How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy in 2023

I am living proof that a strategy Content marketing can serve as the backbone of customer acquisition for many types of online businesses. I've been doing it since starting my blog and I was able to see first-hand how much the Content marketing can be effective in various industries and niches.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy in 10 Easy Steps

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

La strategy Content marketing is a roadmap that tells you not only what pieces of content you'll create, but how you'll create them, promote them — and ultimately use your content to attract, retain, and convert more readers and viewers into customers for your business.

Create a content marketing strategy successful, let alone a blog strategy is a big task, but one that you shouldn't be afraid to tackle.

According to a Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers surveyed say they are creating more content this year than in 2016, with the trend showing no signs of slowing today.

However, while most small businesses and startups understand the value of content marketing, it can be scary to dive into it. Your competitors or people you admire regularly post long, in-depth blog posts, start podcasts, or get into the world of video, and it feels overwhelming.

Today, we hope to take some of that pressure off your shoulders and simplify the process of creating a foolproof content marketing strategy.

Each part of your content marketing strategy has its own nuances and details that you shouldn't miss. So we will look at each part of the process and I will add my expertise as we go. Now it's on!

1. Define your content marketing goal

Before looking at what you are going to create, you need to answer the question of why you are doing it.

Any true blogging strategy should start with a goal that content can help achieve. How will you measure the success of your campaign? Is it the traffic? New subscribers? App downloads? The conversions? Social shares and engagement? Video views? Podcast downloads? Sales?

In his Skillshare class The New Business Toolbox, the bestselling author, prolific marketer and entrepreneur Seth Godin will say too explains the importance of understanding your why from the start.

You have the freedom to make these choices right from the start, when they're free, quick, and easy. Not later, when you have made commitments to other people and to yourself.

It's easy to get caught up in all the content marketing tactics, but without a unifying strategy – a strong purpose – everything you create will fall flat.

Understanding your goal from the start will guide other important decisions when developing your content marketing strategy.

For example, what are we going to produce? And where will we distribute our content? As Godin explains, your strategy is like building a boat. You need to know where it will navigate before you start nailing the wooden planks together.

As Godin points out, Matching what you build to where you put it is more important than what you build in the first place. That's why we have to start by understanding what it's for."

When I am asked to develop a content marketing strategy for one of my clients, whether as a freelancer or as part of my side project, we always start in exactly the same place: we define a end goal, then we organize ourselves into small successes that allow us to reach the overall goal.

More often than not, in content marketing, the end goal is signing up for an email or a free trial.

It is essentially a question of attracting new readers thanks to smart blog post ideas (content) and then convert them into email subscribers who can then become paying customers while the rest of the marketing team works to build relationships and make money blogging. And if you're wondering… do people still read blogs? The answer is a resounding yes.

Once you have this larger goal in place, it is easier to determine, based on your average conversion rates, how many readers or listeners, viewers, users, you need to attract. to the content you post, in order to achieve your sign-up goal.

The number of people you need to bring to your blog is your traffic goal.

And in order to attract enough traffic to hit your conversion rates, you'll need to promote your blog content – ​​getting posts syndicated, mentions in top industry blogs, asking influencers to share with their followers , And so on.

It's not an exact science, but the more you implement, the more you build a content portfolio and the more you promote it, the more you'll see what your content marketing baseline is and you'll you can make changes and experiment in the future.

2. Research and understand your audience

Once you've made a clear connection to why you're creating content, the next step in crafting your content marketing strategy is understanding exactly who is going to see, hear or watch the content you create. .

Effective content isn't produced in a vacuum from a list of topics you personally want to write about or talk about, it's done in the open with input, feedback, and direction from your audience. The best content marketing strategy is designed to answer the most pressing questions of your target audience, in order to educate and transform it.

However, the only way to create enough of a connection between your content and people for them to share it and help you achieve your goals is to reach out to them directly. You need to show empathy and understanding for their situation.

