Choosing the right marketing strategy template and developing an effective branded content strategy can be daunting, especially with so many available options. With many small and large companies making their services accessible online, businesses should implement effective content marketing strategies to spread information about their brands and attract prospective clients to the sales funnel. This blog post focuses on the most effective guidelines for creating an effective branded content marketing strategy in 2023. Let’s dive in!
What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
A content marketing strategy is an essential document that every small or large business should develop. A content strategy contains all the steps companies should take to create, publish and distribute branded content. According to statistics, about 79% of B2B marketers report using content marketing strategies.
A well-developed content marketing strategy allows companies to understand such important things as:
- The target audience of their content marketing strategies
- Content that will appeal to their target audience
- Best practices and specialists that will be involved in the content creation
- Platforms where the content should be distributed and more
Branded Content Marketing Strategy Value
It may seem like a difficult task to develop a content marketing strategy. Yet, the results are always worth the effort applied to content marketing strategy creation.
The main goal of content marketing is to help businesses spread information about their brands online, gain user trust, and turn prospective clients into loyal customers. Every company sets its own goals that should be achieved with the branded content marketing strategy. Businesses need to know the final goals to make the right decisions to achieve those goals.
Creating an effective content marketing strategy is critical to a brand’s survival in the modern economy. According to the stats in Content Marketing Institute’s 2022 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends, 43% of marketers have reported a significant growth in their content marketing budgets since 2020. 74% of marketers have reported that their campaigns have become more successful this year than last year’s results. 66% of companies assume their content marketing budgets should continue to grow. Respondents share a strong assumption that the more content marketing matures, the more likely they will succeed in the promotion of their brand.
It takes time and effort to create an effective content marketing strategy to help you build the desired brand loyalty and attract and retain customers for your small business. We are here to help you and your business create and implement an effective content marketing strategy to meet your customers needs.
How to Create a Branded Content Marketing Strategy
When you work on creating the branded content marketing strategy, you should realize that every decision matters – from the idea that comes to your mind to content creation and promotion. Let’s see how to create a compelling strategy with or without a marketing strategy template.
Set Content Marketing Objectives
Marketers are in full control of their customers purchasing journey. They can decide when and how to invite customers to make purchases. There is no change – in defining content marketing objectives.
When you think about the goals you wish to achieve for your brand, there are five key aspects to consider:
- Your current audience insights
- Business case
- Current state
- Mission statement
- The amount of money you can spend to create a branded content marketing strategy.
In other words, you need to understand where your brand is, its mission statement, and current customers. This knowledge should help you build a business case and the best practice content marketing strategy that is customer-focused, consistent, and result-oriented.
Target Audience(TA) Analysis
One of the first steps in developing an effective strategy is creating the target audience (TA) portrait. Once you define it, you can better understand your target users’ demands and pain points and easily find an approach to market your brand’s offer for maximum efficiency.
The modern buyer persona has high expectations of the brands they are willing to build relationships. While working on content marketing strategy creation, it’s always a good idea to consider additional factors that can contribute to a person’s buying decision, like the things making them happy. The TA portrait commonly features such basic characteristics as gender, age, race, location, income level, etc. Your content marketing team may also consider the factors your TA finds frustrating, what content they consume, what channels they prefer using, etc.
For example, if you target teenagers, try answering questions like “How do I prepare for my graduation exam?” or “How to choose a college?” If you do not analyse your target audience, you risk wasting your time and money.
Competitor Analysis
One of the best ways to develop a content marketing strategy and content writing approach is to learn from your competitors. Whatever industry your business belongs to, there is always someone to learn from. Learning from other competitors’ mistakes is always a good practice and source for analysis.
To run a competitor analysis consider factors like
- The types of content they publish and the frequency of publishing
- The channels they use to communicate with the audience, include content publishing platforms, social media channels, email marketing campaigns, etc.
- Which content does your competitors’ audience find the most appealing?
During the competitor analysis, you can also find out what marketing strategy templates other companies use. For example, you can find many useful designs and graphic elements on platforms like TemplateMonster digital marketplace. You may follow their content marketing strategy example and use ready-made templates for branded content creation.
Editorial Strategy
After you decide what your brand’s goals are, what audiences you will target, and what platforms to use, you can start defining the editorial strategy. It covers the themes, topics, and post types you will include in the content marketing strategy.
If you need to create a perfect marketing strategy for a web design agency, you can focus on writing about web design workshops, web design trends, theme-based websites, etc. Topics will cover the tools for better efficiency and how to use them in practice. The way you write articles depends on the content. For example, consider publishing how-to articles, infographics, lists, general articles, etc.
Keyword Research
Choosing relevant keywords is still important for content creation. Your efforts will only be worthless if you publish articles that cannot be found in search engines.
If you want your content to appear at the top of organic search results, you must use relevant keywords. At the same time, remember that you should write for people, not search engines only. Make your content readable and valuable to your target audience.
Work on the Publications Calendar
The content plan plays an important role in creating and promoting your brand. Create a table that you can share with the editorial team. Specify the time and date for different types of content to be published, the format of content, the goal of publication, etc. The details you specify in the content marketing calendar should be based on the goals of your campaign and the audiences you will target.
Content Distribution
After you decide what type of content you want to publish, it’s time to start content creation and distribution. Your branded content marketing strategy can be distributed on your website, blog, social media channels, podcasts, videos, paid advertising campaigns, etc.
Another way to promote your branded content is to encourage your team to share content on their social media profiles and other platforms that your target audience uses. When the company’s staff shares other employees’ content, it can generate up to 8 times more engagements and increase 14 times more brand awareness.
Analyze Results
It takes time to get the results for your branded content marketing campaign. The factors companies commonly evaluate include:
- The volume of new traffic brought;
- Conversion;
- Social media activity;
- Brand recognition.
Based on your results, you can understand whether your current strategy is successful enough. If you are not satisfied with the numbers, modify the marketing strategy.
Conclusion
These days, you can choose from multiple ways of promoting your content. It is important to choose the approach to help you meet your target audience’s demands and appeal to their pain points. It should be noted that developing a good content marketing strategy takes some time. Writing a good copy can be a way more time-consuming process. Developing a marketing strategy based on competitor analysis should help you determine what approaches work best for your audience and make the best decision for your company.
