Content Marketing Strategy Made Easy

For some new businesses, it’s hard to get their digital marketing on track because they don’t pay enough attention to the planning stages of content. A content plan can be simple to implement if you know what you’re doing.

You need to know some of the tenets of content. What is it for? Who is it for? What are you trying to achieve? What do you want from the person engaging with your content? Ask yourself these bigger questions before you begin to map out your plan. Some companies find it helpful to create customer avatars to gear all their content towards. Once you can answer these questions, you can begin developing your content funnel.

Not all content pieces are relevant to all customers, and not all customers are ready to buy. That’s why you develop a content funnel to help you coax your prospects to the conversion stage and beyond. The call-to-action for the content should lead your prospect neatly to the next stage in the content funnel.

The main stages you want are: awareness, consideration, conversion and then finally retention. Your content takes your prospect on a journey.

Start to think about a piece of meaty content you can create to, first of all, get people into the “awareness” stage of your funnel. This could be an ebook. Then, develop a suite of blogs, vlogs or an infographic.

This type of long-form content has the ability to cascade into smaller nuggets of content for your “little and often” channels, such as social media. For advice on developing chunky content, we recommend the following:

Reading links for chunky content:

• Creating your own content: keeping your social channels fresh with one initial idea
• 10 Blog Formulas To Help You Generate Ideas
• The Go-To Video Marketing List for the Creative Entrepreneur
• Video Marketing Ideas to Turn Your Facebook Page into a TV Channel
• 11 Ways to Tell Your Story Through Digital Channels
• Easy Steps to Planning Your Video Project: Briefing, Storyboarding and Scripting

Start creating this content first and foremost, and batch it if you can. This makes it easy to produce social media posts and email content later down the line.

You can also use chunky content to build other bigger content, such as infographics, video presentations and SlideShares. By reformatting your content, you’re making it fresh and teachable.

Content created from other content is what I like to call the content cascade. When it comes to the content cascade, don’t underestimate your content types and themes. Types are, for example, videos, images, gifs, quotes, statistics, promotions etc. Your themes are centred around key topics. Mix up your types and themes to create a varied selection of content that doesn’t get boring.

Reading links for social media content:

• What Am I Supposed to Put on My Social Media Calendar? 20 Ideas
• 15 Easy to Forget Social Media Activities that Build a Bigger Picture
• 6 Practical Social Media Tips to Give You More Hours in Your Working Day
• Using Instagram for B2B Success

Having some time away from the office is essential to generate fresh ideas as it figuratively and literally offers you a fresh perspective for your content marketing strategy. Ensure everything is placed in a content calendar, starting off with sticky notes on a wall, a whiteboard or, if you love software, an online project management board. The “Calendar” power-up in Trello displays all your tickets in a calendar format, which we find really helpful at this stage.

Get your list of chunky content, together with your identified mini content nuggets and start placing them into your rough and ready calendar. Then you’ll have a template. For example, quotes every other Wednesday, a video every Friday etc. Take a photograph of what you did and then, once in the office, transfer this into a spreadsheet or add some finesse to your digital content calendar.

Your little content snacks should be easier to create now you have your content calendar up and running. Use Canva to develop simple graphics to make your social posts eye-catching in the social streams. If you’ve prepared your content templates (batched and prepped like a boss!) then each post should take you mere minutes.

Reading links for design tips:

• Simple Design Tips and Tricks for Newbie Marketers
• 5 Stages to Producing Richer Content: No Design Skills Required
• 4 Simple Ways to Style Your Content to Look Instantly Professional

Once you’ve gone about the creation stage, choose your content scheduling tool and post away. We tend to use Hootsuite, but other options are Buffer and Later for Instagram.