A good content marketing strategy is like walking into a superstore that is full of well-signposted produce and fresh seasonal fruit and veg at great prices; a pleasurable shopping experience. You’re going to walk out with a full trolley, tell others and the store makes money.

A bad content marketing strategy is quite the opposite, like browsing a supermarket where it’s difficult to locate what you’re looking for, finding empty shelves (no content) or rotten fruit (out of date content). You walk in with the best intentions to fill your trolley but walk out disappointed (and hungry!). Quickly, you share your experience with others and they too stop coming to the supermarket and this will cause long-term damage to the business.

There are no quick fixes when it comes to creating a good content strategy, the content has to be researched, created and delivered appropriately for your audiences. Here are some simple tips to help you plan a good content strategy:

Identify the objectives for your content marketing

First, you need to understand what you’re trying to achieve? This might sound obvious but you can’t just create content for content’s sake. Different objectives require different content and different strategies. Is it for brand awareness? To increase customer engagement? Increase sales? Book a recruitment drive or a mix of many? You will need to be clear what your content marketing is actually trying to accomplish so that you can monitor and record return on investment.

Identify your audiences

You must clearly identify your various audiences, understand their personality, their wants and needs, where they hang out and the language that they speak. You will likely have different audience types for each offering and you might need to communicate and create content for each slightly differently. Create a master audience and outcomes document for all your audiences and refer back to this each time you start creating content for them. It doesn’t need to be over complicated, just some basic rules to adhere to.

Decide what type of content will be created

By far the most consumed content is visual content so don’t ignore it. This might be video, images or infographics as examples but what you create needs to be suited to the channel you are delivering it on. Your content needs substance and relevance, so whatever medium you choose, make sure the content is great quality and suits your brand. Poor quality content is a waste of time and can be more damaging than no content at all.

There are no quick fixes when it comes to a good content marketing strategy, it needs to be researched, crafted and delivered appropriately.

Consider video content

I know we already touched on this in the point above, but I’m giving this another bullet point as it is so important! Almost any message can be conveyed brilliantly via video and your audiences want it, so give it to them. We create so much content but the ones that people always remember, share and give the best results is by far video and the best thing is that adding a video to your website content will help with SEO.

Discuss who will be involved in content

We feel a team effort works best! When we work on a client’s content, although we do the majority of the work, we always see better results when they are involved in the process and with the content creation. Empower the wider team to suggest and create content and if the content is consumed, let them know how popular it is, they will want to create more! See our blog about how to get your team to write great content.

We feel a team effort works best! When we work on a client’s content, although we do the majority of the work, we always see better results when they are involved in the process and with the content creation. Empower the wider team to suggest and create content and if the content is consumed, let them know how popular it is, they will want to create more! See our blog about how to get your team to write great content.

Create a content calendar

Make sure you have a plan in place as to when the content needs to be ready for; create a 6 to a 12-month calendar of content. When you plan ahead with a content calendar, this means you can get organised and create most of the content well before it is due to be used, allowing you the opportunity to create reactive, ad hoc, relevant pieces of content here and there in relation to trending topics, which are often golden opportunities.

Work out how you are going to deliver your content to your audiences

Creating content is the most time-consuming part of your good content marketing strategy, rather than the delivery. There are many social tools to deliver content across multiple platforms so that’s pretty straight forward and additionally you can use the content across brochures and emails for example, without affecting your SEO with duplicate content. It is important that your content should always be created to feature on your website and every marketing channel should link back to the content page.

Make sure people can find your content

If you have gone to the effort of creating good content, you need to make sure as many people as possible can find it. This can be inbound marketing or outbound, but inbound activities will have a better effect. Semiotics can also be a consideration and we have another article related to this that may help. We believe the best way to help people find your content is SEO, but this may be backed up with a good PPC strategy also for quicker results. If it’s an outbound activity, then make sure the database you are targeting is nice and clean. If you get your content marketing strategy right, then your database will grow and outbound marketing will become more successful also.

If you have gone to the effort of creating good content, you need to make sure as many people as possible can find it. This can be inbound marketing or outbound, but inbound activities will have a better effect. Semiotics can also be a consideration and we have another article related to this that may help. We believe the best way to help people find your content is SEO, but this may be backed up with a good PPC strategy also for quicker results. If it’s an outbound activity, then make sure the database you are targeting is nice and clean. If you get your content marketing strategy right, then your database will grow and outbound marketing will become more successful also.

Know how your content will be monitored

There are many ways you can monitor your content such as call tracking, website hits, web retention, web conversions, referrals, vanity URL and more. Don’t just do one, do them all! Not everyone will come to you via the same channel, so track as much as possible.

If you can, link all this to a CRM system such as Sales Force to make your monitoring even easier and more successful. Make sure all this info is collated into a simple weekly or monthly report that is easy to understand at a glance – none of us like tracking through pages and pages of numbers!

Content Marketing at Rooster

Where we talk about content marketing activity, the above are the types of points we need to consider to make sure it’s a great success for our clients.

At Rooster, we class ourselves as a leading content marketing agency; people that know us and work with us here at Rooster know we try not to overcomplicate things and this is the same for our content marketing offering. If you still need a helping hand in creating a good content marketing strategy, please get in touch!