Content marketing is gaining huge acceptance among marketers to reach customers. In fact, 92% B2B marketers use content marketing to reach their target audience, and 86% B2C marketers consider content marketing a key strategy to target customers, according to the Content Marketing Institute.
However, not all content marketers are able to achieve their objectives when it comes to getting content marketing ROI. Some are successful, while many struggle to make their content marketing efforts fruitful.
In today’s post, I am going to discuss six questions that will help you fine-tune your content marketing strategy and ensure success.
Without further ado, let us discuss:
1- What Problems Are You Solving?
The main objective of your content marketing strategy is to solve your audience’s problems.
So the first question your content marketing strategy should be able to answer is what problems you are solving. And to solve your customers’ problems you should be well aware of their pain points.
Here are some ways to identify your customers’ pain points:
- Conduct qualitative customer research
- Interview your customers
- Look at your reviews
- Run online surveys
- Scan forums/groups relevant to your niche
List down the pain points your audience face and figure out the best way in which your content can address these pain points.
Remember, content that adopts a problem-solving approach gets noticed, read, and shared.
2- Have You Set Goals for Your Content Strategy?
Does your content marketing strategy have written goals?
If not, you should set goals now.
Without setting goals, it will be like flying in the dark and shooting randomly and expecting to hit the target. Of course, this is not something that you want to do. So set content marketing goals.
Following are some common goals that you may want to achieve through content marketing:
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase traffic to your website
- Generate leads
- Improve retention
- Create customer loyalty
It is important to list down your content marketing goals because each goal demands a different content marketing strategy and you will have to act accordingly.
3- Have You Fixed KPIs for Your Content Marketing Goals?
To know how much progress you are making toward your content marketing goals, you should track key performance indicators (KPIs).
Have you fixed KPIs for your content marketing goals?
Next, I have discussed common KPIs you can attach to your content marketing goals:
Brand Awareness– Social share, comments, likes, views from partner sites
Traffic to Your Website– Google Analytics
Lead Generation– Leads generated by content, landing page conversion rate
Customer Loyalty– Repurchase, regular subscription
Leads Conversion– Leads to customer conversions through content pieces
Attaching KPIs to your content marketing goals will help you keep check on your content marketing efforts and stay focused.
4- Does Content Echo Your Audience’s Tone?
If your audience didn’t feel right after reading your content, even though your content is super useful, chances are your language is too simple or too complex that doesn’t match with the language of your audience.
So it is imperative that your content should match with your audience’s tone.
And to determine what tone is the best for you to adopt, you should know your audience and find out what they like and how they interact with each other.
5- Do You Have an Aggressive Content Promotion Plan?
Brian Clark, the founder of CopyBlogger, said,
Creating great content and not getting it noticed is an online marketing sin.
There is no point in creating content if it doesn’t get noticed, read, and shared by your audience.
Do you have an aggressive content promotion strategy to make your content reach a large audience?
If not, act fast.
You have the following four content promotion channels:
1- Owned Channels– Homepage, email lists, owned communities, blog, app
2- Earned Channels– Influencer Outreach, media outreach, placed content
3- Shared Channels– social media organic, content sharing communities
4- Paid Channels– Native ads, paid social media, display ads, sponsored content
You should include all these channels in your content promotion plan to boost the reach of your content.
However, your focus should be based on your current position on these channels. If you have a strong presence on owned channels and earned channels, you should give more focus on shared and paid channels.
6- Are You Ready to Tweak Your Content Strategy?
A successful content marketing strategy demands a constant cycle of analysis and adjustments. So you cannot fix your content strategy in a stone.
You need to tweak it and align it based on how your audience responds to your content.
The best way is you should make a rule of regularly reviewing your content marketing strategy after a certain period of time – track key performance indicators (KPIs) to know your progress and find out the reasons for not performing.
You must know that content marketing takes some time to show results, but the results stay.
It is better to set realistic content marketing expectations initially.
Final thoughts,
To make content marketing strategy work for your business, you need to constantly monitor and tweak your content marketing strategy.
The above questions can help you understand where you should improve to be more successful in your content marketing efforts.
What about you?
Do you any other question to add to this list to get a content marketing strategy right?
Please leave it in the comment section. I would love to know about it.