Content Marketing Strategy
Ensure the content of your messages is relevant to engage customers
What is Content Marketing?
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately to drive profitable customer action.
Franchise Development Content Strategy
As a franchisor/franchisee you will need to develop a content marketing strategy.
A content marketing strategy will help you define your key messages, develop a content marketing plan to maximise impact and encourage customer engagement and drive customer action.
The key elements of a content marketing strategy offered to our clients are set out below.
The aim of a content marketing strategy is to build an audience and achieve one or all of the following objectives: increase revenue, lower costs or obtain better customers.
Content marketing allows you to create and publish relevant and valuable content to your potential audience. It allows you to improve your reputation and grow advocates for your brand.
A content plan sets out how your business will execute your content marketing strategy. A documentation of a content marketing strategy for your business will provide a more effective use of all content marketing tactics and social media channels. It also provides a justification for spend on content marketing.
Situational Analysis
For the simple reason that a content marketing strategy is linked with marketing strategy. A complete understanding of your business and its objectives needs to be developed.
Accordingly, the strategic direction for any content marketing must be underpinned by a comprehensive analysis of your business, the market, competition, your brand positioning and the environment in which you operate.
This analysis will provide you with your “why”. Why are you creating the content, who are you targeting and how can you help them.
Content Marketing Plan
The development of a long-term plan for your content will allow your business to focus on your goals, anticipate challenges and allocate resources accordingly.
Content Audit
An audit of your current content will help you understand the type of content that attracts your audience and what improvements need to be made.
Goal Setting
Your content marketing goals should contribute to your business goals and be linked to the marketing strategy of your business. Content marketing goals may encompass brand awareness, brand loyalty, customer education, customer engagement, talent recruitment.
Determining your Audience
Finding the audience that is right for your business is key to success in content marketing. This will require the development of a buyer persona which encompasses their lifestyle, problems and needs. Although a buyer persona may be useful in this context, it’s important to remember that audiences may begin to interact with your brand long before they decide to purchase your product or service. Therefore, your business will need to deliver content that will attract potential customers into your customer journey.
Developing an Editorial Plan
Planning your content will allow you to allocate resources appropriately. This starts with identifying relevant topics that will attract your audiences attention as they progress along the customer journey. Once identified these can be included in a content calendar.
Your content will need to cover each part of the buyer journey to help develop a long-term relationship. This will also require a diverse mix of content types, for example, podcast, infographic, slide presentation, quiz, ebook, white paper, manual, educational article, research.
It’s also important to think about organic search and ensuring your content is search engine optimised
Content Distribution
One of the main elements of content marketing is owned media development which you will have complete control over. This includes properties like your website, blogs, newsletters, social media channels etc.
Earned media and paid media also represent elements of a content distribution strategy. Earned media is gained through promotional efforts such as mentions, shares, reviews. Paid media involves any marketing channel you pay for, examples include, advertisements, commercials and PPC (pay per click).
Your business will need to focus its resources on the channels that your audience uses and where they spend most of their time.
This may require research into demographic and social media analytics to determine which channels your business should use to engage with your target market and audience.
Management and Control
Analysis of your content performance will enable you to understand whether your audience is connecting with your content.
Management and control may be based on user behaviour, engagement, seo results or company revenue.
Other Marketing Strategy Services Offered Include:
Any of the above strategies can be used in franchise development.
Everything we do is backed by research
The Content Marketing Institute B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends 2020 Report can be found here.
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