Creating a robust content marketing strategy begins with knowing your strengths. Do you have strong knowledge of your industry and audience? Is there anyone in the company that is a good speaker? Do you know someone that does graphic design? Do you know any good writers? Pool together all of your assets for creation and attack on all of them. YES, all of them. Starting out, you want to think of yourself as a big experimenter.

TEST. TEST. TEST. Test everything in this guide. What works for your business, doesn’t work for the next. Testing and exploring gives you the vision to see what’s working and what’s not. This gives you the opportunity to double down on what’s actually working for you. Right now, it’s images and video content that’s helping.

Visual images are processed 60,000x faster in the brain than text.

A lot of companies are seeing a ROI on explainer videos and voice-overs. Mainly because there is little to no monetary investment to make these videos. All you need is a computer and a mic. Now I know there are a great handful of people who don’t consider themselves creative in aspects of developing content to engage an audience.

If you’re not a good writer, designer, or speaker and simply do not have the time to devote to developing these skill sets then I advise you hire awesome people like those Stellar Creative groups to do it for you. There is no way around this. You’re either gonna devote time to create content or you’re not and get people to do it for you.

But if you do have the time and you don’t have the money then here are some sources for you to be able to create content D-I-Y style:

Videos

• Animaker
• Moovly

Graphic Design

• Canva
• Desygner

Know Your Brand

Once you’ve pooled all your assets together, you’re going to take a strong look at your brand and get it down on paper. You should have a clear written tell-all about what your brand is about. This ensures consistency in your brand presence no matter who does the posting or creating.

It’s important to have a very clear positioning on your brand in order to market content effectively. Knowing your values, mission, and persona makes it easy to create concepts that deliver on the message you want your audience to hear. If you don’t have your brand on paper, download our Branding Assessment or email me at hellodarrell@stellercreative.com and i’ll personally send you one.

Getting brands down on paper dramatically changed the way we approached developing a content strategy. It put everything we wanted to be online in plain view, spurring ideas and campaigns that can be run. All because we had the business’ foundation inscribed on a piece of oak.

Tooting the Stellar horn: We create brand style guides for businesses who need help creating clarity for their brand. Having everything tucked away in your brain and calling it “vision” is pure ignorance. GET IT OUT.

Know Your ENEMY….I mean CUSTOMER!

Understanding your audience is the holy grail of tools for marketing content successfully. Knowing their pain points or struggles, you can position yourself as an authority by offering free information using a blog or relating their struggles back to how your product or service solves that problem. Understanding their lifestyle gives you a peek into their typical habits and behaviors. With this information, you’re empowered to relate better with your audience on a deep personal level. They’ll feel like you understand them in a very special way which will increase your sales. This is communicated back to them in imagery, captions on Instagram, tone of voice, and your business’ story. This is part of what helps you cultivate a brand persona, a set of character traits that represent your brand if it were a person.

Content Distribution

Content Distribution is a job of jobs. Mediocre marketers will say “All you have to do is post. What’s the big deal?”. I take it more seriously than content creation because in creation, we’re more flexible and open to new ideas. But when it comes to distribution we’re very data oriented. We like to know when your audience is online the most. What days and what times. Next, the proper hashtags have to be placed on every post or your reach is shortened.

Me, the copywriter, then creates an engaging caption sometimes with a call to action to ensure initiatives are taken to get results. You can see all of this data using your Instagram business tools. Those tools are sharp. We suggest testing the frequency of your posting on Instagram. We typically recommend 1–2 times on your profile but since the release of stories and live, you should be dropping 5 or more pieces of content. Facebook is still a pay to play platform but still follows these general rules.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing and business process focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. This content is meant to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and, ultimately, drive profitable customer action.

When done correctly, content marketing helps create a relationship with your audience, which leads to trust. And if your audience trusts you, they’ll be more willing to do business with you when they’re ready to make a purchasing decision. Your content should attract the right people to your site, convert those people into leads, and nurture and help close them into customers.

But it doesn’t stop there — your content should always delight your customers, turning them into promoters of your brand. In a nutshell, content marketing is really just the art of communicating with your prospects and customers without having to sell to them.

STORYTELLING

Why does your business need to tell a story? Everyone loves a great story. People want to feel connected to a group, to belong, and stories create this connection. Stories give us a reason to communicate and relate; stories are stimulating and give us something to believe in; stories make us feel better, smarter, safer, or even loved. Business storytelling is similar.

It’s about creating alignment between your business and your prospects and customers. To begin, start by asking yourself the right questions about your business and customers.

Why does your company do what it does?

What’s the story of your potential customers?

How do they begin to desire or think about your product?

What’s the story of your business?

What do you want your product to provide and how do you deliver on it?

Regardless of the story you’re trying to tell or how you’re trying to tell it, storytelling has three essential elements — characters, conflict, and resolution.

• Character (the primary person you’re trying to reach and educate or inform)
• Conflict (the problem it’s trying to solve)
• Resolution (the solution it offers)

KEEP FRESH IDEAS

Why do you need a process for generating content ideas? A content generation process will allow you to come up with a predictable flow of original, high-quality, and relevant content ideas. There are four things you should keep in mind when generating content ideas on your own:

• What are your buyer personas’ habits?
• What are your competitors doing?

• What are people talking about on question and answer sites like Quora?
•  What can you learn from your search engine optimization efforts?

Each idea should be educational or informative about your industry, not your brand. Most people don’t know who you are yet, so you need to attract them with valuable thought-leadership content.

PLANNING A LONG-TERM CONTENT STRATEGY

Why is long-term content planning important for your business? When it comes to creating content, you want to remain as reactive and agile as you can to make the most of your time. Having a plan will give you and your team the ability to remain reactive to upcoming initiatives, stay organized, and proactively manage content required for your marketing tasks.

Your content marketing efforts should always be targeted to at least one of your business’ buyer personas.

1. What’s your primary buyer persona’s background? (Job? Career path? Family?)
2. What are your primary buyer persona’s demographic traits? (Male or female? Age? Income? Location?)
3. What are your primary buyer persona’s identifiers? (Behavior? Communication preferences?)
4. What are your primary buyer persona’s goals? (Primary goal? Secondary goal?)
5. What are your primary buyer persona’s challenges? (Primary challenge? Secondary challenge?)

Identify the buyer’s journey for your primary buyer persona. The goal is to help them through the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. And while there’s no magic number for the amount of content within the buyer’s journey, let’s start off with identifying three pieces of content — one for each stage of the buyer’s journey.

We recommend starting with a comprehensive, educational awareness-stage resource like a guide or ebook. This way, you can prove your value and help your primary buyer persona regarding your industry, which is a great way to start building a relationship.

Understanding the different sectors that go into content marketing makes it easier to sit down with your team and brainstorm how you can relate this practical strategy to your business and brand.

Thanks so much for reading! Share this with someone struggling to create content consistently if you enjoyed this article.