but they often require time for editing and refinement. Creating one or two pieces of content can be helpful, but to do this well, you need to sustain it, are you ready for the long haul?

Once you’ve answered the questions above, and if you do feel that you have what it takes, let’s look at the steps you need to build your content marketing plan.

Analysing target audience needs and behaviours

The foundation of any successful content marketing strategy lies in understanding your audience. Knowing who they are, what they need, and how they consume content is vital. Start by creating detailed buyer personas, which are fictional representations of your ideal customers. These personas should include demographic information, behavioural traits, and challenges they face.

An alternative to creating personas is to use customer journey mapping. This approach involves detailing the various stages a customer goes through when interacting with your brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase experience. By understanding the touchpoints and experiences of real customers, you can tailor your marketing strategies to address their needs and behaviours at each stage of the journey, leading to more personalised and effective marketing efforts.

Identifying goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIS)

Establishing clear, measurable goals is crucial for any content marketing strategy. Your goals should align with your overall business objectives and provide a clear direction for your content efforts. Common content marketing goals include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, improving customer engagement, and driving sales. By setting KPIs, you can monitor, measure and optimise your content. Whereas we won’t go into detail about these KPIs in this article, examples can be measuring website traffic or social media impressions for the awareness stage; downloads, form submissions or email open rates for the consideration stage and conversion rates for the purchase stage. If you’re just starting out, you don’t necessarily have to have too many of those, and you can set more goals as your business evolves, but having something to aim for is critical.

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Optimising content for search engines

Keyword research is a fundamental element of a solid content marketing strategy. It involves identifying the terms and phrases that your target audience uses when searching for information related to your industry. It helps you understand what your audience is looking for and how they are searching for it. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush to identify relevant keywords. Most marketers generally seek keywords with high search volume and low competition. Also, look at other tools such as Google Trends and Answer the Public which provide a good idea about the questions your audience is asking.

Incorporating these keywords into your content can improve your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) or visibility in search engine results and drive more organic traffic to your website. Remember to add keywords to any images or videos on your website, search engines index those as well!

If you already have content, now is the time to run an audit, and look at any content gaps you may have. SEMRush is a great tool to use for that.

Optimising content for Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Don’t limit your optimisation to algorithms. Marketers who embrace AI-enhanced SEO can stay ahead by creating content that resonates with both search engines and AI algorithms. AI-ready content will be easily understood and utilised by AI tools, which may cite or reference your well-optimised material, boosting your authority and visibility and helping you amplify the messages you’re putting out. AI is growing extremely quickly as a preferred way of getting information, a good marketing strategy should have it top of mind.

Being technically ready

Keyword research is extremely important. But there are technical basics to have in place to make sure that search engines will find and rank your content, which in turn can drive more traffic. If search engines can’t easily access and understand your web pages, even valuable content won’t appear or rank well.

Before loading your content, make sure your website is ready from a technical perspective. Beyond keywords, search engines want to check that the users who will get to your site have a good experience, so they will rank you based on the following criteria:

Website performance: A strong technical foundation signals to search engines that your website is of high value. Google prioritises sites that load quickly, have no dead links, and offer a great mobile browsing experience.

User Experience: By optimising for mobile and desktop devices and ensuring smooth navigation, you create a better user experience. Search engine crawlers notice this and prioritise your site over others with slower or buggier experiences.

Many SEO tools, some of them free, are available online to help you measure your website’s readiness. They identify technical issues that affect your site’s performance and visibility. Some of these tools are:

Google Search Console: This tool provides insights into how your site performs in search results and highlights any issues that need to be addressed.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider: This tool crawls your website to identify technical issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and missing meta tags.
Ahrefs: Besides keyword research, Ahrefs offers technical SEO features like site audits, backlink analysis, and rank tracking.
GTmetrix: This tool analyses your site’s speed and provides recommendations to improve its performance.
PageSpeed Insights is a web performance tool developed by Google. It assesses a webpage’s user experience on both mobile and desktop devices, providing suggestions for improvement based on real-world data.

Technical SEO involves both website and server optimisations. Check your performance often and regularly. Search engine and algorithm changes can impact your metrics quite quickly and significantly. It’s an ongoing process that requires diagnosing issues, implementing solutions, and measuring impact.

Creating high quality content

Helpful content should be informative, engaging, and valuable to your audience. Focus on creating content that addresses your audience’s pain points and provides solutions to their problems. Use a mix of formats such as blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, white papers and eBooks to cater to different preferences.

When creating content, ensure it is well-researched, accurately referenced, and free of errors. High-quality content not only helps build trust with your audience but also improves your search engine rankings. Keep your it updated and relevant by regularly reviewing and refreshing it to reflect the latest industry trends and developments.

Having a central idea that runs across all your content creation is vital. It ensures consistency, coherence, and clarity in your messaging, making it easier for your audience to understand and connect with your brand. This central idea should be closely aligned with what you actually sell, it makes your marketing strategy gel together, helping to reinforce your value proposition and strengthening brand awareness.

