7 Steps for Optimizing Your Content Marketing Strategy in 2021

Developing an efficient content marketing strategy is crucial if you want to attract high-quality leads to your business. Depending on your business goals, a well-thought content strategy can help you enhance your SEO, build an online presence, present your brand as an expert in the industry – just to name a few of the main benefits it can bring to you.

And, just as no industry stands still but keeps changing, your content strategy should evolve and adjust to your target audience’s current needs – this is the secret to any successful content marketing strategy.

In this article, we’ll go over several steps you can take right now to optimize your content marketing strategy. Apart from defying your target personas and identifying your content objectives, they include analyzing conversation topics and search trends, choosing the proper channels to promote your content, as well as tracking and measuring your content marketing. Read on and ensure that you utilize your content marketing strategy to its fullest potential.

Define Your Target Personas

The first step to developing a successful content marketing strategy is building your target personas. This is a process of defining a set of characters that represent your ideal audience.

To be able to address your target audiences in the most effective way possible, you must first understand who they are. Defining personas is crucial when it comes to content marketing because it allows you to portray your target audience’s needs and interests in the content you develop. At the same time, it’s crucial to build personas for your competitors’ audiences, so you can target the same people who are interested in what they offer.

For example, if you want to sell a fitness tracker, you’ll be targeting people who are interested in exercising and staying fit. If your competitor sells yoga pants, you’re also targeting people who like to exercise and keep fit. According to digital marketers at Roger West Creative & Code, this way, you’re adding value to their lives by offering something they’re interested in and that they need.

Let’s say you’re a marketing manager, and one of your goals is to attract more users to the company blog. Then, when you create personas, you’ll identify their interests, fears, problems, hobbies, and pain points – all these things will help you create valuable content.

Define Your Content Objectives

Creating personas is one thing – defining content objectives is another. You can’t create great content if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve with it. For example, you can write a blog post with the following objective: “To introduce our company and its main characteristics.” As a result, your post may lack coherent structure and be filled with random information.

If you want to attract leads to your website, then one of your content objectives could be: “To attract leads who are interested in investing in private companies.” Another important objective could be: “To get leads who are interested in learning about the benefits of investing in private companies.” The latter objective will help you create more targeted content.

Discover Your Content Topic / Theme

Once you’ve figured out your objectives, it’s time to find content topics or themes that match them. You could do this by re-reading the objective statement and trying to think of different topics or themes that match it. For example, if your objective statement is “To attract leads who are interested in investing in private companies,” then one way of coming up with topics or themes might be by thinking about the following questions:

What are the benefits of investing in private companies? What are the things to focus on while investing in private companies?

You could then answer these questions in different blog posts or videos.

Monitor Conversation Topics & Search Trends

To figure out what types of content people are interested in today, check out what people are talking about on social media and forums, as well as how they’re searching for certain topics on search engines. For example, if your business sells yoga pants, then you can conduct research to see whether people prefer yoga pants made of cotton or spandex. And if you discover that cotton yoga pants are trending at the moment, then your next step would be to create content that explains what makes cotton yoga pants so popular.

To figure out what people are looking for on search engines, you can use tools like Google Trends or Keyword Planner. If you want to be even more specific, use tools like Google Alerts or Buzzsumo to track what people are posting or sharing online. Then, when you go through all the results, try to identify common patterns – like what words people tend to use together when discussing certain topics.

Identify Relevant Channels

Now that you’ve defined your personas and objectives, identified your content topic/theme, and identified what people are looking for online (in terms of conversation topics and search trends), it’s time to choose the appropriate channels to promote your content. The goal here is to figure out which channels will bring in the most relevant leads to your business. For example, if your business sells fitness gadgets, then promoting your content on Facebook wouldn’t make much sense since most of your leads come from Instagram and YouTube channels.

Create Your Content Strategy Calendar

Creating a calendar will help you stay on track and work efficiently. First, create a list of content ideas. Then, organize them according to the personas you’ve identified. For example, if your business sells clothing, then you can create separate categories for teenagers, women, and men. The next step is to choose the most important topics for each persona. Then, just like with your content marketing plan, use the calendar to organize your tasks and set deadlines for each one of them.

Track & Measure Your Content Marketing

Tracking and measuring your results will help you make changes to your content marketing strategy. Make sure you track the metrics that are important to your business – for example, if your goal is to attract leads to your website, then you could track things like website traffic, number of clicks on your content, number of subscribers to your mailing list, etc.

Another important element to track is your conversion rate. If you’re selling products online, then you should know the conversion rate at the end of every week or month. This will help you adjust your content strategy if necessary.

Conclusion

There you have it – the seven steps you should take to ensure that your content marketing strategy is working as efficiently as possible. Putting together an effective content marketing strategy may not be easy – but it’s definitely worth the effort. Apart from building your brand as an expert in the industry and attracting leads to your business, it can also help you boost SEO and increase website traffic.

The key to success is organizing your content marketing strategy according to the process we’ve outlined above. Start by defining your target personas and objectives, think of topics and themes that match them, and then identify the appropriate channels and track your results. Just remember that you should change and adjust your strategy according to your business objectives and changes in the industry. Good luck!