You might have heard the phrase that content is the king and it is 100% true. Your content is the representation of what your business is all about and what it stands for. That is why many businesses are starting to rely on it along with other marketing methods and consider it an essential part of their overall marketing strategy.

Content marketing is all about offering your customers what they are looking for. As a result, it drives more sales, generates more leads, and costs much less than many other marketing means. Moreover, it allows businesses to build a better brand reputation.

However, the results totally depend upon the strategy that you choose and the way you execute it. Therefore, everyone needs to have a proper strategy in place and plan out everything before setting foot in this.

Conversely, what if you are very new to this and have no idea about where to start? Well, that is not a big problem as you might have imagined. If you are not familiar with what you are doing, getting the results you want might take some time. That is a part of the journey and you have to start somewhere, right? However, that journey will become much easier if you will follow the approach described below.

On a lighter note, if you are someone responsible for creating the content marketing strategy, one thing you will need before anything else is a strong internet connection. In case you are living in a remote area, you can try out options such as HughesNet internet, which can offer services wherever you are.

1. Set Your Targets and KPIs

A good starting point for a content marketing strategy is to define your goals and set targets. These goals can be anything from reducing marketing costs to increasing revenues or growing your sales. You can also set out targets such as increasing social media engagement to improve the perception of your brand and gain influence in the market.

Once you define the targets, you can also make them more achievable by specifying numbers for them. For instance, you can go for increasing monthly revenues by 10% or see a 30% traffic increase for your website during the next quarter.

When you set KPIs with your targets, it is easy to measure the performance and divide them into milestones when required.

2. Know Your Audience

After setting up your goals, the next thing to do is to know the type of audience you are going to serve. It will help you to understand the type of content you should create and the channels you can use to capture that audience.

To do that, you can start with demographics data that can be obtained from your social media, website, and email subscriber analytics. Along with that, you can use customers' feedback to identify what they need and their pain points.

Both of these things will help you to create buyer personas that describe your best customers, their characteristics, and the pain points.

3. Assess Where You Stand

This one is easy and applicable for those who are already using social media platforms or blogs as a part of their marketing strategy. In case you are new to content marketing and haven't published any content yet, you can skip it.

To assess where you stand right now, you will need to analyze the content that you have published already. While doing so, you will have to assess the usefulness of that content and if there are any gaps in that. This will help you to understand where you need to improve your existing content and the keywords in your niche that you are not targeting yet.

4. Identify the Most Suitable Content Types

In this step, you will need to identify the content that you are going to use as part of your marketing mix. This can be blog posts, video marketing, podcasts, lead magnets, ebooks, webinars, and even checklists.

You can sort out what works for your customers while keeping your buyer personas in mind.

5. Choose the Appropriate Channels

Once you know the type of content that works for you, the next thing would be to point out the channels that you want to use to publish that content. Your business website and blog should be an important part of it.

The key in doing so is to understand where your audience is hanging out the most. If they are mostly available on Facebook then that will be your appropriate channel. If they are available on Youtube, you can use that as a medium to reach out to them.

6. Content Calendar

As a part of your content marketing strategy, you will need to know when exactly do you want to publish your content and the platforms that content will go to. That is why it is recommended to create a content calendar.

A content calendar allows you and your team to plan out what content will be published on what day and on which platforms. So, everyone will be able to participate and play their role.

7. Create Content & Publish It

After creating the content calendar, now it is time to wake up your designers, writers, or other related personnel and start creating content on best laptop for writers. Here, you can decide the tone of your content like it's going to be casual, formal or something in between both. Moreover, you will need to create consistency with your brand voice and keep everything in mind that makes your content useful.

8. Measure Results

Till now, you have done everything, so it's time to see how well you did that. For that, you can use tools such as Google Analytics to find out the stats on your blog posts, Buzzsummo for social media sharing and other social analytics, and Google Alert to find out how many times your brand name was mentioned.

Depending upon the channels you are using, the tool might differ. However, the idea is to measure the performance and match it with your goals and KPIs to see whether it was satisfactory or not.