However, the only way to create enough of a connection between your content and people for them to share it and help you achieve your goals is to reach out to them directly. You need to show empathy and understanding for their situation.

The first step is to understand the demographics and psychographics of your target audience.

Demographics are quantitative characteristics, things that you can actually analyze and measure.

Think about age, gender, location, job title, etc. For example, you might say you want your content marketing to speak to 30-45 year old executives, or 20 remote job seekers just out of college.

Psychographic data are things that we cannot measure.

Attributes such as attitude, belief systems, values ​​and interests. So, in our executive example, we could take it a step further and say that our content is for executives who want to take their business to the next level but can't find a solution. Or maybe they believe in hard work and good deeds, and value family and strong moral values.

Create your audience personas

Now, let's talk about how to find your blog's target audience – the fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. These personas are built to internalize who your ideal customer is, and give you an idea of ​​how you can relate to these people as real humans.

For each of the characters you create, write down their attributes (demographics and psychographics) on a bulleted list.

Then you need to visualize exactly who that person is. I suggest using a photography site like Unsplash ou Pexels to find a picture of the person you just described. It might sound a bit silly, but it will seriously help solidify your vision and create a stronger bond between you and your ideal audience.

Finally, from the photo and the bulleted list, write a story about that person in paragraph form, which actually describes the environment and feelings in which your character lives. Give it a name and describe its daily activities.

How can your content not only fit in, but also be found and recognized by that person?

• Do they search Google or use community sites like Quora or Reddit to find answers and ideas?
• Is he a big Facebook user or does he spend most of his time on apps like Snapchat?
• Maybe he doesn't spend a lot of time online and prefers to attend in-person events, industry conferences or group discussions?

Having a good understanding of who your audience is will go a long way in crafting the right message and fine-tuning storytelling in your content marketing efforts.

Be present where your audience already exists.

These are all critical questions to address when crafting your content marketing strategy, to maximize your chances of getting your content to your ideal audience, where they're already spending their time.

Also, it's important to remember that you can have more than one audience.

Although you don't want your ideal audience to be too large and diverse, especially at the start of your business (readers might not know who your solution is for). However, as long as you understand who your audience is and go through this step, you can create great content for them.

3. Create your blog (if you don't already have one)

It's time to move from the tactical part to the technical part of your content marketing strategy.

If you haven't yet created blog or found a place to host the content you are going to create, now is the time.

The good news? You have options.

Luckily, there are tons of great (and easy) options for creating your own website, ranging from ready-made platforms to fully customizable templates.

But before we get started, we need to answer an old question that content producers ask themselves.

Do you want to create your own platform, or use someone else's?

What I mean is what do you want to create your own blog on the WordPress platform (which I personally do and recommend), through an out-of-the-box content management system like Squarespace , or do you just want to host your content on an external domain like Medium (writing), YouTube (video) or Apple (podcasts)?

The bad news? There are pros and cons to each of these options.

While creating your own site gives you the flexibility and freedom to do it exactly the way you want, it also involves a greater investment of time and potential development costs. You also start without an audience, which can make it harder to get your content noticed.

On the other hand, using a pre-existing platform like Medium, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts to publish your content means less customization, but lower start-up costs for blogging (especially when it comes to the investment in time if you have never used WordPress before).

This route also means instant access to an audience that is already there, actively seeking content.

As appealing as it may sound, keep in mind that youdon't have control what this platform will do in the future, which means it can be bought, hacked, changed its policies or even shut down at any time.

Ultimately, the choice is yours.

However, I am personally in favor of the idea of ​​starting with your own blog domain from day one – which is why I always recommend new businesses to launch their content with a WordPress-powered blog.

Also, having your own blog will allow you to respond to requests for coaching, consulting, teaching, or other work-from-home jobs once you build up a certain audience.

4. Update your current content (if you've already published it)

There's never a bad time to reassess your content marketing strategy and shift gears if something isn't working.

If you've been writing or producing other types of content for a while now is a great time to adapt your published content to the style of your new content marketing strategy.

