7 Steps to Build an Effective Content Marketing Strategy in 2023

Mastering the 7 steps to build an effective content marketing strategy that The7 shares below will help raise your company’s or business’s brand awareness among customers.

Content Marketing resources:

What is content marketing

Types of content marketing

Content marketing strategy

Content marketing writing

Content marketing plan template

Content marketing trends 2023

Understanding Content Marketing Strategy

The term content marketing strategy (or content strategy) is now used by many professional marketers, including Brian Dean, one of the world’s leading SEO experts. However, you need to understand that these two concepts are completely different, because you can build a content strategy that doesn’t include content marketing. Above all, the focus of content marketing is the brand’s website. That is why a content marketing strategy can be considered narrower in scope than a content strategy.

What Is a Content Strategy?

According to the definition set out by Kristina Halvorson, content strategy is the practice of creating, delivering, and governing useful, usable content for companies and businesses.

A content strategy has two main components:

– Content Design: The process of using data and evidence to give readers the content they need, in the way they expect it. The two areas at the core of content design, where they intersect, are editorial strategy and experience design.

– System Design: The process of defining the architecture, interfaces, modules, and data of a system to meet specific requirements. The two core areas of System Design are content structure and process design.

In addition, Brain Traffic helps you better understand the following areas:

– Editorial Strategy: What is your mission? Who is your target audience? What is your main point of view? How do you need to comply with brand and language standards?…

– Experience Design: What are your audience’s needs and preferences? What does the content ecosystem you’re building look like? What is the potential customer journey?…

– Structure/Content Engineering: How do you categorize content so you can manage it effectively? What are the practical requirements for personalization and dynamic delivery?…

– Process Design: Which tools do you choose to create, distribute, and maintain content? Who will be primarily responsible when setting up content? Which standards and metrics do you use to measure content quality?…

In practice, a content strategy goes beyond the scope of a content marketing strategy, because it helps you manage all the content you have.

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

Unlike a content strategy, a content marketing strategy focuses only on a narrow area of marketing content. Put simply, a content marketing strategy is the intersection of content strategy and content marketing.

In practice, a content marketing strategy addresses the following core issues:

– Vision: Your content vision is the reason you decided to create content in the first place. In other words, it is your purpose for building content.

– Goals: The goals your content marketing strategy should aim for are improving brand awareness, building an audience, and driving actions that deliver practical benefits.

– Audience research: Who are you creating content for, and what benefits do they get?

– Voice and style: Your voice is a “mirror” that reflects the personality of your company’s or business’s brand. It helps you connect with customers and sets you apart from your competitors. The best approach is to make your brand’s tone of voice distinctive and memorable.

– External governance: Content governance is about establishing accountability and checking the links related to your content, as well as managing risks and setting permissions. Content marketing strategies commonly opt for external governance.

A content strategy lays a practical foundation for what you need to include in your content plan, and only then do you move on to producing content. This is a reminder that you need a content marketing strategy before you build a content plan.

Why Build a Content Marketing Strategy?

In Vietnam, most people don’t seem to care about building a content marketing strategy. Is that really true? Take a look at the statistics in the image below:

And indeed, at certain points interest in content strategy peaks. But unlike content marketing, that interest doesn’t appear to grow steadily over time.

As the analysis above shows, without a strategy, all of your company’s or business’s efforts may end up meaningless. So:

Whether or not your company or business has a content strategy or a strategic plan for using content across the whole organization, it also needs a content marketing strategy: a strategic roadmap for easily attracting and engaging potential customers.

In 2019, about 61% of content marketers said they had no written content strategy. Yet those who do have a content marketing strategy are more likely to succeed than those who don’t.

That said, you don’t need to put too much weight on your content strategy by making it complicated. Instead, focus on making sure your content marketing investment pays off.

The7 shares 5 reasons why you need to build an effective content marketing strategy for yourself:

– Boost content creation productivity: Once you’ve defined the goals and purpose of creating content, it becomes much easier to come up with ideas and topics.

– Improve consistency: A content strategy helps you stay consistent when creating and distributing content.

– Target your audience better: Building a content strategy can help you understand your customers better and create content that fits their needs or wants.

– Improve your brand: A content marketing strategy gives you specific direction on style, tone of voice, and overall approach so you can build a strong brand identity among customers.

– Save some time and effort: A content strategy can take a lot of time if you use the wrong method. That is why you need to know exactly what you have to do, so you can cut down on pointless time and effort.

A 7-Step Guide to Building a Content Marketing Strategy

If you’re still struggling to figure out how to build a content marketing strategy, apply the 7 key steps The7 shares below:

Step 1: Define Your Goals Precisely

A content marketing strategy starts with defining what you want to achieve. Without that, you’ll have no way of knowing whether you’ve succeeded or failed.

A company or business usually focuses on revenue and cost optimization to increase profit. Think about what role your content strategy plays in that.

The ultimate goal of content marketing is usually email sign-ups or free trial sign-ups. There are also several other important goals, such as:

– Increasing brand awareness

– Providing the best possible support for potential customers

– Building brand loyalty among existing customers.

Note: These goals can change over time depending on your company’s or business’s growth stages and needs. So you should review the goals of your content marketing strategy and plan accordingly on a regular basis.

Step 2: Choose the Metrics to Measure Performance

The best way to achieve your goals is to make them more specific and measurable. That means you should set KPIs for your content marketing strategy based on the goals you’ve set for yourself.

