Content Marketing Strategies (Step by Step Process, Checklist, and More)

Are you tired of investing your time and resources into content that does not attract the right audience or generate leads? Implementing poor content marketing strategies can feel like tossing spaghetti at the wall and expecting it to stick.

How many blogs have you written that barely got a view? What about your social media posts that had fewer or no engagement? All these put together can be overwhelming and frustrating. Even worse, they’ll cost you opportunities to connect with your target audience and potential customers, and drive business growth.

In this case, what do you need? It’s simple—a killer content marketing strategy. It can transform your mundane content into something that drives positive results. And guess what? That’s precisely what you’ll learn in this guide.

In this ultimate guide, we’ll hold you by the hand and walk you through the process of creating winning content marketing techniques along with the checklist and other tips.

Key Learnings

• Understanding who you’re speaking (target audience) to along with their needs is the first step to creating successful content marketing strategies. This way, you can create relatable content that drives business growth.
• If you’re serious about content marketing, documenting your content marketing strategy is non-negotiable. It makes progress tracking, consistency, and onboarding new team members easy.
• It doesn’t end with publishing your content. After that, what’s next? Continuous promotion and analysis are essential to ensure excellent performance.
• A strategic and comprehensive content checklist like ours keeps you organized and ensures you make the most out of each content you put out. So, don’t skip any step!

What Are The Content Marketing Challenges That Brands Face?

Content marketing is crucial for any brand with an online presence. And the key to flourish? Effective content marketing strategies that generate leads. However, creating these strategies is challenging, that’s why many businesses struggle to grow and gain visibility.

Luckily, there are many workarounds to improve your content strategy. But you must first understand the challenge you’re facing to help you understand how to tackle it. For this purpose, we’ll be sharing the challenges that brands face with content marketing.

Not Understanding The Needs of Your Audience

The amount of time an average person spends reading a blog is just 37 seconds! This clearly shows that attention span is reducing drastically with more internet users needing valuable information quickly (without any fluff). At the same time, it means you should focus more on the most important things while producing your content because producing fluff equals zero attention from your audience. Unfortunately, not all businesses consider this when creating content. Hence they end up producing lackluster content filled with fluff and filler.

They Lack The Skills And Resources To Apply a Good Content Strategy

Creating content might sound easy but it’s beyond just churning out content for your audience. It takes great skills and resources to create good content that generates results for your business. However, some brands are unwilling to invest in the skills and resources to make their content marketing efforts work. Such brands (especially small businesses) settle for mediocre tools, which affects their marketing goals.

Their Target Audience Does Not See The Content

90.63% of content is not visible on search engines like Google. Therefore, their target audience does not even see them. This is typically a result of businesses being unable to understand their audience’s needs and optimize their content for search engines.

Their Business Does Not Use KPIs

Another major reason your content strategy isn’t yielding any results is that you do not include KPIs. You see, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used to track your content engagement. These tools help you to:

• Understand if your content marketing strategies are effective in meeting your brand objectives.
• Know the content types that perform better for your business.
• Understand where you need to make adjustments based on performance.
• Know the content platform that works best and delivers more positive results for your business.

Creating Content Marketing Strategies That Works: 7 Steps to Crush Your Marketing Goals

Having the right content marketing strategy can be the magic your business needs to appear in the face of your ideal audience and drive revenue. We’ve curated the step-by-step procedures to help level up your content strategy.

1. Know Who You’re Speaking To

Understanding your target audience is the foundation for creating any content. Therefore, if you miss out on defining your buyer persona or ideal customer, everything will go wrong with your entire content marketing efforts. But how do you determine your target audience? It’s simple—perform your market research.

This market research will help you know:

• Who you’re speaking to.
• Their purchasing behavior.
• Their goals and challenges.
• The content types/formats they prefer.
• Their demographics and professional information.

Having all these in place will help you streamline your content to the right audience at the right time. Meanwhile, consider creating different buyer personas for different buyer’s journeys.

2. Define Clear Content Publishing Goals

What are you looking to achieve with your content and what channels would you use to distribute or publish them? These are common questions you should ask yourself when developing the best content marketing strategies for your brand.

Having a defined set of publishing goals will aid your strategy design process. This stage is more about knowing the “what,” which also helps you tailor your goals using the SMART methodology. SMART represents Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Here are examples of what SMART goals should look like:

• Gain 200 new email subscribers within 60 days.
• Acquire 300K new organic social media followers in 30 days.
• Increase qualified leads by 50% within 60 days.

Additionally, understanding the medium through which you connect with your audience can boost the visibility of your content on search engines, increase organic traffic, and generate leads. Website articles, blog posts, email newsletters, online ads, and social media are some channels for publishing content.