To do this, you need to know exactly what “types” of content you are going to produce.

We're not just talking about the types of content and format you're going to use – be it blog posts, videos or podcasts – but rather subjects that you will produce on a regular basis.

For example, if you are creating a finance blog, your main content pillars might be:

• Personal finance tips and tricks
• Interviews and stories about people who have found financial freedom
• Industry news and what it means for you
• Basics of finance

With these pillars in place, you need to make sure you're using three key content types, known as the 3Es.

• Commitment : Content intended to start a conversation (whether you like it or not, conversational marketing is here to stay), such as your own opinion on a popular topic.
• Persistent : Content based on your key business terms that you can refer to and update for years to come
• Events : Content that revolves around a particular event, such as major news or an industry event.

If you've already published content, go through it and see if it fits into your new content marketing strategy.

Does it speak to your audience and contribute to the realization of your blogging goals ? If not, can you update, change, or remove it altogether?

5. Start building an email list and know how you will use it.

Whatever content you create, you need to make it available to the right people.

But before we get into distribution, social media exploitation and all that, we need to talk about the most important piece of the puzzle of distributing your content: e-mail.

Email allows you to communicate directly with your subscribers and into their inboxes, where many of us spend countless hours each week. Starting to build lists early is a great way to amplify the content you create.

In his course entitled " Getting Started with Email Marketing“, Allyson Van Houten, Head of Product Marketing at MailChimp, explains the basics of creating effective email campaigns, answering some of the key email marketing questions that need to be answered and aligned. on your content marketing strategy.

What tools do you need?

An email service provider (or ESP) allows you to send emails, build and maintain your subscriber list, and check reports and analytics on how your campaigns are performing. An ESP will also ensure that your emails do not fall into spam folders, that your list is clean and controlled, and that you comply with all applicable email laws.

Here's a screenshot of my own ConvertKit ESP dashboard, which shows stats on how many new email subscribers I get over time, including which forms/offers they're opting for. register, which helps me track what works best.

There are many options, but some of the most popular for marketers — and also have lower start-up costs are Convert Kit, Weber, Mailchimp.

Here are some email marketing services to consider:

• MailChimp  (free plan up to 1 subscribers)
• convert kit (what I personally use)
• Campaign Monitor
• AWeber
• Active Campaign

Like any decision tool, a policy can always be changed or rolled back if it doesn't work after a month, and each of these ESPs does a great job of making migration easier.

My advice ? Pick the cheapest option that gives you the bare minimum of features you need to achieve your goals and move on. You can always switch things up and upgrade to a tool with more options in the future. In short, keep a tight budget in the early stages.

And don't forget that maintaining a clean email list is essential to ensure good deliverability to your subscribers. The use of a email verification tool good quality can help you tremendously in this process.

What is the purpose of your emails?

Your email marketing strategy should be tied to your business goals.

What you're trying to accomplish for your business over the next two weeks or months should really dictate what you do in your email campaigns and newsletter.

As Van Houten explains: Some of the goals you could try to achieve with your email strategy could be brand awareness, knowledge of your products, loyalty to your business and brand, and driving people to your website to consume your content."

What should be the content of your emails?

The content you create for your blog is a great starting point for what you might send to your email subscriber list.

Van Houten suggests taking this content and using portions of it to create email campaigns that will keep people coming back to your blog to read the rest of your article, watch the full video, or listen to the full episode. from the podcast.

That's exactly what I do with my own weekly newsletter (sometimes twice a week).

I send out previews of the new podcast episode of the week and new blog posts as soon as they're published, so my subscribers can dive into the full content (if it fits their needs at the time).

What types of emails should I send?

There are three main types of emails you can send to your list to support your content marketing strategy:

• General campaigns and newsletter: These are sent to your list. They're great when you're just getting started and your list isn't really huge (because you know almost everyone on the list wants to hear about your business and the content you post).
• Communication sent to targeted segments of your list: As you grow, you'll want to make sure you're sending the right messages to the right groups of people on your list. Your ESP should let you select segments based on demographic information or what links they've clicked on in the past, so you can send more targeted campaigns.
• Automated messaging: These are messages that you will send to multiple people over time. Think welcome emails, delivering an online course, or listing your top content.