A strong central idea serves as the backbone for both inbound and outbound marketing efforts, creating a cohesive and compelling narrative that resonates across various channels. For inbound marketing, it attracts and engages potential customers by providing valuable, relevant content that addresses their needs and interests, driving organic traffic and fostering trust. Simultaneously, in outbound marketing, this central idea can be adapted into targeted campaigns that reach specific audiences through advertisements, emails, and other direct communications. By maintaining a consistent theme across your content plan, you build trust and recognition, ensuring that every piece of content contributes to a unified narrative that effectively communicates your brand’s purpose and offerings. Organise your content around topic clusters that align with this central idea. This improves brand recall but also makes your content marketing efforts more focused and impactful.

Most importantly, do not build a content marketing plan in a vacuum. Work with other people in your organisation. Sales. Produtct and support teams can be a great source of ideas and insights about customers. Setup brainstorming sessions with them, or interview them as subject matter experts to help you develop your central content idea and have enough information to make your content helpful to your audience.

To determine how well you’re doing, track metrics such as time on page, pages per session, and bounce rate to measure engagement. Interaction metrics like comments and shares indicate audience resonance and social media engagement. Conversion metrics, including conversion rates and lead generation, show the effectiveness of your content in driving desired actions. Additionally, monitor organic traffic, keyword rankings, and return visitors to assess your content’s SEO performance and user retention.

What are the best kinds of marketing content?

Content format will vary based on your goals and the preferences of your target audience. Here are a few popular types of content that you can consider incorporating into your content marketing plan:

Blog Posts: Blog posts are one of the most common and effective types of content marketing. They allow you to provide valuable information, insights, and opinions on topics related to your industry. Blog posts can be educational, informative, or entertaining, and are usually written in a conversational tone to engage readers.
Social media content: Social media posts are often quick to write and most platforms have AI-powered tools to help you create the most relevant content for your audience. Just remember, that with every social media post comes the need for imagery. Having said that, longer text posts on platforms such as LinkedIn or Facebook can perform well when used smartly.
Infographics: Infographics are visual representations of data, information, or processes. They are visually appealing and easy to understand, making them a great way to present complex information in a digestible format. Infographics are highly shareable and can help increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.
Video content: Videos are very popular due to their high engagement rates. They allow you to visually communicate your message, showcase your products or services, or provide demonstrations. Whether they are reels, tutorials or behind the scenes footage, videos can be shared on various platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, and Instagram or embedded in blog posts.
Carousels: Carousels are dynamic, interactive content formats that display multiple images or pieces of information in a single, scrollable view. They are effective in content marketing as they capture attention, encourage user engagement, and convey key messages or highlights in an easily digestible format.
Images: Images and pictures are essential in content marketing because they enhance visual appeal, communicate messages quickly, and evoke emotions. They are particularly impactful if you work in industries such as lifestyle or retail. These can be pictures, memes or illustrations.
Case Studies: Case studies provide real-life examples of how your products or services have benefited customers.
White papers: White papers are comprehensive, authoritative reports that provide in-depth information on a specific topic. They establish expertise, build trust with your audience, and can be a good lead magnet.
Reports: Reports are detailed documents that present data and analysis on specific topics. They offer in-depth insights, support decision-making, and demonstrate your brand’s expertise.

Developing a distribution plan as part of your strategy for content marketing

Creating great content is only half the battle; you also need to ensure it reaches your target audience. Develop a plan that outlines how you will be publishing content across various channels. Use marketing automation wherever possible to build workflows, automate tasks and deliver content based on your audience segmentation. Some of the channels that you can use are:

Your website: Your website should serve as your content hub, where all your content is easily accessible and well-organised. Some content creators might, instead of a website, wish to have a Pinterest board or an Instagram Link Tree or Bio.
Social Media: Share your content on popular channels like TikTok, YouTube, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and Instagram to reach a broader audience and encourage engagement. A holistic social media platform strategy is often key to your success. For example, you can push the same idea across TikTok and LinkedIn, but you might want to do it slightly differently because people use those platforms for different purposes.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) as a content distribution channel involves optimising your content to rank higher in search engine results, thereby increasing its visibility and attracting organic search traffic. By effectively incorporating relevant keywords, creating engaging content, and ensuring technical SEO best practices, you can reach a broader audience and drive more traffic to your website.
Email Marketing: Your email list might be your greatest marketing assets. Whereas you can’t control social media algorithms or forecast changes, you have more power over your email campaigns. Make sure you have effective ways of capturing consent from your prospective or loyal customers to send them updates via email newsletters or alerts. Most email platforms will also give you detailed analytics, helping you to optimise your results.
Paid Advertising: Consider using paid media through Google Ads, programmatic networks and social media platforms to amplify your content’s reach.
Influencer Partnerships: Collaborate with industry influencers to share your content or tell your stories to their followers.
Employee advocacy: This can be a powerful content marketing channel where employees share brand content on their personal social networks, significantly extending the reach of your message. It builds trust and authenticity, as audiences are more likely to engage with content shared by people they know. Additionally, it enhances employee engagement and pride, turning your workforce into enthusiastic brand ambassadors who contribute to your marketing goals. If you’re looking to build your employer brand and attract talent to your business, that would be a key piece of your marketing strategy.
Offline channels: In today’s world, we often focus only on digital marketing and may overlook offline channels, but they continue to be effective. Think about places where you can share your content offline, these could be events, newspapers, magazines or broadcast media such as radio and television.
Content syndication, the process of republishing content on third-party sites, is an effective channel for content marketing distribution. When you pick your content syndication partners, it’s important to ensure that you share audiences with the same interests and behaviours. This helps broaden your reach by exposing your content to new, relevant audiences, increasing brand visibility and awareness. Syndication can also drive significant referral traffic back to your site, enhance SEO through backlinks, and establish your brand as an authority in your industry by leveraging the credibility of aligned platforms.

