Blog: Content Marketing Strategy Planning for 2021

Written by Caroline Life, Marketing Writer and TMA VP Communications

Marketing Planning for 2021: Content Strategy

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:

Doing something new.
Building on what you already do.
Reacting opportunistically to emerging possibilities.

Creating Your Content Marketing Strategy

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.

Tips to Get Started on Your Marketing Strategy for 2021

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:

Put your goals in writing and make them measurable. Examples:
• Grow our email subscriber list by 15%
• Increase our website traffic by 20%
• Create 3 videos per month highlighting products or services and release them on social media targeted to our ideal customer.
Create a calendar that puts your goals in place. Make sure every influential person in your company has access to this calendar so you are laser-focused and working together to hit your goals.
Measure and celebrate! At the end of each quarter, get your team together and celebrate the goals you hit. Learn from the ones you didn’t and adjust your plan for the next quarter. Don’t miss this step! It will reveal more about the effectiveness of the avenues where you are sharing your content.

Remember to Address Audience Pain

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.

Content Marketing Strategy Reminders

Your content marketing strategy may include doing something new or build on what you already do or react opportunistically 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.