3. Build Your Brand’s Voice

Your brand’s voice and tone refer to how you communicate with your audience. Therefore, you’ll need to maintain consistency in your brand elements for effective messaging. Regardless of your content types—social media posts, webinars, videos, newsletters, or blog posts, your brand’s voice and tone guidelines will help you maintain consistent messaging.

For instance, when planning your content strategy, you’ll want to use consistent colors, fonts, logos, and graphics across your content. Consistency in visual elements builds a clear brand identity that commands the attention of your audience/customers.

4. Start Your Content Plan

The steps above have given you a foundation to begin planning your content. Now, determine the topics you’d like to work on alongside the most suitable channels to publish them. You’d want to consider topics that are unique to your target audience’s interests, needs, and values.

Further, look out for content that performs well and repurpose them for other platforms. Remember, the expectation of your audience differs across platforms. If you like, you can organize your content plan with an editorial calendar or content calendar.

Choose your content format(s): One of the most important things you must consider during your content planning process is the most suitable content format/type for each content idea. Even better, you can create different content types for different stages of the buyer’s journey. Some examples of content formats are:

• Videos
• Blog posts
• White papers
• Email newsletters
• Podcasts
• E-books
• Social media posts
• Templates
• Case studies

Pick the perfect content publishing channels: Upon deciding on the right content format for your needs, consider how you’ll optimize your content for your chosen platform such that it’s visible to your target audience. For instance, let’s say you choose blog posts as your content publishing channel. 

You’ll want to employ search engine optimization (SEO) tools & techniques to get your content to sit on the first page of search engines. This brings your content to the face of your audience. Or, if you’re using social media platforms, consider incorporating viral hashtags or hashtags peculiar to your ideal audience. Doing this shows you’re intentional about your content marketing strategies.

5. Document Your Strategy

It will not make sense to go through this whole process without documenting your content strategy. A documented content marketing strategy comprehensively covers how you intend to reach your brand’s goals using content marketing.

Let’s say you started from a small business and grew into a medium-sized business, and then into a large business. As your business expands, you’ll add more people to your team. However, they’d want to know the content marketing strategies you’ve been following all these while and the results you’ve been getting.

So, how would they know? This is where a documented content strategy comes to the rescue. A documented content strategy covers the tools you use, screenshots of tasks, links to document examples and templates, password and account information, KPIs, and so on.

6. Hit The Publish Button

Now that you’ve gotten to this point, you can hit the publish button for your chosen publishing channel. But before that, ensure you’ve organized your content marketing plan by doing the following before and after publishing:

Before publishing

• Developing your content calendar
• Optimizing your content for reach

After publishing

• Analyzing your content performance using KPIs like traffic, engagement, etc.
• Reviewing and adjusting your strategy based on data

7. Track Your Performance With KPIs

The best content marketing strategies do not end with publishing; they incorporate content analysis. Immediately after publishing your content, your audience begins to engage and interact with them. Hence, content analysis is a vital aspect of content strategy and you need to monitor it.

With KPIs like conversion rates, engagement, lead generation, views, and traffic, you can track your content’s performance. However, this isn’t all. So, figure out the metrics or KPIs important to your marketing goals and choose a suitable method to measure them consistently.

Understanding how your content performs will help you know when and how to adjust your content or the entire strategy. It will also inform you about the content type/format and publishing channels you choose.

The Only Content Marketing Checklist You Will Ever Need

Many businesses rely on content marketing to provide valuable solutions to their audience, generate traffic, generate revenue, and ultimately drive business results. However, an efficient content marketing checklist is the only way to execute all your strategies and more.

For this purpose, we’re giving you the most comprehensive content marketing checklist. Don’t miss a step!

1. Know The Fundamentals of Content Marketing

Learning the fundamentals of content marketing is the first step to creating effective marketing strategies. Understanding content marketing makes it easy to identify your target audience and create content that resonates with them.

Additionally, content marketing covers the entire process of creating, publishing, promoting, and analyzing your content to ensure it aligns with the needs of your ideal customer and meets your business goals.

Therefore, you must understand these fundamentals before getting started.

2. Who Are Your Target Audience?

There’s no content marketing without the right audience. So, you must perform market research to determine your target audience first before anything else.

This process will help you understand your ideal customers and their demographic profile with which you can design different buyer personas.

Also, you will be able to identify their needs & pain points, their preferred content type/format, the solutions they seek, and the channels they seek their solutions from.

3. Set The Roadmap: Build a Content Marketing Strategy

The next thing you should do is create a winning content strategy. It serves as a roadmap to everything you do and covers your:

• Business goals
• Content creation tools
• Analytics tools
• Content types/formats
• Promotion tools
• Content marketing tools
• Budget for marketing efforts
• Content publishing channels and frequency
• Professionals required 

This is one crucial step you shouldn’t miss for any reason. So, ensure you consider all these and more before creating any content. It’s more like the heart of every other thing you do—a lot of things depend on your content strategy.

