How to Develop a Successful Content Strategy

According to a survey by HubSpot, an authority of inbound marketing, 56% of the respondents said they were doing content marketing without a plan. This is shocking!! Without a plan, it’s harder to assess your marketing efforts and achieve your business goals. Stand out from the crowd now and follow this guide to create your own content strategy.

Stage 1: Getting Buy-In

Before developing a content strategy, you may need to pitch this idea to your boss. Ask yourself the following questions:
1. What are the key challenges you will solve with content marketing?
2. How are they related to business metrics?
3. What are some detailed steps to achieve these goals?
Even if you don’t need to get buy-ins, these questions will help you understand how the content strategy fit into the big picture, and prepare you for developing a successful plan. Remember to always keep business goals in mind.

Stage 2: Developing Your Content Strategy

After you gain the internal support you need, you can start creating your own content strategy.
Pro tips:
1. Include the buyer personas you are targeting. 
Buy personas are profiles of real buyers who influence or make decision about your products or services. Ask yourself, what are the pain points of your buyers? What are their needs and desires? How can your content help them solve these problems?
2. Understand where the content gaps are in your buying cycle. 
Consumers typically go through three stages to make their purchase decisions:
Awareness – Evaluation – Purchase
Each stage has unique issues and requires different contents. You want to make sure your content covers all three stages so that your consumers have all the information they need at each point of the buying cycle.
3. Come up with content ideas and stick to an editorial calendar.
Brainstorm with your team and come up with creative content ideas for each buyer persona. Put these ideas on an editorial calendar so that everyone within the company can see what content is being published and what is being scheduled.

Stage 3: Determining Your Publishing Plan

Pro tips:
1. Thank about scaling your content by repackaging in several formats.
When you develop your content, think about different ways you can use it. For example, you can turn several blog posts into an e-book or guide. You can also turn your videos into scripts and publish them on your blog. Be creative!
2. Make sure the quality of your content always remains high.
Remarkable content can generate leads and traffic for your business site. It has a longer shelve life than a tweet. For example, people will still read your blog post even if it’s published two years ago, as long as it contains valuable information. Therefore, it’s important to always keep track of the quality of your content.

Stage 4: Promoting Early and Often

If content is king, then distribution is queen. Without proper distribution channels and promotion, it doesn’t matter how great your content is. Have you promoted your content through social media, email, and blog? Can your messages reach your buyers?
Pro tip:
1. Make promotion a really important part of the planning process.
2. Make sure you have people with promotion skills on your team.

For additional information on creating a successful content strategy, read this Hubspot guide