If you’re a brand that is eager to step into the marketing landscape, then I must tell you that you can’t survive without a winning content marketing strategy. And, while everyone is literally doing the regurgitation of viral and successful content, you don’t need to fall in their footsteps.
No, that’s the way you go!
To win at your content game, you’ve to think-out-of-the-box. How about animation? How about using an animated theme around your digital content and specifically corporate messaging to stand out from everyone else?
Well in this blog, we’ll look at how exactly animation as an element in your marketing strategy, can prove to be a gamechanger for your content. We’ll also focus on the general content marketing strategy that highlights the action plan for you.
Make sure to give it a read. I’ve kept the content scannable so you can return to it whenever you like.
Step 1: Write your mission statement
The first thing you need to do to start with your content marketing game is pen down a mission statement. Here’s a solid formula to create your mission statement;
We provide [target audience] with [content materials] to help them achieve their [specific business goals].
For instance if you’re an SEO marketing agency, you can have a mission statement like this:
We provide search marketers, CMO, SEO experts, and budding content marketers with search insights to rank content, case studies of SEO success, tips on content marketing, and how to enhance overall search experience, allowing them to improve SERP performance with a dedicated strategy to draw traffic and conversions, resulting in improved presence and ultimately business growth.
Step 2: Define Key Performance Indicators
Next up you define the key performance indicators for your campaign. These could be any of the following;
- Increase the number of high-quality leads
- Bring in more traffic to your website
- Boost conversion by X percent or acquire Y number of customers
These indicators will help you devise a strategic plan that is realistic enough to accommodate your marketing needs. So, setting up KPIs is crucial as it tells you where you’re going.
Step 3: Research your customer
In addition to defining KPIs, now you need a strategic plan to execute your content campaign. It starts with doing thorough research on your customer. You can start with creating a persona of your Ideal customer profile.
- Research on demographics, and psychographics.
- Take a deep dive into knowing their pain points, challenges.
- Figure out what are their wins and losses
You can use platforms like Reddit, Quora, and even land in Facebook groups and Linkedin communities. Some viral tweets on ‘X’ might also hint on an underpinning issue that needs to be solved with a compelling offer, and a promising product.
Step 4: Create an alignment
If you haven’t already created any content. You can skip to step 6. However, if you’ve already produced and posted some form of content. Be it blogs, social posts, or even videos, just make sure to create an alignment.
By creating an alignment, I mean that you need to find out gaps in your content. You can do it by any of the following;
- Researching your competitor’s content frameworks, what worked for them and didn’t
- Interviewing your prospects, and collecting first-hand information
- Keep a close eye on SERP performance of your competitors by using search tracking tools like Semrush and Ahrefs
Step 5: Identify Best channels for your niche
Now we know the gap in our content strategy and our competitors. At this point you may have some idea of what you need to do for your content mix.
It’s great, you’re doing good.
Don’t waste your time in creating something truly out of the box every time. I’ve been using the ‘Skyscraper technique’ and believe me the results can’t be any better for you. The term was originally coined by Brian Dean; he’s the founder of Backlinko SEO.
All you need to do is simply peek at your competitors and try recreating their content in an interesting way to offer greater value.
Next, you need to identify channels for your content. These could be anywhere from social to affiliates, and from websites to even YouTube.
Step 6: Figure out the best content types
One super-effective practice that is being adapted by product marketers is an explainer video that is posted on a website and repurposed into social ads and email snippets too.
In case you don’t know where to start with your explainer video, you can always connect with an animation agency.
It will certainly be worth your time, as it’s a solid content piece that can be repurposed for multiple channels. So, you won’t be stuck with picking distribution channels for an explainer video.
Step 7: Allocate Resources
Now you’ve a plan for content types and their respective distribution channels, it’s time to allocate resources. Without a doubt you’ll need videos for your website and socials. To draw engagement and keep your cost low, you can create videos on your own.
Or you can always focus on the marketing side of the job, and outsource the creative aspect to an agency. Here’s a reasonable Animation studio in Chicago. They’re impressive and by far the best in terms of quality and affordability.
You can hire an agency to produce anything from infographics, to animated reels, video editing, youtube videos, explainers ads and a lot more.
Note: To keep it simple, you can also rename this step as content creation.
Step 8: Measure performance
Now that we have a full-blown strategy that is already operational, it’s time to find out how effective it really is. In order to do that, we’ll need to track our performance. If in the previous steps you didn’t do competitor benchmarking for key metrics like CTR, conversion, site traffic and social engagement, you can do it now.
Benchmarking will guide your analysis and help you improve overall performance of your content assets. It’s important to constantly measure your content marketing efforts, and make smart tweaks as you go.
Wrap up
Let’s wrap this one up. In this blog, we gave you a detailed walkthrough of what a winning content marketing strategy looks like. Give it a read, and feel free to return to grab insights whenever you want to.
Hope you got a nugget or two from this one!