How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy to Grow Your Business

63% of businesses don’t have a documented content marketing strategy.

A recent report from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs indicates that companies need to have a content marketing strategy now more than ever.

If you’re a business owner who wants to create a content strategy for your business, we can help.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to develop and execute a content marketing plan that’ll help you grow your business, while saving time and money.

Step 1. Set Your Mission and Your Goals

A good way to start thinking about your content strategy is to write down a mission statement that describes what you’re going to do. This will be your guide to help you figure out what to include and what to leave out of your content so that you don’t lose your focus on creating quality content for your audience.

A content marketing mission statement should include:

Your target audience
What content you’ll use to reach them
How they will benefit from this content
Step 2. Establish Your KPIs

To achieve goals you have to make them specific and measurable. To make sure your content marketing efforts are hitting their mark, set KPIs.

The KPIs will help you know when you’ve met your goals by providing milestones you can check off.

Your strategy will include revenue goals, profit, traffic and SEO, as well as different aspects of digital marketing strategy like social media metrics and email marketing.

Step 3. Know Your Audience

As you begin creating your first piece of content, think about who your audience is—that way, you can make sure that the content you create will connect to them.

Collect Demographic Data

The first step is to get demographics about your website visitors, social media followers, and email subscribers.

Web, social media, and email subscriber analytics will supply you with the information you need about your audience, such as:

Age
Gender
Education
Income

Step 4: Get Customer Feedback

To learn more about your target audience, ask your customers for feedback. That’ll give you insights into:

What their feelings are about the current content you are creating
What their top priorities are
How you can help them meet those needs with your content.

By gathering valuable customer feedback, you can:

Understand your readers’, followers’, and subscribers’ priorities
Establish what the best places are to reach your target audience
Formulate your buyer personas

You can use WPForms to create surveys and easily collect customer feedback.

Step 5: Create Buyer Personas

Customer feedback and demographic data make up the backbone of buyer personas.

Buyer personas are descriptions of what your ideal customers are like so that you can better target your content.

The best customer avatars are built around the goals, pain points, behavioral motivators, challenges, and sources of information of your customers.

Once you’ve figured that out, you’ll have a better comprehension of:

The type of content that your audience responds to
How the content will benefit them
What will make them care about it

Step 6: See How Your Content is Working

Lastly, you’ll want to assess the usefulness of your content. You’ll need to look at metrics like:

If there are many inbound links to the content
What the search engine ranking is for certain keywords related to that piece of content
How widely the content is shared

By tracking your progress, you’ll be able to improve your content marketing strategy on a regular basis, so it’s always up to date.

Now that you know how to formulate an effective content marketing strategy from scratch, it’s time to put things into action.

Good luck!

Who we've worked with

Our Happy Clients

Caracal Engineering is a B2B engineering company focused exclusively on Solar PV mounting structures, a technical part of the Solar PV sector that is rarely understood and not often engaged. Being a technical business, necessitates digital partners that can wrap their heads around what we do, who we sell to, the markets we are in and the markets we want to move into. Correlate have managed to do exactly that in a short space of time and the results have been excellent.
Nathan Venter
CEO, Caracal Engineering
As a growing e-commerce business with a large retail footprint we needed a solid way to navigate our way around marketing and advertising in the digital space. Correlate helped us custom shape a digital marketing strategy which has helped us catapult our growth to new heights. We’re reaching targets that we never believed were possible!
Loren Young
Marketing Director, Whitehouse / Continental Linen
Correlate Digital has been exactly the partner we needed in our business. As a business we have in the past tried and failed to execute digital and strategic marketing strategies. When we approached Correlate, it was to outsource our digital marketing function so that we, as a company, can focus on our strengths whilst Correlate extends our reach and promotes our value proposition to the market. We can categorically state that Correlate has exceeded our expectations, and in doing so, we believe we have found a long-term strategic partner for our business.
Darryn Faulds
Portfolio Fund Manager, Metta Capital
The team has a great combination of talent & commitment. Once they take up a job, it’s as if they run it like its their own campaign. They’re fully committed to providing the highest levels of service, with an excellent turnaround time, and are always available to sort out all issues immediately. Their insights during the campaign strategy even helped us understand some aspects of our business & the market better
Ankur Poddar
Head of New Business Development, Mahindra South Africa