A Quick Content Marketing Strategy that Works

If you are just starting out in business (or if you have never done anything for your business online), developing your content marketing strategy doesn’t necessarily need to be an awful experience. It doesn’t have to be arduous and it doesn’t have to be extremely time-consuming. 

Using content marketing guidelines that are quick and easy

As you are thinking about your content marketing strategy, you need to devote a reasonable amount of time to creating it. Of course, you will spend subsequent time on making it work and on keeping it fresh. It is also important to always have the big picture in your mind at all times. There is no doubt that developing a content marketing strategy can take up a lot of your time and energy if you don’t go about it in the most efficient, more sensible way possible.

You can eliminate the stress of creating your content marketing strategy

The first thing that you need to realize is that you don’t need to handle everything on your own. You can get support from other people who you trust. A good approach is to devote an hour at a time to developing your strategy. That includes the work that you do yourself as well as the discussions that you have with other people who are working with you to develop that strategy.

Considering that there will probably be a lot of moving parts in your content marketing strategy, a checklist may  help you a great deal. If you have a thorough checklist, you will probably not allow anything important to fall through the cracks. That is critical to your success. Additionally, you should keep in mind that everything that you do should be written down. You will need to revisit whatever you write and it will make it easier for you down the road. After all, you want your strategy to not only exist but you also want it to be effective. 

Your content strategy is critical but it doesn’t need to be painful.

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How will you use that hour

Remember that the hour that you have designated will not be enough to create and effective content marketing strategy from start to finish. However, it will be enough to set the process in motion and to lay the foundation for what you will do later on. In that first hour, you will put all of the players exactly where you want them to be. You will also get them to completely agree to your plan and to commit to being a part of it. Those are critical pieces to the puzzle.

Of course, another part of that is the idea that you want those other people to be as passionate about your business as you are and, hopefully, that will be the case. You can get help from the other players as far as ironing out the details; however, you also need to come prepared when you first sit down to propose the strategy that you want to execute. The following are the steps that you will want to take to lay that extremely important foundation.

• Define the goals of your business: You will need to state exactly how you hope your business will benefit from your strategy. Remember not to take too much time for this part of the discussion. It should be a simple statement.

• Let everyone know exactly what you hope to accomplish with the content that you share with other people: It is very important that you understand that your content is a tool. Granted, it is a powerful tool that can really help your business to accomplish a great deal. However, it is still a tool. As you are engaging the people you want to work with you, you may want to open up the discussion by posing some important questions, such as how  you can (collectively) accomplish the goals that you have set up and what your content needs to accomplish to make that happen.

• Discuss your target audience in detail: Not only do you need to identify your target audience but you need to know them as intimately as you possibly can. That means that you need to have information such as, where they live, what issues are they experiencing that you can help them to solve, how likely are they to become loyal customers to your business, etc. 

• Know exactly who your competition is: It is important to embrace your competitors. You will not be doing your business (or you) and good by sitting in the dark and convincing yourself that you don’t have any competition. That is just plain naive and it is a sure way for your business to fail. 

• Discuss the content that you think will be the most effective: If you are a strong writer, you will have absolutely no problem with that. On the other hand, if you don’t feel confident about your writing, you need to find someone else who excels at writing. Hopefully, one of the people (or more) who you are looking to for support can fill those shoes.

• Determine exactly where you will store your content: The good news is that your content is not necessarily like paying the rent. You don’t necessarily post content and that is the last time that you can do anything with it. It can be recycled (or repurposed) on many occasions. You just need to make sure that it is not time-sensitive. If you can do that, you will get a great deal of mileage out of it.

• You need to determine that you have accomplished your goals: You will need to set up success markers as part of your strategy. The first one that you will want to set up is watching how your traffic increases. Half a year is a good amount of time and by then, you should see some real results. Another marker is generating a robust number of leads. At the one-year mark, you should be able to see an increase (by a certain percentage) of people you have been able to convert to customers. 

Conclusion

You have a lot to accomplish in an hour but if you are organized and efficient, you can do it. It is a very important foundation for your business’ future, in the short term as well as in the long term. Of course, the big picture is that your message must reach the right people at the right time, which you will make sure to accomplish. What follows that is being able to engage other people. After all, your ultimate goal is to convert them to loyal customers and you won’t be able to do that if you don’t engage them.

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