As you create your overall marketing plan for 2021, you will also want to consider your content marketing strategy or strategies. If you're like our B2B expert members of The Marketing Alliance, a content marketing strategy will also be a part of your marketing plan.
First, let's look at the concept of strategy. The Harvard Business Review has a good article on strategy that remind us that strategies can be boiled down to several approaches. A strategy is:
To decide how to create the right content marketing strategy, you can do a lot to analyze what worked over the past couple of years. Did 2020 change everything that you did as a marketing leader? What worked and what did not? Can any of your content be updated or repurposed? What will 2021 bring as far as new challenges and opportunities? How will your content marketing strategy fit into your overall marketing plan? Can you reach out to customers and ask them what content they want from you in 2021?
To that end, Hubspot shares a reminder to of course think about who we are creating our content for, and what problems we hope to solve by sharing this content. Entertainment may be part of the approach, but for B2B marketers, we should consider how we are providing educational content to help our customers to achieve their goals, too. Your content may help your install base of users to use your products or services more efficiently. Or your content may help prospects who don't know how to solve a particular problem yet, and could further benefit from purchasing your products or services.
The Marketing Alliance partner Serff Creative Group suggests that we think creating a deliberate content marketing strategy that coordinates key dates throughout the year and targets ideal customers. This helps to bring a timely focus to your products and services with an efficient path for your marketing team to execute on tactics.
Serff Creative Group recently shared three tips to help you get started on your content marketing plan, including to:
As you think about what to do in 2021, there's really one best place to start. It's the right place to start for any B2B or B2C content, and that is with considering your customers' pain. If you think of how to address this before planning and writing blog posts, before scripting videos, and prior to planning webinars, you'll be off to a much stronger start. Plus, Google loves it when we write web copy for humans, not for their searches. Google SEO basics are important, of course, especially page title tags and the use of descriptions meta tags. But just writing for keywords is not the right approach. Try to solve challenges for your intended audience and help customers find what they are looking for, and your content strategy will drive more results.
Your content marketing strategy may include doing something new or build on what you already do or react opportunisitcally toward your 2021 goals. Just be sure to include the content, campaigns, channels, and tools that you will use to execute your tactics toward each goal. Remember to include in your marketing strategy how you will track and measure each success.
Start creating your content marketing strategy for 2021 today.
Harvard Business Review: What is Strategy, Again?
Hubspot: How to Develop a Content Strategy
Content Marketing Institute - What's Up in 2021 for Content Marketing - Expert Predictions
Also from Content Marketing Institute, some ideas for marketing content for lead gen
If you don't mind sharing your contact info. with Marketo, you can download an e-book on content marketing for lead gen
Convinceandconvert.com is a little noisy (pop-up city) but offers a nice, long list of content marketing resources.
Written by Caroline Life, a content marketing strategist and writer. Connect with Caroline on LinkedIn.
Categories: Blog
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