Six tips for developing a content marketing strategy

Content marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their target audience and build brand awareness. But having a content calendar full of great ideas is not enough to see you make returns on the great content you’re publishing. 

Your content strategy needs to be tied into your businesses’ overall marketing goals. That means your content isn’t just sitting on your website gathering dust but rather, it’s helping you create a healthy lead generation pipeline which ultimately leads to revenue. 

To achieve this, you need to dedicate time and resources into getting your content strategy just right. We’ve devised six tips to help businesses create a successful content engine – read below.

What is a content strategy?

A content strategy is more than your content calendar. It’s a strategy for using your content to achieve key business goals, such as generating leads, converting prospects, upselling, or retaining business. 

This can be delivered through a variety of content mediums, whether it’s a blog, video, infographic, newsletter, or more. A good content strategy is the foundation of your inbound marketing framework. Along with attracting leads to your website, you can leverage it for sales enablement and customer satisfaction.  

Your strategy should take into account the biggest pain points of your target audience and it should be frequently updated to match their changing frustrations and needs. Which is why our first tip is to know your audience.

Tip one: understand your personas

You have no doubt heard this before but it bears repeating. Because without a clear understanding of who it is that needs your services or products, you won’t be able to create a content strategy that accurately reflects your business goals. 

Understanding your target audience is crucial in creating content that resonates with them. Collect the wider team and spend some time creating your ideal customer profile (ICP) before you work on your content strategy. 

Tip two: define your goals and keep focused

Setting goals is key to a successful content marketing strategy. Make your goals achievable and scalable with the resources you have. 

Your goals should align with your overall business objectives, such as increasing website traffic or generating leads. Remember, you can’t achieve every goal in one article, so choose carefully. If your focus is on building brand awareness, perhaps your Q1 content goals are to pick 2 to 3 high-intent keywords to target. 

For lead generation, you might focus your next quarter on creating a high-value eBook or whitepaper that you believe will draw in the most leads. You can then use this longer-length content to break it up into smaller content pieces, such as blogs for your website, to ensure you still have a healthy publishing schedule. 

If your goals are conversion, then you could create a targeted landing page and direct leads here, with a simple form for them to book a meeting or demo. You could promote this page on Google Search. Remember to continually test and iterate for improvements.

Tip three: create a content calendar

Planning your content in advance will help you ensure that you are consistently creating and publishing content that aligns with your goals. A regular publishing schedule gives your site better chances of being seen by Google. 

A calendar will keep your strategy on track. Of course, deadlines will change or new opportunities for content will arise so your calendar should have some wiggle room and shouldn’t be set in stone. 

Tip four: rank on Google

One of the main goals of a content strategy is to rank on Google – after all, that’s why we’re publishing regularly, using keywords, and looking at what our audience is searching for. 

Make sure your content is optimized for search engines by using keywords, meta descriptions, and header tags. 

To please Google's algorithm, you need to take into account on-page and off-page SEO. 

On-page SEO is simpler and you can rank just by doing the basics: including low-difficulty target keywords in your content. 

Make your content readable, and include clear and concise headings that follow the hierarchy (H1, H2, H3 etc…) to help Google index your content. Make sure you have a meta description and an alt description for any images or videos in your blog. 

Off-page SEO is a bit trickier: you’ll need backlinks to your content from high-authority domains if you want to rank on the first page. To do this, you will need to see what the top-ranking pieces are for your chosen keyword and reach out to the authors to ask for a backlink. This is a more time-consuming option and only really works if you know the author well. 

Another option is to offer guest posts to businesses with high-domain authority. Partner case studies can also help you achieve this. For example, you can write a case study for a partner or a product you use in exchange to be mentioned on their website. 

For more detailed help with your SEO strategy, read our SEO top tips here.

Tip five: promote your content

It’s no use spending time and resources writing content that no-one sees. 

Sharing your content on social media, through email marketing, and through other channels will help increase its reach and drive traffic to your website.

There are a few ways you can ensure your target audience is seeing your content. LinkedIn is the best tool for B2B so make sure you’re utilising this channel – you can also pay to promote your content on here and pick your ICP for who to target that content to. 

Having a CRM to help with your email nurturing and marketing automation will help save you time. Our tool of choice is HubSpot due to its incredible sales and marketing capabilities, such as lead scoring, email workflows, and performance metrics among others. 

Tip six: refresh your best content

You shouldn’t just set a content marketing strategy once and leave it. Regularly measure and analyse the performance of your content marketing efforts to see what's working and what's not – this is where performance metrics from HubSpot will come in handy. Use this information to adjust your strategy and improve your results over time. 

SEO prioritises fresh content so if you have a post that’s performing well, you should improve it and refresh it to keep it ranking high. 

At Resonance, we regularly look at and analyse our data to see what content is resonating, what channels are working, and what frequency of posting is best. 

We’ve worked with plenty of B2B businesses to optimise their content and inbound marketing strategies to ensure they’re generating leads and seeing return on their efforts. Why not book a 30-min call with our team for personalised support for your business?