How to develop a content marketing strategy

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Do you know how to develop a content marketing strategy for your business? Often, I see businesses blogging but don’t have a real purpose behind what they’re doing, let alone a content marketing plan.

However, don’t get confused between a strategy and a plan. Some business owners may develop a plan, but it’s still not tied to a content marketing strategy.

That’s what I want to dive into in this blog post – the difference between a content marketing strategy and a plan, why I would encourage you to develop your own strategy and some examples to get you started.

What is a content marketing strategy?

Sometimes it’s easier to start with what a content marketing strategy isn’t. When I started out in blogging on a personal blog, there was no strategy behind what I was doing. I was simply blogging for the love if it.

I see some businesses who might not see themselves as blogging for the love of it, but nonetheless they have no strategy behind what they’re doing. They’re creating content with no real purpose.

Which brings me to what a content marketing strategy IS.

It’s having a purpose or goal behind the content you’re creating and often brings together a series of content pieces that can lead people in the direction you want.

A content marketing strategy is often centred around a particular service, launch or area of your business.

I’ll share some content marketing examples further down, but to highlight how this might work, I can share that for one of my clients when she has a launch, we create a series of blogs that each centre around her launch and serve a particular purpose.

The idea is to create content that attracts the right people to you, shares your authority and expertise in an area, and builds enough trust that the right people are willing to invest in you.

Content can take many forms, but often our first thought is of blogging. But it can also be social media, videos, infographics or documents, like white papers or templates.

When we’re developing a content marketing strategy, we need to look at whether these sit in the:

awareness stage – like blog posts, whitepapers, videos and education webinars
evaluation stage – such as case studies, FAQs and product demo videos
purchase stage – free trials or free consultation

Why you need a content marketing strategy

Too often content marketing gets pushed down the list of things that need to get done in a business. It’s seen as something you do when your business grows, rather than when you’re starting out or looking to grow.

One of the great benefits of creating a content marketing strategy is that content can pay you long into the future. When we’re smart about what our strategy is and we can develop SEO (search engine optimisation) into our strategy, then it can act as a driver for the right people to discover you. Kind of like the pollen in a flower will attract the bee time and again.

We want to create our own pots of pollen that draw people to us.

The more flowers you create with their own pockets of pollen, the more bees you attract.

But to ensure you have a sound strategy, you need to determine what your business goals are first.

Your goal might be around brand awareness, which would mean attracting the right people to you.

A lot of the content marketing strategies I develop for clients are based on lead generation, where we develop an opt-in offer that’s aligned to a paid offer or service. This way the content attracts people at the right stage of the buying journey, encourages them to join their database, where they can then be further nurtured and encouraged to buy. That nurturing sequence may even include pieces of content as part of that strategy that can help achieve smaller goals that are important to the success of the bigger goal.

An example might be an email that looks to overcome an objection their ideal client has to buying their service. So the email leads off to a blog post that can help overcome that objection before the lead even gets to the sales page or are invited to buy. This means when they finally hover over that buy button or go to book that discovery call, previous objections have now disappeared, and they’re more confident in their decision to proceed.

Think abou your own actions when you go to purchase something online. What doubts come up for you that sometimes stop you from proceeding to sale?

Creating an effective content marketing strategy

So how do you write a content marketing strategy and what do you need to make it effective? Often, the things you need to answer for your content marketing strategy have been part of your ideal client profile and your 12 month marketing plan.

But to get you started, here are some things that can ensure you’re building a content marketing strategy that’s successful.

Determine Your Ideal Client

If you have different sections to your business or different ideal clients, it’s important to hone in on who your ideal client is, what they most want, their pain points and their aspirations.

Knowing this will give you greater clarity around the content you need to create.

As part of this stage, you want to start researching what your ideal client is already searching for online to answer their questions.

Some good places to start include:

Facebook Groups: Look at Facebook groups where your ideal client is hanging out and see what questions they’re posting in the group. Are there particular concerns they have? Is there a recurring theme you’ve noticed? What questions are going unanswered or require more detail through a blog post or video?
Your own clients: When I’m doing discovery calls with new clients, I take copious amounts of notes. The reason being is that this is when a client is most honest with where they’re at and what help they need. And then during coaching client calls, I also take notes and reference the topics clients tend to want to discuss and focus on. These give us clues as to what we should be writing about that will attract the right type of people to us.
Perfectly aligned people: maybe they’re your clients and maybe they’re just people who you’d love to have as clients, but don’t disregard having a sit down or Zoom coffee chat with someone. You can ask questions about where they’re at, where they’d like to be and what type of things they need to know to bridge that gap.
Google suggest: I rely on this quite heavily when I’m creating blogs, but using Google Suggest can be a powerful tool to open ideas for content. To do this, you simply open Google, start typing what you know your ideal client is struggling with and Google will “suggest” topics based on what other users have searched for before.
Google Analytics: Often the best content I’ve created and the one that generates the most amount of traffic are those that came from searching through my Google Analytics. If you have your analytics connected to Google Search Console (another Google product that you should have set up for your website), it will allow you to see the exact keywords someone uses in Google search to find your content. Sometimes what they’re searching for and the content they land on within your site aren’t exactly in alignment. This is where there’s an opportunity for you to create a new piece of content centred on that topic.