How often should I send emails?

According to Van Houten, there are no hard and fast rules about sending once a week or once a month.

Rather, how often you send will depend on how much time you have to spend emailing and how often you have valuable news or new content to share.

Although you're just getting started, she generally recommends that small businesses aim for one email per month.

You need to be consistent and talk to your subscribers as often as possible without overwhelming them. And you also shouldn't go 4, 5 or 6 months without them hearing from you, because they're likely to forget how they even got into your mailing list and your chances of being marked as spam will increase. considerably.

6. Brainstorm content ideas and use keyword research to find opportunities.

Okay, at this point we know why we create content and who our audience is.

We've set up a blog and our email service provider is ready to go. It's finally time to talk about the content you'll be creating and how it fits into your content marketing strategy.

This is where the fun begins.

At this point you probably have a ton blog post ideas to write or videos to film. However, that initial excitement can quickly fade when other things get in your way. Having the right tools (such as a simple video editor, social content generators, design resources and more) to facilitate your processes.

For your content marketing strategy to be successful, you need to be careful to stay strategic in what you create and avoid falling into the simple reaction trap.

As Seth Godin explains in The Modern Marketing Workshop:

“Great marketers set their own agenda. It means getting out of reaction mode and focusing on your strategy. ”

I know firsthand that posting content on a regular basis is difficult. So you can use a tool like WordPress Strive Content Calendar Plugin to view your calendar and plan your next articles. Not to mention actually tracking content performance over time through thoughtful marketing dashboards.

All for the purpose of setting your own agenda, creating a content marketing editorial calendar (regardless of format) can help you be less reactionary in your publishing goals. On the contrary, the right content calendar, filled with actionable ideas and directly related to your business goals, can make all the difference.

The pillar articles or types of content we discussed earlier will help you determine the type of articles you will write, but what about the specific content of each one?

For this, we turn to the keyword research.

Here's how Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, explains the basics of keyword research in Introduction to SEO: Tactics and Strategy for Entrepreneurs.

Rand shares: When we think about our audience, we want to look at the people we know belong to the group we want to target and ask ourselves "what are they looking for today that they can't find or are not well exposed.

Once you've started thinking about your audience's needs, Rand offers a 5-step process for finding the specific topics and keywords your audience will be searching for. This will be the basis of your content marketing strategy.

Brainstorm topics and terms : Start by noting down as many blog post ideas likely to interest your audience. It's a good idea to involve people who work directly with your users at this stage, such as a customer service or sales representative.
Use a keyword research tool to gather results : Now is the time to introduce these terms into a tool like Google's Keyword Planner, Moz, Twinword Ideas or any other tool to see what comes out of it.
Expand and refine your list : Take this big list and narrow it down or group them together. What looks good? What doesn't make sense in relation to your business goals?
Create a spreadsheet and prioritize terms : Now is the time to get organized. Create a spreadsheet with the data you got in your tool, like keyword, estimated search volume, difficulty, and opportunity, and assign a priority to each. Which is more important to your business?
Define content that meets these three key needs : Take your key terms and craft a blog post with content that will meet your goals, user needs, and keyword targeting. It's the trifecta of killer content that's tailored to the SEO.

Rand's final tip? Make sure you don't just match the content you see in the top position, but surpass it:

He specifies : " When you read the first search results, you think, “That's great, but I wish they…”. If you have great answers to this question, don't ask "how to do something as good as this", but say "how to do something 10 times better than all this". This is the bar that was set because it is so competitive trying to rank for terms today. »

7. Decide on the format of the content you want to produce

Blog posts, videos, launching a podcast (you'll need separate hosting for podcasts), infographics: they all have their place in your content strategy and it's up to you to use them. What is non-negotiable, however, is that they tell a story.

