Content marketing is an effective way to engage and retain customers. In this guide, we’ll go over how to develop an effective content marketing strategy for your clients utilizing PIC’s unique Hero Mission Strategy®.
What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
Marketers use content strategies to create, distribute, and promote valuable content to attract and engage with a target audience. The goals of a content marketing strategy are to build awareness, generate leads, and drive action.
What is Hero Mission Strategy (HMS) and How Does It Relate to Your Content Strategy?
Hero Mission Strategy (HMS) is a unique PIC-developed approach to clearly defining a business’s ideal customer profile (Hero), identifying what the Hero is trying to accomplish (Mission), and developing a content Strategy that speaks to the Hero(es) and helps them achieve their Mission.
With HMS, businesses actively refocus their content marketing efforts, moving away from promoting features and toward solving real customer problems. Additionally, it provides a framework for understanding ideal customer profiles and their missions which results in targeted and effective content.
PIC walks with clients through each step of the HMS process with a series of workshops to develop your Hero(es) and their Mission(s). Additional workshops develop the Hero’s Story, their fundamental needs and friction points in the customer journey, and Chapters, structured buildouts of content that focus on the value the business can offer to the Hero in their journey.
In comparison to traditional content marketing strategies, HMS cuts through the noise and strengthens the value of your brand, services, and customer relationships. By understanding your ideal customer on a deeper level through HMS, you can develop more effective content that will enhance your content marketing strategy, leading to increased traffic, lead generation, brand engagement, and more for your business.
Why Have a Content Marketing Strategy?
A content strategy gives your team a structured approach to creating and distributing valuable content that will assist your marketing efforts. Additionally, it ensures that you’re promoting a cohesive narrative with every move.
The following are key benefits of instituting a content marketing strategy:
- Enhanced Brand Awareness
- Increased Lead Generation
- Strengthened Customer Relationships
- Increased Customer Retention
- Boosted Conversions
How to Create a Content Strategy
In-depth planning is vital when creating a content strategy. It is the foundation for content development, optimization, and distribution, making sure every piece of content aligns with business goals while providing purposeful and impactful information for target audiences.
The following are key steps when planning a content strategy:
- Define Goals and Objectives
- Audience Research
- Content Audit
- Competitive Analysis
- Content Ideation
- Keyword Research
- Content Promotion
- Setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Let’s take a deeper look at each stage of developing a content strategy.
Defining Goals and Objectives
SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) is a framework that helps marketing professionals develop clear goals and objectives. Following this framework allows marketers to set goals that are both attainable and measurable. Here are a few examples of SMART goals:
- Increase Facebook engagement by 20% in Q4 by posting daily and developing interactive content, such as polls and questions.
- Increase organic traffic to blog content by 15% through SEO optimization and publishing at least 10 high-ranking posts over the next 6 months.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) will factor into your SMART goals. For instance, if you want to look at website traffic, you may want to evaluate KPIs like organic traffic, referral traffic, and page views. When setting goals related to engagement, core KPIs may include likes, comments, and shares.
Understand Your Audience
Without a deep understanding of your audience, you risk not connecting with your ideal audience, leading to a loss of engagement and conversion. Audience research will allow you to develop content that is relevant and impactful to your audience. Some of the most important factors to consider are demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and desired outcomes.
Target Persona vs Hero
When researching your audience, you may create a buyer persona, which is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on research and other data. Typically, businesses build these personas as a targeting tool, but they don’t take the customer’s perspective into account. In fact, buyer personas can come off as a bit predatory.
On the other hand, marketers can develop Heroes, who represent a specific segment of your target audience but also fall in alignment with your core values and offerings. When developing a Hero, you look at their desired outcomes from their perspective. This allows you to discover what value you can provide them with for them to be successful in their journey. Additionally, it creates a relationship-centered approach.
Here are some key questions to ask when developing your Hero:
- What do they value most?
- What challenges or pain points do they face?
- What is their desired outcome?
Know Your Hero’s Mission
Your Hero’s Mission is the job they need to accomplish. Part of their Mission are the pain points and challenges they face along the way to their goal. Researching and acknowledging these obstacles is important for reaching your Hero and assisting them in their journey to make it as optimal as possible. There are multiple ways to find out what friction points your Hero is facing, including surveys, customer feedback forms, and testimonials.
Audit Existing Content
Analyzing existing content and its performance allows marketers to optimize their content strategy. Marketers audit content regularly to understand performance and identify improvements. This process ensures alignment with business goals and audience needs.