Once you know this, the last piece is to understand how they like their content to be delivered. Do they like to:

Read
Listen
Watch

This will guide you on whether to create blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts or whitepapers.

Define Your Goal

Without a goal or purpose to your content, then it’s not a strategy. This is a key step in how to develop a content marketing strategy.

There are two levels to your goals. There’s an overarching goal and individual goals.

With an overarching goal, you may be creating content for

a launch,
Attract more service-based clients
trialling a new area of your business
Building a list of leads for a future project

But then you need to attach the individual pieces to a goal so you’re creating content with intent.

There are really 3 main goals behind your content.

Attract Qualified Leads or Email Subscribers
Convert Qualified Clients via discovery calls OR low-dollar item
Increase Offer Awareness. While it’s hard to sell a high-ticket offer or service directly from a piece of content, you can at least ensure people are aware of it so other layers of content and marketing strategies can convert clients.

Knowing this, will then help you define the call to action for each piece of content. For example, whether it’s to download something, attend an event, buy a product, book a cal or learn more about a service.

It’s one thing to know how to develop a content marketing strategy, but it’s just as important part to track the content you’re creating and how it’s helping you achieve your goals. The best way to do this is to set up goals within Google, which will highlight which pages on your website have led people to your content.

Determine their pain points and aspirations

Once you know “who” and “what” you’re creating content for, you then need to drill down to the “why”. What’s the motivation behind someone searching to find your website and then purchase your product or sign up to your email list?

Generally it’s because they want to move away from something (pain point) or they’re looking to achieve something (aspiration). It doesn’t matter too much which position you come from. A blend of pain point and aspirational content is good.

Before you start creating your content marketing plan, you can use this stage to brainstorm ideas that are relevant to your audience. A lot of this will come from your ideal client exercise.

How to develop a content marketing strategy and plan

Before you start writing your copy, put it into a plan. When people search for how to develop a content marketing strategy, this is really the step they’re searching for. Maybe that was you.

But as you can see, there are important steps to ensure you create a blog plan that has content ideas with a strong purpose behind them. Otherwise, you’re simply creating a plan of blog post ideas that don’t help you reach your business goals.

I’ll create a more detailed post on creating your content marketing plan later, but for now look to include:

Date to publish
SEO-based title
SEO main keyword and secondary keywords (I also include additional columns in my plan that reveal search volume and competition)
Call to action (what is the “next step” you want someone to take after reading your content
Content plan (this is a outline or framework for your content)
Overall goal (this is where you’re reminding yourself what the bigger goal is behind what you’re creating).

To help you create your blogging plan, I’ve put together an xcel content marketing plan for you to download free.

Download Your Plan

Leverage your content

When I started blogging, I thought it was a “build it, and they will come” scenario. Alas, this isn’t the case. I was fortunately told early on that the rule was to spend 20% of your time writing the post and 80% sharing it.

That strategy has served me well since.

Look at where your ideal client hangs out online and look to share your blogs on those platforms. Bring images in with your content or video to help draw attention to it.

Lastly, use a social media recycling tool so your old content continues to be shared on social media and receive traffic.

Content Marketing Strategy Example

If you’re wondering where to get started on how to develop a content marketing strategy for your own business, I want to share how I’ve been working with Kathryn Hocking to create simple launches using content marketing and email marketing.

This has been a slightly different approach to the content strategy case study I shared previously or you can think more broadly with these content marketing ideas.

The strategy has involved researching blog post ideas and SEO keywords that tie into the bigger launch goal and work to nurture or help in converting clients through the email sequence. It’s also layered with a Facebook ad strategy to bring in both organic and paid traffic.

Here’s what Kath had to say about working with me:

She has an incredible strategic mind. She has been a wonderful support to my launches and provided a second brain and implementation support in my business.

Kellie has also supported me with maximising SEO for my website. She provides me with great recommendations for blogs to write, a number of which are now in my top 5-10 generating thousands of hits per month.

I like the general efficiency and organised manner in which she works, her flexibility and communication on progress. I highly recommend Kellie to help support your marketing and launches.

Now you know how to develop a content marketing strategy, it’s time to implement. Download the plan to get started on creating content that will nurture and convert ideal clients.