As we say Seth Godin will say too: “Marketing is about telling a story to the people who want to hear it. And make that story so vivid and so real that people who hear it want to tell it to other people.”

To achieve this goal, Godin says your content must possess four qualities:

1. Emotion: What emotion do we want people to feel?
2. Change: How do you change people with your product or content? Does that emotion change them in a way that helps your brand?
3. Alert: Once you've changed someone, how can you create the privilege of being able to tell them when you have something new?
4. Sharing: How to make people tell it?

With that in mind, let's take a look at the details of setting up some of the most popular content formats: blog posts, videos, and podcasts.

Blogging in your content marketing strategy

blog post ideas are a great starting point for creating your content marketing strategy because publishing blog content has the lowest barriers to entry by far.

You don't need a designer or special equipment. Just start writing and you're good to go.

Here's how the CEO of Single Grain, Eric Siu, explains how to build a blog post in Content Marketing: Blogging for Growth:

Start with a draft : Start with a skeleton of what you want to say. This means that you need a few lines for the introduction and why people should care about your topic, as well as the main points or subheadings that you are going to use throughout the article. Read all of this. Does this make sense? Does your plan quickly answer the What, Why, How and Where questions?

Add the essentials : These are details, statistics, quotes, images or case studies. If you make claims in your article, you must back them up. Use Google to find statistics on your topic (like these blogging stats). And when you link to studies or references, you can reach out to those people later when you distribute your content. (You can also create a Google alert to receive regular updates on these topics).

Outperform the competition : At this point, you have a good article, but not an excellent one. Take the next step and see what the competition is doing. What is the top result for your topic and how can you improve yours? Can you go deeper? Add more images or resources?

Write a great headline : The last part, and almost the most important, is to learn how to write a title for your blog posts. You only click on things that catch your eye when browsing social media, and your audience is the same. your titles.

Add an effective featured image : People love images and adding a featured image before the post has been shown to get you 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets on Twitter alone. Check out sites like Unsplash to find better quality photos, then use a tool like Canva to add additional elements like text or icons.

Videos in your content marketing strategy

According to a recent study, 51% of marketers worldwide cite video as the type of content with the highest return on investment, while social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined. This is why digital asset management software is increasingly popular with content creators.

However, make videos can seem like a monumental task if you're used to watching highly produced content from people like Gary Veynerchuk who have entire teams dedicated to producing his content.

You need specialized equipment, a studio, lighting, sound, right? Not exactly. In DIY Viral Video: A Mini Class on Making iPhone How-To Videos, Nicole Farb, founder of Darby Smart, explains how to create one of the most popular styles of video, hyperlapse videos, using your iPhone.

If you've watched cooking recipes or DIY videos online, you know the style. Introduce what you're going to do, the ingredients, the process, and the end result, all in 60 seconds or less. Here's how she does it:

• Keep it short: Less than 60 seconds maximum. If you can keep it under 30 seconds, you kill it!
• Have a plan: Think about your ingredients or accessories you need or how you will show the steps
• Use hand signals to communicate to your users: The majority of videos are watched without sound, so think of other ways to communicate what the user needs to know.
• Use your tools: Skillshare uses the Hyperlapse tool, a box to store its videos and a video rack, which you can create with something as simple as two stacks of business books with a board across them. Place your camera on the edge of the board and launch your camera app. You can set a "scene" for where you are filming by saving it to the table.
• Gather your resources: Either bring them in one at a time or have them all laid out on your center stage.
• Start with a compelling image: Either an impressive end product to spark interest, or some unconventional ingredients.
• Don't worry about it being perfect: DIY videos are going viral every day. If you can tell a compelling story in a short time, it doesn't matter if you're doing it on your iPhone or a professional camera.

Podcasts in your content marketing strategy

Podcasts are very popular right now as a form of content, and for good reason: they can fuel your content marketing strategy with relatively little effort compared to writing 7+ blog posts. 000 words like this.

