Blogging, email marketing, eBooks and guides are all things you may be checking off on your digital to-do list. But without a content strategy, you could be spinning your wheels.

You may have an excellent copywriter on hand. Kudos! But if you are not creating a strategy so all your efforts work in tandem i.e. you attract the right leads get them to qualify into your sales funnel and walk them through to picking up the phone or ordering your product, you need to hit pause.

How I help you develop a results-driven content marketing strategy

Who are you trying to talk to?

What problem does your product solve? Who are you trying to speak to and appeal to? Who are your best customers?

The first thing we build is a thorough understanding of your target buyer, his or her needs, and challenges, and what pain points your product or service helps solve.Understanding your buyer is the core foundational piece.  Based on this, we build a roadmap of the type of content to create, the right content distribution channels and your most effective offers. It also helps dictate what content to create as well as the tone and language.

How are you going to reach your target buyer?

What key pieces do you need to deliver? What content formats work best for your audience? What social platforms or channels should we focus on?

Blogs and Facebook don’t work for every market. Your content and social channels should match your buyer’s behavior. Once we understand how your target audience likes to receive content, we use that as our guiding tool. This creates content and channels that attract the right leads to your website.

It’s important to also build content that hits each stage of your customer’s decision-making process. From potential customers just researching products to customers who are further in the buying process. We need to match the purpose of each blog post or guide to the right stage. This helps increase your discoverability in your market.

What’s the roadmap?

Building an editorial calendar is a long-not-so-fun step. Especially if you are itching to get out there and start creating and deploying content. But if you skip it, you wind up kicking yourself a few months if not weeks later.

That’s because your editorial calendar is your mother ship. It maps out what content to create, channels to leverage, and your promotional spend. Even if you are building your content in-house, building a calendar is a crucial step to hitting your goals, avoiding brick walls and maintaining your sanity.

What will we measure along the way?

The end-goal is sales, yes. But there are other trade posts you can use to gauge if you are on the right track.

Not all blog posts result in a sale, especially if you are hitting different stages of the buyer’s journey. Your goals need to match. Content campaign goals will vary. From checking out your About Us page to visiting product or pricing pages, to downloading a second offer, each goal can serve as an important metric to weighing the performance of your content piece or campaign. These can also help you score leads to see which leads need a nudge and which leads needs more information.

How do you automate this process?

Once you have built an optimized process the next step is for me to get out of the way and let it run. Elements such as blog posts will always need hands-on involvement and effort, but other pieces such as your email nurture, landing pages, and PPC campaigns can continue pulling leads with periodic analysis and optimization.

How do your content marketing efforts stack up?

Contact me for a 15-minute review.