Here are some specific examples from The7:

Goal	Metric
Raise brand awareness of your company/business	Website traffic, views, and shares
Support customers	Number of downloads, support calls, or SMS messages
Email sign-ups	Total number of new email subscribers
Free trial sign-ups	Rate of converting traffic into trial users
Build customer loyalty to your company/business	Number of newsletter subscriptions or word-of-mouth referrals

One note for you: when you define your goals and set KPIs, make sure they are practical by applying the SMART principles below:

– Specific

– Measurable

– Attainable

– Relevant

– Time-bound

Step 3: Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your audience is a key factor in building a successful content marketing strategy. But keep in mind that defining your audience is not simple. So you need to discuss it thoroughly with your colleagues, and research and survey every detail about the customers you’re targeting.

It’s best to define a number of characteristics related to your customers, such as:

Information	Characteristics
Audience you want to reach	B2B and B2C (Who makes the purchase? Who can help you spread your content?)
Demographics	Age Gender Occupation Income Gender Behavior…
Challenges/pain points	Problems your customers face that your company’s or business’s content or products/services can help them solve
Content format	In which content format do your customers want to receive information? Text, images, video…?
Sources of information	When your customers look for information about the problems they face, where do they search?
Best timing	At what times of day do your customers usually search for information?

If you already have a blog with a certain amount of traffic, you can use the analytics data in Google Analytics to carry out your research.

Step 4: Research Your Competitors

No matter which field you want to grow in, you will never be alone. There will always be competitors around you, which is why researching them is always necessary. But understand that research here doesn’t mean copying or “stealing” the content they produce. What you should do is look at what your competitors are doing and follow them for a while, and you will see what direction they are heading in.

There are 2 ways to help you identify who your competitors are:

Method 1: Go to Google Search Console to see which queries get positive responses from customers. Then check Google Search to see who competes with you and what they have done.

Method 2: Use keyword research tools to check which competitors you are up against. For example:

The Tactics Your Company or Business Will Use

Some tactics you should include in your content marketing strategy are:

– Target customer segments (or potential customer audiences)

– Keyword set research

– Content, including the homepage and sub-pages

– Organizing related content using the topic cluster model.

– Auditing old content and adding new content

– Defining the content formats you want to produce

– A call to action in every piece of content

– Choosing the right timing and distribution channels for publishing content.

– Content creation frequency, to make sure you meet the goals you’ve set.

Step 6: Identify and Allocate Your Resources

After you’ve lined up the tactics you plan to carry out, you need to allocate your main resources, including people and budget. By estimating the cost of your content marketing campaign, you can determine what to do in-house and what to outsource. You also need to answer the following questions yourself:

• How much budget do you need?

There is no fixed number; it depends on your situation. Or you can calculate how much to invest based on the goals and KPIs you’ve set.

• Who will be primarily responsible for the results?

If you are the only content creator, you will bear all the responsibility. But if you have a small team, let each person take responsibility for their own work. Of course, you will still be the one ultimately accountable.

• Who will be involved in producing content?

Producing content requires writers, designers, video editors, and so on. If you want to outsource, you can turn to freelancers. In addition, you should create a shared workflow so everyone can coordinate more smoothly.

Step 7: Write Down Your Strategic Plan

All of the steps above are a process of research and discovery that shapes an effective content marketing strategy. But if you don’t write it down on paper or in software on your computer, it will be hard to picture what needs to be done next.

According to the latest research, marketers who document their strategy are more successful than those who don’t. It takes just 2 to 3 minutes to write down what you plan to do, yet in the end your goals will be reached much faster.

Why Content Marketing Strategies Underperform

Content Without a Clear Purpose

Content marketing needs to be closely tied to the goals of your marketing strategy. If you don’t define a clear purpose, your content will be generic and scattered, and it won’t meet your customers’ needs.

That is why, before planning your content marketing, you need to study the goals of the product and brand promotion strategy your business is pursuing. Then choose the right topics and keyword sets to carry out content marketing as effectively as possible.

Promoting Through the Wrong Channels

Today there are countless content marketing channels for marketers to choose from, such as ebooks, guides, software/apps, research studies, blogs, videos, and social media sites. Choosing the wrong communication and promotion channels means your business won’t make any impression on customers, and you will lose a large number of potential customers as a result. To choose the right content marketing channels, base your decision on the following factors:

• The business’s main goal in running a content marketing campaign
• Your budget
• The resources your business already has

Not Investing in Useful Content

Even though your main goal is still to market your product, you shouldn’t create content that leans too heavily toward advertising. Doing so makes customers feel you are “overhyping” what your product can do rather than giving them any concrete benefit. The content you create should be based on the words or phrases customers commonly use to describe a problem or ask a question. Skillfully work your primary and secondary keywords in so that they read as naturally as possible.

Useful content that hits the right note with customers and offers solutions to their problems will earn your business top marks. In this case, Google Keyword Tool is an extremely powerful helper for building a list of the keywords with the highest traffic and search volume.

Outdated Content

One of the main jobs of content is to give customers information. With outdated content, your business won’t deliver any value or benefit to readers, because it is old content that doesn’t keep up with trends, can’t be applied in practice, or contains information readers already know.

It’s time to remove outdated content from your website and social media pages. Instead, keep updating with the latest news in line with how your market and industry are developing. If you can give readers information they’ve never heard before, your business will make a strong impression.

Conclusion

The7 has just shared information about content marketing strategies, along with detailed guidance to help you get started easily. The content marketing strategies above can be applied by companies and businesses of every size. All it takes is the desire to give your customers the best possible experience.

Once you have a concrete content marketing strategy, controlling content quality and evaluating performance become much easier. If you have any questions about full-service marketing strategy, contact The7 directly for more detailed guidance!

For information about our services, connect with us today via Hotline: 082 246 7979 – 028 3899 7377 or visit https://the7digital.com/ for a consultation!