With how busy your audience is, giving them a way to passively listen to your content is fantastic for lowering the barrier of entry.

However, as with video, you probably think you need all kinds of specialized equipment and skills. And while audio is a whole other beast, you can get started with a bit of effort. In his course entitled " Getting Your Podcast Off the Ground,” Neil Patel, host of the Indian Startup Show (India's first tech podcast), walks us through the basics of podcasting.

Step 1: Choose your topic or niche

If you already know your audience and topic, this step shouldn't be a problem. However, you will need to choose a niche to blog about to get people interested. There are currently over 100 podcast shows, so get specific!

A few tools to help you research niches are cast.market (a search page for podcasts), graphics iTunes (to see what's popular and where there are gaps) or even Google Trends.

Step 2: Gather your tools

A basic podcasting setup consists of one of the best cheap podcast microphones and software to record your voice. This can range from a simple built-in mic (which I don't recommend due to poor sound quality) to an external USB mic, audio interface, and professional recording software.

Personally, I use a great sounding ATR2100 USB mic, which you can get on Amazon for around $65.

It's super affordable, has impressive audio quality for the price, and is small and portable, which makes it perfect.

Step 3: Find your guests (or write your own episodes)

If you're doing an interview type show, you need to start involving guests.

You can use your existing social network to reach people you already know or connect with on Twitter or Facebook. You can also go to Medium or Amazon to find authors or experts on topics specific to your niche.

Once you've gathered a list, prepare an approach email template (because you're going to do this many times), short and clear about expectations. Tell them who you are, what your podcast is about, and what you're asking them.

Step 4: Edit your podcast and add music, sound and other elements

Audio editing is an art form. Luckily, there are tons of affordable options for hiring an audio engineer or podcast producer to put your episodes together. To get started, you only need 4 files: your main interview, intro, outro, and jingle/music.

Then upload these files to Google Drive or Dropbox.

Note that when you're first starting out with your podcast, I recommend leaving your episodes (or interviews) very lightly edited, without too much narration (which takes a lot of time), unless you have a knack for it or the podcast is on its way to becoming your biggest content marketing strategy.

Either way, after recording your conversation, play back the main interview and write down what needs to be done and when.

Next, email your sound engineer asking them to improve the sound quality and levels of the interview if necessary, and make the following changes:

1. Add intro music (add a link to your file and desired playing time)
2. Add a new intro (add the link to your intro)
3. Add the main interview (add the link to the recording of your interview)
   • With the following edits (tell them where you want cuts or edits)
4. Add the outro (add the link to your outro)
5. Convert to MPR
6. Save under the file name of your choice.

Step 5: Download and Promote

Congratulation! You now have a podcast episode that's ready to go live on iTunes, SoundCloud, or anywhere else and promote alongside the rest of your content!

Be sure to notify your guests with a cut-and-paste social copy that they can use to promote their episode, and it helps tremendously if you have visually appealing graphics to go along with it.

8. Describe the content marketing strategies you will experiment with

Now that you've gathered your content, how are you going to promote or distribute it? You need to be productive in your marketing efforts because if no one sees, hears, or reads the content you took so long to create, was it really worth writing?

In 10x Marketing: Content Marketing That Stands Out & Gets Results, Garrett Moon, CEO of CoSchedule, outlines some specific tactics and strategies you can try.

Find your “content without competition”.

With so much competition in content and social media, Moon believes it's important to find the "blue ocean" opportunities, i.e. the places where you don't fight with. existing markets and where you can do your best work.

“How do you create content that stands out from the competition, so that what you create stands out and is truly impactful and meaningful? ".

He cites the example of Groove – a support software – which decided to shut down its already popular blog to focus on a topic only it could talk about: its numbers, metrics and history. of his own creation.

They went from producing “me-too” content that everyone creates, to something unique and were rewarded with a massive increase in traffic and users.

