Is content marketing not working out for you? Are you not getting the traffic you expected on your website? Well, chances are you don’t have a proper content marketing strategy in place. According to one research, 66 percent of companies that were successful with content marketing also reported having a content marketing strategy in place.

Now, what is content without a proper strategy (Hint: it’s loud)? Yes, you guessed it right; it is noise. There is so much content on the internet today that if you don’t have a strategy that drives your content, there’s a high chance that content is only adding to the noise – rendering it irrelevant.

Companies lose out on a lot of potential business without a good strategy in place for their content marketing. Don’t be such a company. Let’s go over what a strategy is and see how you can come up with a good plan for your content. Later we will talk about press releases as an example of noisy content.

What Is Strategy?

A strategy is a plan to reach your goals and objectives. This involves plotting out how the operations will happen and who will be responsible for what. Multiple tactics are involved in this process to achieve targets smartly.

In any strategy, it is important first to figure out who you are targeting. Hence, it is important to decide on the niche you will be focusing on as part of your business. You cannot cater to the whole market at once, so your niche is going to be the market that you target initially. These will be the people who will form your ideal customer base.

The next thing you need to focus on is how to provide value to your customers. You need to be different; otherwise, people might not be interested in it. From a business point-of-view, this entails coming with a product or service that is unique from the rest of the similar businesses.

From a content point of view, this means coming up with original content. Now, original content is difficult to come up with as the online content game is already so saturated. So, rather than being completely original, you need to have a fresh tone, at least. Offer people exciting and readable content that they cannot turn away from. This will not only help you gain readers, but also potential leads that you can convert to customers.

Finally, once you have decided on your initial audience and the type of content you will be putting out, it is time to bring everything together and initiate the strategy.

What this means is that now it is time to use start creating content and putting it out. Promote it on the relevant platforms and track its performance. See how audiences are responding and are the content achieving the targets you set. If the strategy is not working, adjust it, or even change it entirely if need be.

The main purpose of this exercise is to see whether the initial two decisions you made were correct or not. If not, then you will have to change them for your strategy to work.

Let’s now dive deep and look at what a good content marketing strategy looks like.

How to come up with a proper content marketing strategy?

A good content marketing strategy should explain how you are going to achieve your set targets. This entails: deciding on the niche market that you will target, setting out a path for how much content to put out according to a timeline, which keywords to target, and so on.

An important thing to note here is that a lot of your content marketing strategy will also depend on the team you have hired. Ultimately, they are the ones who will be responsible for carrying out various tasks. So, you may find that a strategy involves starting with the hiring process.

Another aspect of strategy involves competitor analysis. You will have to learn from the most prominent players in the market to know what content is accessible and what keywords are high-rated.

Furthermore, you will need to identify your KPIs (key performance indicators). These can be your number of views, conversions, traction, etc. These will indicate how good your content is doing in generating business for you, and so you will have to track them and make changes accordingly.

Finally, always remember that strategy is more than just creating a blog and writing articles. It takes into account your customer base, traffic, and the business it generates, among other things. Make sure to take all the other factors into account as part of your strategy, as that will help you focus your efforts to achieve your targets.

Press Releases – An Example

There are multiple types of content that you use to sell your business online. One of these is press releases. They are an old requirement of public relations, but an important one. If used effectively, they can help you gain the attention of influential publications and their writers. These publications can then write for you and help you get solid traffic on your website.

However, if used without the right strategy, it does not help anyone. It only adds to the clutter on the internet. Press releases need to stand out to make an impact, mainly because they are a traditional way of getting the word out.

A better way of going about this is to thoroughly think about which market to target, and then shortlist those publications or writers that address that market. This way, you can focus your press releases towards relevant people rather than aimlessly targeting everyone.

Your next step should be to try and make good relations with your shortlisted publications and writers. Once that’s done, you need to then focus on the content of your press release. Make sure always to include something “newsworthy.” Research about what interests the writers and use that to catch their attention.

Apart from these necessary steps, remember to include your press releases in your overall marketing campaign. This means putting your PRs out on social media, email, and other outlets that you use for marketing. This will help you reach maximum relevant eyes as all of these people you’ll reach out to will be already geared towards your business. In this article, we discussed how content is noise if not executed with a solid strategy. We also saw how you could create a proper strategy and used press releases as an example. The major takeaway from this discussion should be that no matter how fancy your content is, it only contributes to online noise and does nothing for your business if not executed with a well-thought-out strategy.