Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Content is king’? Well, it’s absolutely true. When it comes to your online presence, content is the heart and soul of your business.

Creating high quality, unique content is key to increasing your brand awareness, reaching a wider audience and ultimately increasing conversions. An effective content marketing strategy is directly focused on your target audience. Everything you publish, whether it be a blog, social media post, podcast or video should be done with your prospective customers in mind.

Below we have shared seven of the most important factors when it comes to creating a content marketing strategy that converts. We use these seven tips on a daily basis when creating content for our clients. No matter what your product or service, or which industry your business is in, follow these seven steps for successful content marketing!

1) Know your Target Market

Knowing your ideal target audience is a vital step to creating an effective content marketing strategy. According to a recent report, 56% of customers believed that businesses need to have a deeper understanding of their needs. To boast an effective marketing strategy, businesses must know as much about their potential customers as possible. Knowing your target audience allows you to market your product or service to the right people, focusing on their needs and how you can solve their problems. It’s also important to note that running paid ads to the wrong target audience can become very costly and usually achieve a much lower engagement score.

2) Use Content Planning Tools

Planning your social media, blog and email posts sets you up for an effective content marketing strategy. Whether your main goal is growing your email list, driving more website traffic or getting more sales, you need to create consistent content that resonates with your audience and reflects your brand. With the use of these helpful apps, you are able to find popular keywords in your niche which can help you write an SEO optimised blog, increasing the likelihood of your website ranking organically. Buzzsumo also helps generate content ideas within your industry and tracks your business insights – meaning you can easily analyse your content performance and tweak things where necessary.

3) Benchmark against your Competitors

Simply put, benchmarking means you are comparing your performance against another. In this case, comparing your content to that of your competitors. You can enhance your content marketing strategy by looking into what is working for your competitors and replicating this under your brand. You can set realistic goals and targets by tracking specific metrics and KPIs, helping you rank amongst your competition.

Some of the things that you may consider looking into include:

• Keywords that your competitors rank for
• Keywords that you and your competitors share
• The type of content that gets good traffic for your competitors
• The type of content that gets the most social media engagement for your competitors

4) Remember your Goal

Every business should have a marketing goal that is the central focus of their work. This should be displayed as a short call to action (CTA) at the bottom of each piece of content and tells readers what you’d like them to do next. Otherwise, most people will just exit your website and move on, acting as a lost opportunity.

A call-to-action can be something as simple as asking your followers to comment on your post, or more complex like asking them to join your mailing list.

It’s also important that you post pieces of content that add value to the reader and answer their questions, this way you increase the likelihood of people sharing your content online. In turn, this increases your content reach and opens up more opportunities for you to sell.

5) How to Deliver Content

Your content distribution channel can be even more important than the content itself. Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, it becomes easier to decide which platform is best for you to deliver content on. There are many ways that you can deliver content whether it be through your own website, social media or the traditional PR route.

Posting on your own website may seem very obvious, but there are still many businesses who bury their content on their site that it becomes impossible for visitors to find it.

As a small business, it’s important to find the best mediums for your target audience. If you have followed our content marketing strategy checklist, you should have a good idea of your target audience. Where do they like to spend most of their time? What social media is best suited to their interests?

6) Promote Your Content

What is the point in having the best blog ever, if no one ever sees it?

That’s why promoting your content is a key part of your content marketing strategy.

It’s true that organic traffic is possible, and some companies can post up a blog and see traffic from search engines like Google straight away – but this takes a long time and requires a very comprehensive SEO strategy.

The best way to increase your reach is to actively promote your content online through social media channels and other forms of advertising.

Social media still proves extremely beneficial for small businesses looking to get their content in front of potential customers. If you know that your target audience is using social media, then it’s definitely worth posting on. To ensure more people stop scrolling and look at your content, it’s a good idea to have an eye-catching graphics created to compliment your blog – this will help you get more engagement and click throughs.

You also want to tell the reader why they should read your blog; how will it benefit them and what will they gain from it. A good tip is to include a shocking statistic that builds curiosity amongst your followers, meaning they have the urge to click through to your website to find out more.

Sharing content to relevant groups on Facebook also proved valuable for small businesses, as it allows businesses to target people with very similar interests and those in the same niche. With over 620 million Facebook groups, we guarantee there will be one related to your industry!

7) Hire help!

When it comes to your business content marketing strategy, one of the best investments you can make is hiring a team of experienced and expert content marketers who know how to get your content in front of as many possible people.

Hiring a team of experts ensures that your business is producing consistent, high quality content that is favoured by search engines such as Google.

In addition, the team at Social Chameleon are also experienced content creators. Hiring a team of experts ensures that your business is producing consistent, high quality content that is favoured by search engines such as Google.

We will also help to spruce up your marketing channels, widening your network and allowing you to grow your social presence. We understand the algorithms and science behind different content marketing channel and know how to optimise each of them accordingly.

Want to take your content marketing to the next level? Get in touch with our London-based Digital Marketing & SEO agency today. We have 7 years of experience managing Marketing & SEO for UK businesses across a number of industries. Email us on contact@socialchameleon.com or visit our Contact us page to fill out an enquiry form.