This content marketing strategy focuses on using their core skills, but here's how you can find those same kinds of opportunities in your own business:

1. Observe your competitors : What do they do, where do they post, and how do they use email? Understand what your customers are already seeing.
2. Search for relevant topics on Google : Look at the first 10 results and see what is there. How long is the content? What images are used? What is consistent or stands out?
3. Ask yourself what you and your team really know how to do. What models are your competitors adopting that you can disrupt? Are there people in your audience that you don't serve? What have you created that you are most proud of?

From these three steps, you should be able to start seeing opportunities where you can excel that aren't already saturated with competition.

Prioritize Opportunities 10x

Another crucial tactic for any content marketing strategy is to always prioritize content with the greatest impact. Moon calls this the 10X vs 10% test. What are the opportunities that could potentially increase your audience, traffic, or subscriber growth by 10x, compared to just 10%?

To do this, there is another simple 3-step process:

Put all your ideas on a board. There are no bad ideas here, just let it all out.
Call on the rest of your team to help you. Identify all real 10X opportunities and put them in a column.
Rank the difficulty of your opportunities 10X on a scale of 1 to 3. If you have a 10X opportunity whose difficulty is only Level 1, you should grab it immediately and prioritize it in your content marketing strategy.

At this point, you know what you need to focus on the most. But remember that your 10% ideas aren't bad, so don't throw them away. They may become a more profitable business in the future.

They just don't have the same potential impact today – and therefore should be given a lower priority in your overall content marketing strategy for now. Go back to your idea board regularly to re-evaluate priorities and stay alert.

9. Use social media to promote your content

It's nearly impossible today to separate your content marketing strategy from your social media strategy.

As the master of motivational quotes says Gary Vaynerchuk, founder and CEO of VaynerMedia, in Context is Key: Social Media Strategy in a Noisy Online World :

"I like social media because it sells shit."

Social media has become an integral part of getting your content to the right people. But you need to do more than just post to Facebook and Twitter once or twice.

“My social media strategy is to provide as much value as possible in order to convince people to buy what you're selling. So when you finally ask them to buy what you're selling, they do. »

It's not just about talking about your content and asking people to click on a link or subscribe to your newsletter. On the contrary, you must show that you are a reliable source of educational resources and gain their attention when you ask for something in return.

At the heart of your content marketing strategy should be the belief that this is a long-term (lifetime) investment in building your value.

Going from the overview of social media to the practical aspect of creating messages, Brian Peters, digital marketing strategist at Buffer, and content marketer, explains his process in Introduction to Social Media Strategy.

find your voice : What are the words, graphics and visual elements that you will publish? Are you going to be quirky like MailChimp or stuffier like IBM or Cisco?

Choose the platforms you will use : When you start, you cannot and should not be present on all platforms. Choose what makes the most sense for your brand and where your audience is most likely to be. Does that mean Facebook or Snapchat?

Create platform-specific content : You can both create original content from your blog posts or other content, or curate other people's content like links or relevant videos. Both have their place and should be part of your strategy. Each platform has its own nuances and intricacies in how it is used and how people share.

Set up your social media “stack” : Which blogging tools will you use to support your social media strategy? Peters suggests Trello for planning posts ahead of time and making sure you have all the content you need. Canva and Pablo to create graphics. Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule the broadcast of messages at appropriate times.

And when your blogger outreach efforts start paying off, you can potentially increase the number of emails you send (and the relationships you build) by using outreach automation.

10. Use paid ads to draw attention to your content.

Today, many social media platforms are adopting the “pay to play” model. In other words, even if you have a large number of subscribers and a high engagement rate, you have to spend a certain amount to get your content seen by everyone.

When you're just starting out and building a new content strategy, investing in paid ads is probably a little scary. More than $72 billion was spent on social ads in 2016 alone, and that figure is expected to reach $113 billion by 2024.