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Building an editorial calendar

To be consistent in your content marketing campaigns, it’s very important to schedule production and publication. If you have a large marketing team, this can also ensure that the message and information that you are putting out in the market are in sync across all channels. If you’ve done a content audit, such a calendar can also be a good place to make sure that you have covered any gaps you had and used as many different content types as possible to diversify your reach.

When building a content calendar, consider the following:

Frequency: Determine how often you will publish new content. This could be daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on your resources and audience expectations. This can be different for each of the channels that you use, for example, there might be better times of day to publish a new video on YouTube, or put a post on Facebook. Monitor your existing content’s performance and look at your competitors’ pages to spot trends.
Topics: Plan content topics that align with your audience’s interests and your business goals.
Formats: Decide on the formats you will use, such as blog posts, videos, or infographics.

Promotion: Schedule content promotion activities to ensure your content reaches the right audience.
Internal alignment: Share your content calendar across your organisation. This will ensure your full team knows what’s coming, can share some of your social media posts, or talk to customers about any announcement you might be making, such as business news, product updates or new promotions.

Leveraging User-Generated Content

All of your content does not need to be solely produced by yourself or your team. As part of your marketing strategy, don’t forget to leverage User-Generated Content (UGC) which might be created by your audience, such as reviews, customer testimonials, social media posts, and blog comments. UGC is highly valuable because it builds trust and authenticity. Encourage your audience to share their experiences and opinions about your products or services. This will produce engaging content that you can feature on your website, social media channels, and through other types of marketing campaigns.

Collaborating with Influencers

Influencer marketing involves partnering with individuals who have a significant following and influence within your target audience. Collaborating with influencers can help you reach a broader audience and build credibility. Choose influencers whose values and audience align with your brand. Develop mutually beneficial partnerships where influencers create and share valuable content that promotes your products or services. This can drive traffic, generate leads, and boost sales. Wherever possible, align these collaborations with your content calendar to maximise your impact. When considering working with influencers, don’t just use social media. Leverage the partnership across other channels, such as email marketing to amplify your message as much as possible.

Repurposing content

Repurposing content involves taking existing content and transforming it into a different content type or updating it with new information. This approach maximises the value of your content and extends its lifespan. For example, you can turn a podcast episode into text, visual content, or effective video marketing. Repurposing content helps you reach new audiences and reinforces your message across different platforms. Most compelling content

But remember, if you are not a content marketer, or do not have the resources to do it all, just pick the channels that are most effective for you and concentrate on those. For example, social media marketing alone might be enough if your product lends itself well to that (for example if you are in the fashion business) and email marketing can be very effective when you have a good list of opted-in subscribers. As we said above, an effective content marketing strategy should very much take into account what you are actually able to deliver.

Interacting with your followers

Engaging with emails, comments and other interactions from your social media followers is absolutely crucial for fostering a vibrant and loyal online community. It’s not just about posting great content; it’s about creating a dialogue. When you respond to comments, you show your followers that you value their input and are invested in their experience. This not only boosts your brand’s authenticity and trustworthiness but also encourages more engagement, driving visibility and growth. Plus, timely interactions can turn casual followers into brand advocates, sparking conversations that expand your reach organically. So, roll up your sleeves and get ready to interact—your audience is waiting to connect!

Measuring and analysing performance

Measuring and analysing the performance of your content marketing tactics is essential for understanding what works and what doesn’t. Use analytics tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and HubSpot to track key metrics such as website traffic, engagement, conversions, and ROI. Regularly review these metrics to identify trends, strengths, and areas for improvement. This shouldn’t only be after a campaign has been live for a while, make sure that you develop ways of A/B testing your content, so you can quickly pivot towards what works best and reduce the time, effort and money you might be spending on low-performing pieces.

Based on your analysis, adjust your content strategy to align with your goals and audience needs. Make sure that your marketing report looks closely at your conversion funnel to always know that you are meeting your targets, for example, social content could be getting a lot of engagement, but driving very little actual results. Never get too excited about attention if what you’re seeking is sales.

Going back to our point about goals, always start with the end of mind, and know what content marketing success actually looks like for you.

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Looking for more resources? We recommend the content marketing institute.