4. Create Content Ideas Your Audience Cannot Resist

The fourth step in our checklist involves researching content ideas that your target audience is looking for. Remember, you’re not the end user of the content you create; your target audience is. Thus, everything should revolve around them.

While your ideal customers are the major focus of your content ideas, they should also align with your business objectives such as generating more revenue and helping you maintain a top position in search engines.

Moreover, finding topic ideas shouldn’t be a struggle since there are many online tools (free and paid) to help you achieve this.

5. Map Out a Strategic Action Plan

Now that you’ve fulfilled the steps above, consider creating a strategic action plan to help execute your content marketing strategies. It is easy for you to mistake this for a content strategy. However, they’re both entirely different—the action plan is more detailed and comprehensive.

To execute this, you can use tools like Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Teams Calendar, or Google Calendar. This plan should contain details of the following:

• Content type and title you want to publish.
• The time and channel you want to publish it.
• If it’s a text-based content, how long will it be?
• What keywords (long-tail, short-tail, and LSI keywords) are you targeting?
• Will you create the content yourself or you’ll outsource it to someone?
• How do you intend to promote the content and when will you update it & review its performance?

This action plan will be helpful especially if you’re outsourcing the content to a professional. It will guide them effectively and hasten the process.

6. Diversify Your Content Formats

There’s no harm in trying out different things. For best results, you wouldn’t want to stick to one particular content format. Social media posts are great, but do you know you can repurpose your social media posts and use them to make a YouTube video?

In this context, suppose your social media post does not perform as much as you want. Repurposing it for a YouTube video could get it across to a wider audience and even generate more conversions.

Or, let’s say you’ve only been creating text-based content. Considering the drop in attention span, video content will likely perform better. Sometimes, text-based content can come off as boring but mixing things up can work the magic for your business.

So, don’t always rely on a particular content format/type. Be creative around everything, diversify, and try new stuff! This is another way to be spontaneous about your content marketing strategies.

7. Boost Your Content Visibility For Search Engines

While you’re ensuring your content is audience- or customer-centric, you want to also generate income and have a wider reach. But you cannot execute this without SEO (search engine optimization.

SEO-optimized content makes you seen and heard by a wider audience and boosts your leads simultaneously. If you’re writing a blog post, here are some things you should keep in check:

• Ensure you have only one H1 tag.
• Images should have ALT texts.
• Content should be well paragraphed.
• Include internal links and a meta description containing your primary keyword.
• Use a keyword-based URL.
• Do well to incorporate several headings formatted H2 and H3.

8. Show Off Your Content

Promotion is the only way to show off your content to a larger audience and increase your chances of conversion. This is a must-do if you must grow as a business. Meanwhile, you can promote your content through these ways:

• Influencer marketing
• Backlinks
• Incorporating internal links in your blog/website posts.
• Using paid advertising on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
• Sharing it through email newsletters to your subscribers.

9. Employ Top Content Marketing Tools

Our content marketing checklist will be incomplete without emphasizing the importance of content marketing tools. These tools give you more clarity about the effectiveness of your content marketing strategies.

Depending on your content format, there are various tools to aid your efforts. Some of them include:

• Grammarly – used for enhancing your text and checking for grammar and spelling errors.
• Ahrefs – used for keyword generation, content audit, SEO audit, etc.
• Google Search Console – used for tracking your content’s rankings on Google.
• Google Data Studio – used for analysis and reports.
• Google Analytics – used for tracking your content performance.
• Google Keyword Tool – used to perform keyword research
• Google Trends – used to learn about trending topics.

10. Measure Your Campaign Performance

Here’s the final step on our content marketing checklist. Your marketing efforts will be incomplete without measuring your campaign performance. Even though you check all the steps above, it is also crucial that you monitor your content’s performance over time.

These are the most important metrics you should track:

• Number of visits from social media platforms
• Website bounce rate
• Total backlinks
• Lead generation/conversion
• Total website visits
• Number of email sign-ups
• Total video views
• Rankings, the respective keywords, and their position on Google
• Total number of engagements and reactions to content

Doing a detailed analysis like this helps you to understand how your content is performing, what’s working and what’s not, and where to make adjustments in your marketing strategies.

Final Words

Comprehensive and well-thought-out content marketing strategies make you avoid all the fluff and filler and stand out from the noise.

With careful planning and a structured approach like what we’ve discussed in this blog post, you can refine your content marketing strategy and achieve sustained business results.

Progress Ogunka

Progress Ogunka is an SEO Content Writer who knows how to make words work. With a keen eye for research and a strategic approach, she crafts content that not only ranks on search engines but also engages readers with compelling storytelling. Her results resonate with audiences and drive brand success.