Content Marketing: Your Secret Weapon for Building a Stronger Brand
Whether you're a startup or a seasoned pro, content marketing is a powerful tool for building brand awareness, maintaining consistent messaging, and establishing yourself as an industry authority. But what exactly is a content strategy, and how can it help your business?
Let's cut to the chase: A content strategy is your roadmap to creating and distributing valuable content that resonates with your target audience. It's about understanding what they want, where they're looking for it, and how to deliver it in a way that's both informative and engaging.
In this article, I’ll dive into the key components of a successful content strategy and provide practical tips to help you create a content marketing plan that drives results.
What Is Digital Content Strategy?
Many experts have already defined “content strategy” and in essence, a content strategy is a plan for crafting, managing, and tracking content to achieve business goals. Whether those goals include accessing a wider audience, increasing website conversions, or meeting users’ needs, content strategy is an essential, ongoing practice.
How Do Businesses Create a Successful Content Strategy?
Like any successful business endeavor, a content strategy requires careful planning and execution. Content strategies can be broken down into four key phases: ideation, content creation, maintenance, and content removal.
Planning & Ideation
One of the first steps is to develop a comprehensive plan outlining your content goals, target audience, and key topics. This includes planning content types around topics that are relevant to your audience, but also deciding who will own content creation, management, and circulation.
The ideation phase is also where your content strategist will typically create an editorial calendar, a detailed roadmap outlining content creation timelines, deadlines, and future updates. Editorial calendars can vary depending on organizational styles and specific content needs whether that’s creating video, scheduling a webinar, or crafting case studies.
Not to be overlooked, the ideation phase of a content marketing roadmap also requires research. Analyzing engagement data from your most important marketing channels can provide valuable insights into what resonates with your audience. By studying these trends, you can identify knowledge gaps and test different content approaches to optimize your strategy.
Content Creation
Once a content plan is in place, it’s time to set it in motion. A well-structured roadmap ensures that your team knows exactly which content types to create each week, whether it's videos, blog posts, infographics, or podcasts. This also helps you determine the most effective distribution channels, such as social media, email marketing, or your company website.
To streamline content creation and maintain consistency, consider using tools like asset maps, style guides, and brand tone guidelines. These resources help ensure that your content aligns with legal and editorial standards while preserving your brand's unique voice. A successful content strategy requires regular updates and a commitment to quality.
Maintenance
The competitive landscape is constantly evolving, making ongoing maintenance and updates a crucial component of a successful content marketing plan. Once a piece of content, whether it's an infographic, video, or blog post, is published, it's essential to revisit it regularly to assess its performance and determine if it needs refreshing.
Think of this as a content audit. Every few months, review your published content to evaluate its effectiveness and identify opportunities for improvement. This might involve republishing it in a different format, such as a video or social media post, or exploring new angles and topics related to the original content. By staying proactive, you can maximize the value of your content and ensure it remains relevant in a fast-paced market.
Sunsetting Content
Content can eventually be removed from your company’s blog. This typically happens when an article, thought leadership piece, or a whitepaper has gone through a few rounds of updates or different iterations in your company’s digital content strategy.
While this can be a difficult decision to make–which pieces to remove and which to keep–it plays a very important role in the content marketing roadmap and user engagement. By prioritizing the most relevant and up-to-date content, your audience is far more likely to engage with the content on your site and move along the marketing funnel.
Why Do Businesses Need a Content Marketing Plan?
A well-crafted content marketing plan is a cornerstone of effective digital content strategy. Whether your goal is to nurture existing customers or attract new ones, a clear roadmap can help you create and distribute content that resonates with your target audience.
For sales teams, a content strategy is a valuable asset for lead generation and building a robust sales pipeline. It can also be tailored to support account-based marketing (ABM) efforts, making it especially effective for B2B businesses. Without a structured plan, it's challenging to track prospecting activities and maintain consistent messaging across various marketing channels.
By creating consistent messaging across all platforms, your brand can establish itself as an authority in your industry. Ad-hoc content creation without a defined strategy can lead to wasted resources and inconsistent messaging. With a content marketing roadmap, businesses of all sizes can optimize their marketing efforts, improve ROI, and achieve their strategic objectives.
D2C Content Marketing Helps Establish Home Fragrance Newcomer
Fresh Wave, a pioneer in plant-based odor elimination, faced a challenge: breaking into the competitive home fragrance market. This pivot required the company to shift marketing gears from primarily a B2B brand to one of their first forays into the D2C market. They weren’t well known by shoppers and they were big competitors already in the home fragrance space.
To overcome these challenges and achieve their brand awareness objectives, they needed a compelling D2C content strategy that highlighted all of the benefits of their product and could successfully disrupt their competitors. Then, the pandemic hit.
With a content strategy already in place, we were able to quickly pivot some of the topics we had on the docket. This pivot allowed us to create content that would be highly relevant to shoppers as the consumer market continued to shift at a rapid pace throughout 2020.
By highlighting the science and providing valuable information, Fresh Wave established themselves as a new brand on the scene that consumers could trust. This strategic approach led to a significant increase in organic traffic and sales, solidifying their position in the market.