What are the Questions to Ask Yourself before Creating a Content Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing strategy is generally confused with content strategy. However, they are not the same. When it comes to content marketing, it encompasses creation, distribution, and sharing of content for achieving multifarious objectives. A clear content marketing strategy helps in engaging the target audiences, generating leads, improving branding activities, and the achievement of many other marketing goals.

Therefore, a strategic approach is needed by keeping certain aspects in minds such as life cycle of the customer, the buyer’s journey from entering the website to buying the product, wide array of customer experience, and many others. In fact, a comprehensive content marketing strategy should align itself with the other associated strategies, including sales, marketing and customer-related ones.

While creating a strategy for content marketing, multiple things are needed to be kept in mind including:

• Who are the target buyers? What are their preferences as well as needs regarding content?

When a buyer starts his/her journey within your website, it is important to track the journey as it gives important information about customer touch points, preferred channels of communication, and so on. Before making a marketing strategy, keep the buyer personas in mind so that you can create a strategy that addresses their needs.

• What are the goals (marketing as well as organizational ones) that can be realized or improved with the use of content marketing?

With the use of the appropriate content and the associated content marketing strategy, a wide array of aspects can be improved, such as:

• Traffic building
• Optimization of conversion
• Customer service
• Lead generation as well as their management
• Marketing Automation
• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Event Marketing

Therefore, you should create content marketing strategy keeping these aspects in mind. The most common mistake marketers do is segregating content marketing from all other questions. Keep the overall question in mind at the time of creating the marketing strategy.

• Which metrics should you use to gauge the success of a content marketing strategy?

To measure the success of content marketing, it is important to earmark the KPIs. No matter which marketing or business effort you are using, it must speak the common language among the different departments. It is important to stress on implementation of ROI for the entire organization and not just for content marketing efforts.

Which organizational aspects should the marketer know to cherish success?

There are multifarious organizational aspects that the content marketer must know to create the right content marketing strategy.

These are:

• What are the stumbling blocks of the organization?
• What are the goals of the management?
• Which competitor data should you have?
• What are the overall marketing priorities?
• Who are the external partners of the company?
• Who are the team members?
• Which business stakeholders are there in the organization?

Getting answers to all or most of the queries is important so that a comprehensive content marketing strategy can be created.