Best Content Marketing Strategies 2017
Be it you already have a content marketing strategy in place or want to create a new strategy. You would need to revamp the existing strategy to accomplish the current goal of your business for the year 2017.
The reason behind this is that there is a huge competition to content marketing strategy compared to the last year. In fact, a survey has found that many B2B marketers have developed more content this year over the preceding year.
To give a tough competition to your rivals, you need to have a powerful content marketing plan. This helps you gain traffic and sales for your business. Many businesses that are in the nascent stage could not come up unique with ideas to plan a perfect content marketing plan. However, if you need any blooming ideas, then keep reading this article.
You can get a marketing plan for the year, in a matter of few minutes using the free generator.
In this post, you would learn the importance of content marketing plan for the business. Also the steps you need to follow to create the best marketing strategy that fits in your business goals.
Role of Content Marketing for Businesses
Content marketing will motivate the users to know about a business products and its services and compel them to take a desired actions. In addition, the website with fresh and informative content will let you gain a sea of traffic and conversions for your business. Imagine of developing a blog post by incorporating a link to free e-book or to download the tool developed by your company will generate huge traffic and sales for your business over time.
The quality traffic and conversions generated after reading your content will give you the confidence to explore other marketing strategies to generate huge revenue including advertising on social media, sponsored content and distributed content. The best thing is that, the informative content created will educate the new customers about your products and services and let them evoke you, when in need of your products/services down the line beside helping you gain leads.
Now, it is time for you to get acquainted with the steps involved in creating a solid content marketing plan.
Here are the seven steps that you need to embrace to create a perfect content marketing strategy that meets your business goals.
Have a Goal in Place
You should have a clear cut idea of why you are developing a content marketing plan and the purpose of developing content. Unarguably, having a goal in place will let you make most of the content marketing plan that you have created in this year.
Do thorough Research on the buyer’s personal
When you are developing a content marketing plan, you should know whom you are targeting. This helps you create a successful plan that strikes the right chord and let you achieve your sales target. It is critical to know the buyer’s persona without which your plan would go futile. More importantly, knowing the target audience is important when you creating a marketing plan newly. By knowing the audience, you would create the content that they are looking for and love to read.
Know Your Audience & Add Best Value in Your Contents
Give Value for your Listeners and Viewers. If you can add good value in your contents, you will become an authorized person for your audience.
Be it you are a new or expert marketer, your perspective would differ. No matter whether you want to target the current set of audience to improve your customer base or want to target on a new set of audience, it totally depends on your business goals. However, you would need to know the interests of your target audience every year by doing a thorough marketing research to improve the base.
Do Content Audit
Many companies have their own blogs and keep posting about the latest news about their business, product launches and other information about the products in it. But, if you want to try promoting your business creating other piece of contents, then you need to figure out the right one. For instance, if you are continuously posting blog articles on your blog, then you can create an eBook adding all the articles that you created in the year and give it as a guide to the target audience. There are different types of contents you can create to create awareness about your brand.
If you already have a content marketing plan in place, then it is time for you to track its performance and check whether or not your efforts have turned fruitful. After analyzing your performance, you need to set a new goal for the following years to accomplish them.
Pick the best Content Management System
You need to have a perfect CMS where you can manage the content. Few of the integral tasks of content management include creating content, publish and tracking its analytics.
If you are an existing hubspot customer or a new customer who is looking for the best CMS for the organization where you can plan, create, publish and guage the results, then without a second though, you need to buy Hubspot software. There are other CMS available in the market. Few of the popular ones include WordPress and CoSchedule.
Come up with new and unique content ideas
You need to come up with the new content ideas to tell about your products to the customers. Few of the tools that lend hands to get new ideas include
HubSpot’s Website Grader: This is the best tool that let you know the place where you are standing in marketing. From blogging to promoting on social media, this tool thoroughly analyze all your marketing efforts and prepare a detailed report that helps you to find out the weak areas in your marketing plan and focus on those areas to improvise the plan. This tool gives you powerful content ideas which makes your website more SEO friendly.
What To Write: This tool will give fresh content ideas which you can use to create a blog post that is informative and can pull the audience to your site. There are a few questions that are probed by this tool which let you to brainstorm and come up with new ideas. More importantly, after answering the queries, it gives you a series of blog post ideas which you can use to create a solid content marketing plan.
HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator: You can get the blog post ideas for the whole year using this tool. In this tool, you need to enter the topics or keywords about the topic that you would like to project. Then this tool does the needy for you.
