To create a successful content marketing campaign you need a plan. In our advanced digital world, you no longer have to rely on just yourself and sheer luck to do that. There are many tips and tools that can help you create a successful strategy without having to worry.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a type of marketing that entails sharing content across social media and digital marketing platforms. This content can include blog posts, infographics, videos, polls, and social media posts. Content marketing allows you to talk about your brand and products or services to your audience and then convert that audience into active buyers.

Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Strategy?

Businesses need content marketing for a variety of reasons. From promoting their business and products to consumers to engaging users across social media to creating ads to promote and sell these products to offering content that benefits their audience. An effective content marketing strategy can, therefore, boost your business and generate leads and conversions.

But to create a successful and effective content marketing strategy and campaign, there are few points you need to consider and work on first.

1.     A Target Audience

Many businesses believe that their audience is everyone. While that may be the case, you still need to segment your audience based on their likes and dislikes, their demographics, their spending habits, and abilities and so on.

Moreover, if you're working on a business to business (B2B) content plan, then offering informational content to your audience is the way to go. Instead of sales content that people shy away from. According to data by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), around 90% of top-performing B2B marketers create content that benefits their audience's needs for information.

In order to create this content, you need to first identify your audience, because without an audience you won't be able to decide what is useful for them.

Let's say you're selling coffee, your target audience might be school and college students who need to stay up late to finish their studies and projects. Your audience can also be 60+-year-old grandparents who like to take their cup of coffee in the garden at noon. See how these two groups want the same thing but are decades apart?

You can't use the same message to address both groups. The way you talk to the school and college students will differ drastically from the way you address your grandmother J

Also, keep an eye on your competitors, what are they doing and who are they targeting? Is there something you missed?

2.     Define Your Goals and Measure Them

To determine if your content marketing strategy is working – or not, you need to define a number of goals that you want to achieve. In other words, what does success mean for you? Does it mean more engagement in terms of likes or shares? Does it mean raising awareness for your brand? Increasing subscribers? Driving more conversions and sales?

Write down your goals and what it means to achieve them. That way you can measure the performance of your strategy and if it's making progress or if you need to think it over.

Now that you have your goals, set them against a realistic time frame because without one you would be like a swimmer in a sea with no land or someone who is just running with no end to the road in sight.

3.     Buyer Personas

Like any form of marketing, your content plan needs a buyer persona or several personas depending on your product.

Around 77% of successful B2B marketers include buyer personas in the marketing, according to the study conducted by the CMI.

As mentioned earlier, you can' target everyone at the same time. You can't talk to your 15-year-old daughter the same way you talk to your grandmother. That's where the buyer persona comes in. You envision the different segments of your audience and create a persona for each of them. Then, you start creating content to meet the needs of each persona and accordingly the audience segment it represents.

Maybe you're a digital marketing agency and your customers range from large corporates to smaller-sized startups. While both might have similar needs, the scale and budget for each would be drastically different.

Socialbakers' AI Persona Mapping Tool can help you create a visual persona for each target audience segment.

4. Diversifying Your Content

In today's world, creating a blog for your business has become an essential part of a content marketing strategy. That said, your blog needs to offer quality content that is in line with your brand and the services it offers and with your audience's needs.

Take Maverick Digital, for example, we offer digital marketing services, web development, and UX design. That said, our blog posts cover topics for these three categories. For web development and UX design, we have an article on what wireframes are and how they speed up the pace of creating your website, and another on why shared web-hosting mightnot be good for your business.

We also have posted on hiring a digital marketing the agency, the types of ads YouTube offers, and the benefits of mixing email marketing with social media.

But remember, the blog isn't the only thing to consider when diversifying your content though. Your content marketing strategy should contain audio and visual, and audio-visual aspects like video content, infographics, case studies, and maybe even podcasts.

This graph by SocialBakers explains the buyer's journey depending on each type of content when it comes to lead generation.

5. Tools to Implement Your Content Market Strategy

To carry out your content marketing strategy you need a number of tools. After all, we are all human and our time and energy are limited.

According to the study by the CMI, successful B2B companies that use technology get the best results from their content marketing strategies.

That's why you should consider which platforms you will need as part of your plan and invest in content marketing platforms to facilitate publishing, your projects, and social media management.

6. Don't Rely on Organic Only

Last but certainly not least, your content marketing strategy needs to include both organic and promoted posts. Relying on organic alone with limit your reach and your audience(s) won't be able to see you.

You, therefore, need to have a strategy for publishing, distributing and promoting content.

Highlight the main platforms you'll be using for your content marketing strategy then create a plan to publish and promote.

Conclusion

Now that you have everything you need, the content marketing plan, the goals, the buyer personas, the diversified content, your audience's platforms of choice and a promotion strategy, it's time to start implementing your content marketing campaign.

As you go through the strategy, you will need to test certain types of content and discover which of it resonates with your audience and customers. This testing phase will tell you what types of content to focus on and what to skip in your next content marketing plan.