Content Marketing Strategy – 10 Questions It Should Answer

Defining an effective content marketing strategy involves more than just creating and sharing content. It needs to be integrated into your overall marketing strategy, but with its own separate strategy.

What Your Content Marketing Strategy Should Include

A good content marketing strategy will include ways that content marketing can be used throughout the customer life cycle and experiences. It looks at how content marketing (not content) can be used strategically as an individual strategy, as well as with other marketing, customer and sales strategies.

Some questions that a content marketing strategy should answer are:

1. What are your buyer personas?

The personas for typical or ideal customers must be defined. What type of content are they looking for and for what purpose? What pain points are you trying to solve? How do your customers prefer to communicate? Buyer personas should be part of an overall marketing strategy, then further refined for content marketing.

2. What marketing and organizational goals will be met by an effective content marketing strategy?

Will your content marketing strategy increase traffic to your website? Generate leads? Contribute to other marketing strategies (email, social media, etc.)? How does your content marketing strategy support and strengthen the goals of the organization as an integrated entity of your marketing plan?

3. What metrics will we use to measure the success of your content marketing strategy?

Your high-level marketing plan should have performance indicators to measure its effectiveness, and so should the content marketing portion of it, as well. They should complement, not contradict, each other, with a common language for implementing marketing ROI across all aspects of the marketing strategy.

4. How will you make sure all content marketing processes are organized in relation to other marketing processes?

Content marketing activities do not function in a vacuum. Rather, they should be integrated with other marketing strategies and plans so that the processes and flows are correlated to run smoothly. If there are separate teams responsible for each segment of marketing strategies, they need to work together to ensure that all aspects are working in concert.

5. Can we use content marketing for other marketing goals and business objectives?

The content marketing plan can also support other areas of your business, for example, customer service, sales, website optimization.

6. What do you need to know about the organization in order to succeed?

Details about your company, such as its processes, competition, management practices, customer relationships, overall marketing strategies, etc., must be weighed in order to be effective in content marketing.

7. Is your industry changing or evolving?

Consider the level of change inherent to your business and buyer’s personas. Look at ways your customers are evolving and how you need to account for that in your content marketing strategy.

8. How will you put your content marketing strategy in place?

What steps are needed to activate your content strategy? What’s the best way to implement it in a timely manner?

9. What budget is needed to achieve the content marketing goals?

You may be able to tap into existing budgets allocated to other areas of your business, but you need to weigh the pros and cons of that. Is it more advantageous to concentrate now on content than on website updates? Are you spending too much time on generating traffic and leads, but your conversions are lagging? You’ll need to adjust your budget focus accordingly.

10. How do you get the required budget?

You’ll need to determine how important content marketing is to your organization in order to allocate a sufficient budget for it. If you don’t, you’ll be missing out on opportunities for continued success. Don’t cut it short.

Philadelphia SEO for Growth Can Help!

Philadelphia SEO for Growth helps companies develop content marketing strategies, in addition to a plethora of other services to improve your online presence. Contact us today to learn how we can help you get found and get leads.

If you want to know how your website currently stands, Philadelphia SEO for Growth offers a free audit of your website. We will provide you with a report on how your business stands for local SEO. We can then help you develop a strategy to improve your local SEO to improve your local search rankings.