Content marketing is one of the most practical tools for building a relationship with your customers, driving traffic to your website, and increasing social media engagement. As with all types of marketing, planning and creating the right strategy is the key to success. Here are five things to consider when planning your content marketing strategy.

Objectives

Knowing the aims and objectives of your content marketing is crucial, as it will affect the type of strategy you choose. Each marketing campaign needs a well-defined objective or goal. For example, your objective may be to build a recognizable brand that customers can trust, or you might choose a more concrete goal, such as earning a specific amount of money through product sales. While you probably have multiple objectives for creating content, it’s important to choose just one main goal on which to focus.

Content Type

The type of content you produce will depend on what appeals to your audience. Text, audio, and video are the most popular types of content, but there are also plenty of others, such as infographics, animations, and digital downloads. Experimenting with a range of options will give you the opportunity to observe how your customers respond. Podcasts, webinars, educational courses, and mobile apps can all be highly effective ways to increase engagement with your content.

Platforms

Choosing the right platforms for your content is important, especially if you want to reach a wider audience. Your website, blog and subscriber newsletter may be able to reach existing customers and some search traffic, but you will need to use a range platforms to reach new people. Social media and video-sharing networks are popular platforms, most already saturated with marketing messages that users have learned to ignore, so you will need to tailor your content to ensure it will be useful to your target audience. Building long-term relationships with other users is the key to success when marketing on social media.

Frequency

The frequency of your content is also important, as you want to provide a steady stream of posts to keep your business in the minds of your target audience. However, posting too many updates can overwhelm your customers, and they may stop reading your messages altogether. The ideal frequency of your content will depend on your audience, so you may need to experiment. If you run an online magazine that provides up-to-the-minute news stories, customers will expect to see new content several times a day. However, if you are selling products through your online store, customers may be irritated by daily updates and prefer to read a simple weekly post on your blog.

Content Sources

Creating a steady stream of content can be extremely difficult, especially if your customers expect several posts a day. Finding or commissioning content from external sources, such as freelancers, content providers, content curation, guest posts, and public domain sources, is an easy way to increase your output. Consider how and where you are going to source your content, as well as the potential costs involved.

Content marketing is an effective strategy for bringing in new customers and building relationships with existing customers, but it’s important to have a clear plan for your marketing. When planning your strategy, you need to consider your objectives, the type of content your audience will respond to, the best platforms to use, the frequency of your posts, and using external content sources to help increase your output.