Repurposing Content for Different Formats
Repurposing content into different formats allows marketers to maximize the value of existing content while reaching a broader audience through multiple platforms. This tactic extends the life of your best-performing content. For instance, you can repurpose a high-performing blog post into a YouTube video with PowToon, a video creation tool, or an engaging infographic with Canva.
Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis is a process that evaluates your competitors, looking at their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in comparison to your own business. This involves reviewing competitors’ strategies, content, products, and performance. By analyzing your competitors, you can identify gaps in your strategy and opportunities to gain a competitive advantage.
When completing a competitive analysis, you can use analytics tools and platforms to gather data and insights.
Google Analytics
Marketers can use Google Analytics to monitor their client’s website performance and gain insights into competitor activity. Looking at your own performance metrics, such as traffic and conversions, you can analyze your content’s performance against your competitors.
SEMrush
With SEMrush, you can dive deeper into which keywords your competitors are ranking for as well as your own website. SEMrush can also give insight into competitors’ SEO strategies, organic rankings, and ad performance.
Ahrefs
Like SEMrush, Ahrefs can be used to analyze competitors’ backlinks, content performance, and SEO strategies. When performing a content analysis, it’s important to assess your competitors’ top-performing content so you can optimize your strategy and improve in the search rankings.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s tools help marketers track their own content performance while also tracking competitor content. With HubSpot, you can set up and automate competitor monitoring dashboards that track social media, blogs, and other content.
Content Ideation and Planning
After conducting research and setting goals, the next step is to decide the types of content you’ll focus on. Creating a content marketing strategy framework will guide your decisions, serving as a blueprint. A content marketing strategy framework ensures each piece of content is aligned with your goals and resonates with your Hero.
There are various options to choose from when deciding which content to focus on. Here are some content examples:
- Blog Posts
- Videos
- Infographics
- White Papers
- Social Media Posts
- Case Studies
- Webinars
- Podcasts
Next, you’ll want to find key topics to cover in your content. When deciding what to cover, it’s important to refer to your Hero insights and competitive research. Consider your Hero’s pain points and what information they are looking for. Additionally, look at the topics your competitors are covering. These references will guide your decisions when looking for topics to cover.
Keyword Research
Conducting keyword research is crucial to understanding what your Hero is searching for online. By identifying key terms and phrases your Hero is searching for, you can create content that aligns with their interests, questions, and needs. Keyword research will set you up for SEO optimization of your website, content, and advertising, which in turn will lead to increased visibility, relevant traffic, engagement, and conversions.
As previously mentioned, SEMrush is a useful tool for SEO analysis and keyword research. SEMrush helps marketers find valuable keywords, track search volume, and examine the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Overall, incorporating core and target keywords into your content strategy will assist with more targeted traffic and relevancy.
Promote Your Content
Not only do you need to create valuable content, but you also need to create a strategy for getting that content in front of the correct audience. When developing a content strategy, there needs to be a clear plan for distributing and promoting the content to ensure it reaches your Hero(es). The following are important content promotion strategies to consider when thinking about distribution and promotion:
Social Media
Social media platforms are great ways to promote content when you want to directly engage with your Hero through two-way communication. However, each platform attracts different types of users, so it’s important to tailor your content to each platform accordingly. For example, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are great for visually engaging content and short videos. On the other hand, LinkedIn is best for B2B content, thought leadership, and professional insights.
Email Marketing
For audiences who have already shown interest in your brand, email marketing is the most effective way to promote content. The first step is build an email list, which is typically built through an interest form. After segmenting your list, you’ll be able to provide valuable content through email, which can foster lead generation and/or drive traffic back to your website.
Paid Advertising
In comparison to other methods, paid advertising will give an immediate boost to your content by putting it in front of a larger audience. Common paid advertising forms include Google Ads, social media ads, and native ads.
SEO
Optimizing your content through SEO services will help make sure your content is discoverable and increase its visibility. This method of promotion focuses on increasing your content’s chance of ranking high in the search result pages.
Influencer and Partner Outreach
Collaborating with influencers and partners will help amplify your content, by sharing it with the collaborators’ existing audience. However, when using this approach, it’s important to partner with influencers whose goals and values align with your business and its marketing efforts. This will ensure a more genuine connection between the brand and the audience.
Guest Blogging and Podcast Appearances
Guest blogging and podcast appearances can be an effective way to expand your reach and connect with new audiences. When taking this approach, look for opportunities within your industry to make a guest appearance or blog, as this will build yourself and your business as a thought leader. Additionally, writing for respected websites or blogs can lead to increased trust and authority from your audience.
Monitoring the Performance of Your Content
Monitoring performance is key to knowing if your content marketing strategy is driving results toward your goals. Tracking your performance will allow you to make informed decisions moving forward and drive insights for improvement.
