10 Essential Elements of a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that is used to attract, engage, and retain customers with a product or a service by using articles, videos, podcasts, and other informative media about the product or service.

Content is considered as the main component of the success of marketing and it should be used correctly in order to receive maximum attention from the target market.

There are 10 main components that have been identified to implement a successful content marketing strategy in a business.

01. Brand Guidelines

If multiple people or teams are engaged in speaking on behalf of a particular brand, all the parties should have a clear direction on the brand’s personality, tone, voice, and language. Most of the businesses are using a brand book or formal guidelines for this. Apart from that, training and research facilities are helpful in implementing brand guidelines in a business regardless of the business type.

02. Marketing Objectives

Based on the business needs, the business has to set up different key performance indicators (KPIs)and set up goals for the content marketing proposals. The business should implement and define the relevant metrics for each type of content. These contents can be categorized as below.

– Performance marketing content

Demand generation, direct response advertisements, and other promotional content that has a relationship with sales

– Local market communication and support content such as asset sharing with the distributors

– Brand awareness, consideration, and perception content

03. Market research and data collection

Conducting researches and collecting data are key methods to understand customer behavior and expectations. The collected data can be historical data such as the data from past surveys, sales reports, feedback received from customers, or other recorded brand interactions. Apart from that, the data can be collected as primary research data or third-party data. The business can select one or more of these data collection methods. However, most business organizations use all three methods in collecting necessary data.

The collected data should be analyzed and converted to information in order to use for the decision-making process.

04. Customer Persona

The purpose of marketing is to use the most effective methods to reach the target customer audience. The target audience can be a broad range of customers or a selected niche of customers. The marketing method is selected based on the type of target market. When identifying the target market, people’s personality profiles, social and cultural behavior traits are highly important.

The marketing tea should have a thorough understanding of the potential customer demographics such as age, gender, income method, geographical location, education, family status, and the nature of employment. Apart from that, social and cultural behavior such as personal goals and values, preferences, social and cultural influences, fears, and unmet needs in the current market should be identified.

Identification of these factors will help the business to uncover unique insight about the target market and focus on that unique insight to create a maximum impact on the target market segment.

06. Content-market fit

Understanding the current state of the content in the particular business industry of the product or service is equally important as understanding the customers. It helps the business to look for new openings and opportunities in the market.

To identify the most effective content direction, the business can identify the content marketing methods by finding answers to the below.

– What is the impact created in the conversation by the organization’s content?

– How would the content creation and impact the product, brand, and value proposition of the customers?

– What content will have the most ability to obtain the highest customer attention?

07. Assessment of available resources and capabilities

Once the business identified the type of content that is most effective to use as a marketing strategy, it has to conduct an assessment to compare the required resources with the available resources to conduct the marketing campaign.

Factors such as budget, the method of content creation (by the employees or by outsourcing to a third party), the required talent of the creative team and the ways of obtaining the talents, technology requirements, etc. are the most important factors to assess before conducting a content marketing campaign.

08. Process of the marketing campaign

Every successful content marketing campaign requires a pre-defined process and a workflow of how the campaign will be conducted. Based on the importance and the necessity, each target should be achieved in the process.

The business can use grouping, best practices, stakeholder meetings, process flow charts, and creating process habits to create a smooth process flow in the campaign.

09. Internal communication

When implementing a content marketing strategy in a business, it is important to maintain proper communication between all the related parties in the strategy implementation. It helps the business to make sure that everyone is informed about the past, current as well as future process changes. The communication methods can be horizontal or vertical. Based on the organizational nature and structure, the best and most effective internal communication method should be selected.

10. Continuous repetition and control

Just like any other business process or strategy implementation, the steps of the content marketing strategy also should be monitored, feedback should be obtained and the necessary actions should be taken to ensure continuous improvement.