Feedly: This RSS feed helps you to stay on par with the digital marketing trends and come up with new content ideas which you can use to create blog posts.
Buzzsumo: You can get the solid content ideas using this tool. The best part of this tool is that, it gives ideas about whether the content you would like to prepare has good scope and is popular on social media or not. This informative will let you decide on what type of content you need to write to attract the audience.
Content Forest: This has two tools including KeywordKiwi and ContentIdeator. These tools help you to find out the blog posts of your competitors that have gained a huge traffic and keywords to be used in the content and get content ideas under one umbrella.
Blog Post Headline Analyzer: This headline analyzer help you to create catchy headlines. When you put the headline created by you in this tool, it find give valuable feedback on the headline length, words you choose, grammer and the search volume of the keyword embedded in the title. You can put your headlines in this analyzer to check how strong the headline is. Also, you can make changes to the headlines to make it powerful.
Content Marketing Tips
Find the contents you need to create and publish: There are umpteen options that are available for you to create different types of contents. Few of the piece of contents that are created by many marketers to boost brand reputation, improve traffic and sales. These contents are published by considering the content marketing tips.
Blog posts
If creating blog post is a part of your marketing strategy, then keep posting fresh content that attracts new customers to your business. Undeniably, blogs are the best way to get new leads. The posts that you create should be worth reading and sharing on social media. It is highly recommended to create the blog posts of around 1000 to 2000 words, but you need to experiment posting short and lengthy articles time to time and check the responses.There are many templates avilabale in online to write curation, listicles and newsjacking posts.
Ebooks 
When the customer land on your site and go through the content would get motivated to download the ebook where they can read and know more about your products. E-books are the best way to get potential customers. Ideally, these ebooks are a small version of books that are rarely published over ebooks. But will grab the attention of many visitors to your website. Ebooks are the integral part of inbound marketing process. Once they read the blog post, to know more information about your business, they would provide the contact details to download the ebook. More importantly, the sales team will have the contact details to get in touch with the prospective customers. There are many templates available in online to start writing ebooks.
Templates
While writing a piece of content whether it is a blog post or an ebook, you need to have a template in place which lets you to present the content in a structured way. This engage the customers until the last point in the ebook or blog post. The beautifully projected content will enlighten the customer and generate leads for your business. The content that is posted by you would be regularly read by the customers.
Infographics
Undeniably, a picture speaks louder than words. Infographics are the best way to portray content in a graphical format. This is perfect piece of content, if you would like to share ample content with the audience. This clearly portrays what you want to convey and make the audience understand it with ease.
There are many infogrpahics templates which can use to create an infographics with the available data in a few hours.
Videos
Videos are the powerful way to promote your products and services. Today, in the busy life, peoples prefer to watch videos instead of reading contents. These can be shared on social media platforms to read wider audience. To create a quality and enriching video, you need more resources and time. With the increase in demand for visual marketing, it is crucial to create videos that tells about your brand story.
Podcasts
Podcast is one of the best ways to reach the audience in every nook and cranny of the world. If the audience do not have enough time to read content, they can download the podcast and listen. The people who are listening to podcast are increasing at a rapid pace. In the year 2016, it was found that over 57 million people have listened to podcasts every month. If you have the conversation of thought leaders or industry experts, then posting those interviews will motivate the customers. They can download those posts and listen to them whenever they find time. This is another content format that is worth experimenting.
After creating the content, it is time for you to publish them on blogs, social media, and other platforms. Also, you can post the content on various niche sites. You can also re-purpose the content or create a fresh article and post them on your social media pages.
Post and manage various content formats
The content marketing plan should not just be about creating content, but should be about how you are promoting. There are a few people who post less and promote more. This is the mantra followed by expert marketers. To post the content regularly, you first need to create an editorial calendar. Based on this calendar, you need to create different contents and post them on websites or other platforms. In addition, you also need to create social media calendar to promote and manage content. You need to keep posting the fresh content that is according to the trend rather than posting other topics. Your editorial calendar will help you create contents regularly and generate a huge traffic.
Many people start to post marketing content on important occasions to drive quality traffic to the website. But instead of focusing on special days, you need to focus on every week to post unique content. If you believe that the content published about a particular niche during niche holidays. Then you need to post content related to it and share on social media. You need to consider the holidays while creating an editorial calendar.
Following these steps help you create a perfect marketing plan. But you need to use your creativity and spend time to make your strategy a big success. From creating a solid content marketing plan to finding the best CMS tools, it would be a piece of cake for you.
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