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Creating your own content marketing strategy is completely achievable, but you must know from the start that considerable effort is required to complete every stage of the strategy.
Whilst many of you may be doing one part of content marketing, such as blogging, or an eBook, this 5 steps blog will show you how to run a full strategy from start to finish - helping you achieve your goals of increasing your leads and hopefully new customers too.
1 - Buyer persona & research
Your buyer persona is really important - you must understand who you are trying to target to enable you to write the best content marketing strategy you possibly can. This means thinking about who they are, what they do, and more importantly, what their pain points and challenges are.
You must also use this stage to do research into your competitors, your industry and the keywords and phrases that your buyer persona is typing into Google to solve their pain points.
2 - Create premium content
After doing your research, now is the time to create the premium content. Premium content is a downloadable piece of content, such as an eBook or webinar, that allows you to capture data of those filling out the form.
These pieces of premium content need to be engaging, align with the pain points of your buyer persona, and also help to push personas down the sales funnel.
3 - Promote internally
By promote internally, I mean using your website, blog and social media channels to promote your premium content that is hosted on a landing page you've created. On your website and blog you should be using call-to-actions to promote the premium content and direct them to the landing page.
Using your social media channels, and also your email database too, this is your chance to convert some of those 'followers' into genuine leads for your sales team to follow up on.
4 - Promote externally
Probably the hardest part of your content marketing strategy is to promote your premium content externally. Press releases and guest blogging on industry websites are a great way to promote your content, as well as getting a link back to your website.
You could also look towards online advertising to get in front of your persona. Google Adwords, re-targeting ads, as well as advertising on social media are great ways to do this and boost your digital presence.
5 - Analyse and tweak
After setting your content marketing strategy live, it's important to keep an eye on how every part of your strategy is working. Little tweaks such as changing the colour of your call-to-actions may seem small, but could be the difference between generating 10 leads and 50 leads.