8 Steps to Building a Content Strategy That Makes You Stand Out

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach built on creating accurate, consistent content on relevant topics for a defined audience. It goes beyond promoting your products and trying to close sales at every turn. It’s about educating customers so they can solve their problems.

The most important thing about content marketing is its power to create loyal customers. Many marketers say content marketing is a must for most businesses, because when you give your customers the right information, you don’t just educate them and contribute something to society, you also earn customers who trust you.

Whatever kind of marketing you do, content can add something unique to your business. If you explain the benefits of what you offer in the places your customers are already searching, you become easier to find. And of course, quality content also helps you rank in search engines. SEO is an incredibly competitive field, so ignoring anything that can help you stand out isn’t a smart strategy.

According to research by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs in 2016, 70% of marketers don’t have a documented content marketing strategy. So how do you build one? These eight steps, which I also used when creating this blog, can help you grow your business.

How to do content marketing in 8 steps

1. Set your goals

What do you want to achieve with the campaign? For example, B2C (business to consumer) marketers tend to focus on brand awareness and loyalty, while B2B (business to business) marketers focus more on sales and demand generation. Setting a goal lets you make a plan, and your plan is the one tool that lights the way as you go.

2. Map your audience

Get to know your audiences and try to understand them. A buyer persona tool can help here. This step applies one of the core principles of marketing: segmentation, targeting and positioning. Who are your customers and what do they want? Instead of broad labels like “our customers” or “women”, define more specific subgroups. The most important criterion is behaviour.

3. Find and plan your content

This step covers coming up with content ideas and planning them. Good content connects to your customers’ lives and reflects the principles that define your brand’s personality.

4. Create your content

This covers everything involved in actually making the content: designing the right visuals, writing the copy and running SEO checks. A business can do this in house with its own resources, or outsource it to agencies or freelancers. Content has no start or end date, it’s continuous work, so make sure you can keep producing it consistently. For many businesses, outside professional help is the most cost-effective and reliable option.

5. Distribute your content

No matter how good your content is, it means nothing if it doesn’t reach the right place. There are three main media channels you can use: owned, paid and earned media. Owned media is every channel the business controls: email, SMS, website, blog and social media accounts. Paid media is any channel you pay to use. Earned media happens when content goes viral and gets shared across many channels by outside sources. Earned media doesn’t happen on its own, the other two channels have to lay the groundwork.

For example, if you create SEO-strong content that solves your customers’ problems, you’re building your earned media. Some sources call this inbound SEO.

6. Amplify your content

This means getting your content spread by people who are better known and have more followers. Content alone usually isn’t enough to get these people, often called influencers, to share branded content. You need to build a two-way relationship.

This is also the most misunderstood part of influencer marketing today. An influencer is really someone who has done valuable work in their field and whom people trust in that field. Assuming that anyone with a lot of followers is an influencer has confused both brands and people.

7. Measure your content marketing

There are several metrics for this. How many times was the page viewed? How many viewers came back? How many unique visitors did you get? What share of viewers remember the brand? How long do people stay on the site? Beyond these, the rates at which people click links, sign up or buy after seeing the content are also part of the evaluation. Everything is compared against hard data to see whether you reached your goals, and there are plenty of free marketing tools to help.

8. Improve your content marketing

Content marketing is far more measurable than traditional marketing. Software now stores all the data and hands you the results easily. With trends changing this fast, improving your content regularly isn’t optional for a business.

Content marketing in Turkey is unfortunately far behind where it should be. Very few people who speak English search in Turkish for the information they need, because there aren’t enough good sources. Most scientific sources are in other languages, and so are most useful articles and news. In e-commerce especially, the habit of growing through marketplaces instead of strengthening your own site makes this even worse.

Content marketing plays a central role in helping businesses create value, explain the problems their products solve, and build loyal customers.