But, as Peters describes in another lecture – Introduction to Social Media Advertising— you don't need to throw huge amounts of money on social media to get a return. On the contrary, $5 is enough to start experimenting, especially with channels like Facebook Ads…

Here's how Peters breaks down the setup for social ads on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram:

Step 1: Define your goals

Paid advertising is about getting people to work from the top of your marketing funnel, where they haven't heard of your brand, to the middle and finally the bottom of the funnel, where you ask for the sale and where they hopefully become customers.

So start by asking yourself: who is my target audience and what is my goal with him?

Is it to drive awareness for your top-of-funnel audience and build brand awareness?

Or are you reaching out to people who already know who you are and asking them to click on a blog post or landing page?

Once you've set your high-level goal, you need to be specific about how you're going to measure its success, whether it's impressions, engagement, or clicks. To do this, there are two things you need to do:

1. Configure Google Analytics and UTM parameters on your links: these are simple tools that allow you to track where your traffic is coming from and what it did once it arrived on your site.
2. Configure 'Pixels' on your site: This is a small snippet of javascript code that you can add to your website to track social media advertising efforts specific to each individual platform. For example, a Facebook snippet opens the lines of communication between Facebook and your website that gives them information about people who come to your site and lets the social network know if a user has taken a certain action.

Step 2: Target

Next, you need to decide who will see your ad. As Peters explains, targeting is why social media marketing works as well as it does:

" Targeting capabilities are at an all time high. Social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest give you an incredible wealth of information about your customers, allowing you to create highly targeted ads tailored to your audience. "

There are 3 ways to target your audience:

1. Develop personas of your target audience: Ask yourself why someone would want to click on your ad? Who are they ? What problem are you solving for them?
2. Retarget people who have viewed you: You can also target people who have visited your site or watched a video for a while or gone to another site. Custom Audiences allow you to target people who already know who you are, which means you can target top-of-funnel users with ads and then create Custom Audiences based on what those users are doing, pushing further down your marketing funnel.
3. Targeting competitors or look-alikes: These are groups of people who the social network believes likes similar things to your current users (and therefore might like you), or who like a competitor's page.

Step 3: Budget

As we said earlier, you don't need a big budget to be successful with social media advertising. In fact, you can start with as little as $5 a day.

When you start with a small budget, you need to focus on the top-of-funnel audience because it's less expensive to reach them. You're not asking for a sale or a click, you just want them to see your brand and engage with you.

Once you get past that, you'll start looking at things like cost per click (CPC), which is how much you're willing to spend to get someone to click on your ad. Or, the cost per thousand views (CPM). While budgeting for great social media campaigns can be complicated, it all boils down to one simple question:

“Ask yourself if you are willing to spend that money on that specific goal. It all depends on what you're willing to spend and your social media advertising goals, so that $100 or $1000 doesn't go to waste. »

Budget doesn't matter as long as what you're paying for pays off in the long run.

It doesn't matter the budget as long as what you pay actually pays off in the long run.

Step 4: Copy and visuals

Finally, it's time to set up your actual ad.

For this, Peters says there are only 4 things you need to include:

1. What do you want your ad to say? In other words, how do you want your audience to feel when they see your ad? Do you want to shock him, delight him, intrigue him?
2. How do you want your ad to look? Is this a video? A stock image? Just text? What colors are you going to use? Does it match the brand?
3. What action do you want your audience to take? Where should they go after seeing your ad? Towards a landing page or blog post? Lure them in with a free offer like I did with my blogging books and courses or consider offering them an eBook that you wrote.
4. Where do you want your ad placed? Is this an ad aimed at mobile phone users or desktop computer users? Will it be placed in their newsfeed or elsewhere?

Final thoughts on creating a content marketing strategy:

By now, you should know just about everything you need to plan and implement an effective content marketing strategy this year (and the blogging mistakes to avoid along the way). Keep in mind that your content marketing efforts should also fit into your blog's business plan, in order to generate thoughtful traffic that can one day turn into real income.

If you have any questions about how to get your content marketing strategy off the ground, ask them in the comments below and I'll answer all your questions.

Above all, remember that your content marketing strategy will only be effective if you have a plan.