Content marketing is the strategic creation of text, imagery, audio, or video, that delivers a relevant and compelling message to customers or prospects while paving the way for a sale. This strategy is being used by 86% of businesses today.

There are three significant advantages of a thought-out content marketing strategy: it can increase your sales, reduce costs, and help you gain better and more loyal customers.

Elements for an effective content marketing strategy

Content marketing plays a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO). It is one of the pillars any SEO strategy you want to implement as search engines recognize businesses that constantly publish highly valuable, relevant content.

However, not all strategies for content generation work. If you don’t provide value-added content, then it won’t help your business grow. Take into consideration the following elements for a more effective content marketing strategy.

Define your target market. You need to know exactly who you are creating content for. Normally, you need to target people who would be interested or could be persuaded to buy your products or services. Some experts, and pretty much any SEO company, recommend creating buyer personas. This is a representation of your ideal customer.

Buyer personas are created based on market research and data about a business’s existing customers. You should include your customers’ demographics, motivations, goals, behavioral patterns, and other data that you consider relevant. The more details you include in constructing these characters, the better.

Create quality content regularly. The next step is giving your audience what they want. Create content that is relevant and engaging and present it in an imaginative way (especially if your topic is considered boring for most people). Cater to their needs and choose what you publish accordingly. Use your content to demonstrate authority within your niche, and include compelling calls-to-action to increase conversions.

Content creation and publishing should not be done randomly. If you want your content marketing campaign to bear fruits, most of the pieces should be planned out. Every article you publish should be informative, entertaining, engaging, and relevant, and always provide value to your customers and prospects.

Optimize your content. While your content should be created to meet your target audience’s needs, it needs to be structured, so it is easily crawled and indexed by search engines.

You can do this with content optimization. A few basic tips for content optimization include:

  –  The keyword you want to target should be included in your title and throughout the text, but not in excess. Use keywords and their variants naturally. Be sure to include LSI keywords as well.

  –  Make use of header tags to organize your content.

  –  Use your keyword in the page’s URL and in the first hundred words of the text.

  –  Include both outbound and inbound links. Outbound links should come from reputable sources in your niche.

Monitor, analyze, and report. It’s essential that you measure the results of each post. This will allow you to understand what type of content your audience is more prone to enjoying and which channels are the best to distribute it. Once you have gathered enough data, you can tweak your campaign to improve its success.