One key benefit of monitoring your content performance is that it allows you to continually improve and optimize your content and strategy. For instance, if a specific topic is underperforming or not connecting with your Hero, you can tweak your content structure or address new aspects of the topic. Also, tracking SEO efforts, such as ranking, will allow you to update content with more relevant keywords or backlinks.
In essence, performance tracking will allow for content optimization over time.
Setting and Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs are a core part of evaluating the success of your content marketing strategy and content itself. The following are common KPIs used in marketing strategies:
- Organic Traffic – the number of visitors to a site that come from unpaid efforts
- Time on Page – the amount of time a visitor spends on a page or piece of content before moving away to another page or site
- Bounce Rate – the percentage of visitors who land on a web page and leave without interacting with it
- Page Views – the total number of times a page or piece of content is viewed (can include multiple views by the same visitor)
Analytic tools, such as Google Analytics, can help monitor these types of metrics.
Other KPIs can track how effectively content is converting visitors into leads or customers. Lead generation and conversion rates measure how effective your content is at driving users to act, such as subscribing to emails or downloading a guide. When trying to track conversions, Google Analytics and other marketing automation platforms (HubSpot, Marketo, etc.) are useful tools.
Using Tools to Track Content Performance
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an effective tool for measuring traffic, user behavior, and engagement with content and generating reports. Source/medium reports show where your traffic is coming from. Reports can also look at landing pages, highlighting which pages effectively attract visitors. Behavior flows can be measured to show how users navigate through your content. Google Analytics can develop detailed reports that can be analyzed to optimize your content marketing strategy.
SEMrush and Ahrefs
When looking to track keyword rankings or analyze backlink profiles in relation to your content, SEMrush and Ahrefs are excellent tools to consider using. Both platforms offer insights into which keywords are driving traffic to your content. Additionally, these tools can identify gaps in your content strategy, which will allow for continual improvement.
Heatmap Tools
Heatmap tools like Hotjar, Clarity, or Crazy Egg can help visualize how users interact with your content by showing where visitors click, scroll, and drop off. This is achieved through color-coded heatmaps that highlight hot spots on your pages, which are sections with the most attention. Heatmap tools help identify content or design elements that may need improvement.
Regular Audits and Optimization
Content Audits for Performance
Regular content audits are important when looking to assess content performance. Audits identify areas for improvement and help ensure that your content remains relevant, accurate, and aligned with your goals. A recommended time frame for reviewing content is every 3-6 months.
A/B Testing and Optimization
A/B testing is a way for marketers to compare different versions of content, including headlines, CTAs, and structures, to see which version performs better in terms of engagement and conversions. Not only does this method improve engagement, but it also improves other measurements like click-through rate and time on page. A/B testing is key for optimizing your content.
Optimizely and Google Optimize are tools that marketers use for running A/B tests.
What Are Content Marketing Services?
Comprehensive Content Strategy Development
When developing a content marketing strategy, it is important to align your strategy with your business goals. It is equally important to define your ideal customer profiles to ensure your content resonates with your audience.
Content Creation and Copywriting
Whether it be blog posts, articles, or white papers, your content marketing strategy should include high-quality, SEO-optimized content. Visual content will be best to engage diverse audience segments. However, a mix of content formats is encouraged when creating a strategy.
SEO and Keyword Optimization
The first step to SEO optimization is conduct in-depth keyword research to find terms your audience is searching for. Integrating SEO optimizations into every piece of content will improve your organic traffic and visibility.
Content Distribution and Promotion
Content can be distributed across multiple platforms, including social media and email marketing. To amplify your content reach, utilize paid advertising strategies and tools like Google Ads.
Performance Monitoring and Optimization
To measure content performance and success, track KPIs (traffic, engagement, conversion rate, etc.). Content audits will help identify opportunities for improving and updating your content.
For more information, visit our Copywriting & Content Marketing Services.
Get Started on Your Content Strategy Today
Developing a content marketing strategy can be time-consuming and challenging. However, conducting each step in the development process will ensure your content is valuable and reaches the right audience while aligning with your business goals and objectives.
PIC’s Hero Mission Strategy (HMS) goes beyond the traditional content marketing strategy by focusing on the customer, the Hero, and what they are seeking to accomplish. HMS helps you take the buyer’s point-of-view with your marketing initiatives, communicating why your business offers the solution they need to complete their mission successfully.
Are you ready to develop a content marketing strategy?
Schedule Your Discovery Call Today and learn more about HMS as a content strategy solution for your business.
