How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy for 2020

According to the statistics from the Content Marketing Institute, the most successful B2B marketers have been spending over 40% of their total budget on content marketing.

Even if you have an already implemented content marketing strategy, it will never hurt you to reexamine it. After all, you’ve got to make sure that your content marketing strategy is up to date, responsive, and evolving.

Creating a content marketing strategy can be a crucial task for content managers. It requires careful planning, deep study of your audience, analyzing your goals, objectives, and more. A successful content marketing plan can build your business and benefit your massive ROIs. A bad and ill-planned content marketing strategy can cost you a fortune and still pay you no valuable benefits.

As 2020 is approaching, we have developed a guide for you to create a content marketing strategy. By the end of this article, you will be able to get your hands on all the steps required to establish a well-structured and result-oriented content marketing strategy for 2020.

Here are the 10 steps which have been proven vital while creating a content marketing strategy:

Step 1 – Analyze Your Goals and Set Your Objectives

Before you start putting your content out there, make sure you are fully aware of your goals and objectives. Make sure what is it that you want to write about and analyze if it is the best choice. After you are done analyzing and you are sure of your goals and objectives, write down a mission statement for your brand’s content.

Defining a mission statement for your content will help you stay focused. It will help you determine what’s important and what’s not, consequently helping you stay on track in the long run.

Step 2 – Knowing Your Audience

You need to know what audience you are dealing with. Whatever you are selling a product, a service, or a solution to a problem, you have to know what kind of audience you are dealing with beforehand.

This will help you in designing your content and will also help you stay on the correct path. Moreover, you don’t want to alienate your millennial audience by building a content marketing strategy that actually focuses on the elderly.

Before you continue, make sure you know who your audience is.

Step 3 – Assessing Your Current Position

Determine where are you standing currently. If you’re a new brand making an opportunity for a new entry opportunity in the market, you’ll probably have easier access to quick ROI.

If you’re starting out in an already existing market, you will have some competition going on and you will have to follow a content creation strategy that’s exclusive and distinct to your brand. Either way, you must figure out where are you standing correctly so you can determine how much work you need, and how much time will it take you to get where you want to be.

Step 4 – Determine the Best Channels Out There

When you are swooping in a new market, you have ease of access to a large number of opportunities. You have more chances of securing better consumer and supplier channels. This also allows you to build long-term, successful relationships right from the start.

However, in an already existing market place, you will have to make an effort to secure the best channels out there. You will have to find which audience you are going to target and what are the sources you will be getting your content from.

Step 5 – Define Your Content-Type

When you are done determining the favorable channels out there, you must figure out a content type for your brand. This is the first step to your actual content creation which would help you narrow down your scope of interest.

Defining your content type will simplify things for you, will help you to identify and allocate resources, and will ultimately help in content creation.

Moreover, defining your content type also helps you build a piece of factual evidence for your mission statement and gives a practical shape to your overall purpose.

Step 6 – Allocating Resources

Now that you know what kind of content you will be making in the upcoming time, you have to identify your resources. You have to know which of your team members you can trust and which task you can assign to each one of them.

First, you identify your resources, you analyze their capabilities, and then you have to allocate resources to each one of your team members.

You will be needing a reliable team if you are building a content marketing strategy for a large business. In order to continue, you must allocate resources to your team so the actual content creation process may start.

Step 7 – Develop a Content Calendar

After that, all you have to do is set deadlines, assign tasks for your campaign, and get to work. Setting deadlines will let your team members know that you mean business and they will have a motivation to complete their work in time.

As a content manager, you will have your whole content calendar in front of you which will help you to design and plan the future steps accordingly.

Step 8 – Start Creating Content

This is where your content creation process actually starts. Your team works on their assigned tasks and communicates any related issues.

As a content manager, you must be making your team focus on quality rather than quantity. Top-notch, authentic, and quality-centered content creation should be your team’s utmost priority.

Step 9 – Kick-start your Marketing

After you start getting some content in your hands, that’s when you can kick-start your marketing campaigns. Your content calendar will already have you prepared for the marketing phase but now since the content will be in your hands, you’ll be able to initiate the marketing process practically.

The marketing team should build just the right marketing strategy to deliver maximum outputs out of your strategy overall.

Step 10 – Observe Results and Repeat

Lastly, you need to be generating authentic and data-driven reports about your results. You must measure if you’re getting the required ROIs and if you are meeting your set goals.

If you’re not meeting your set goals or if there’s a lack of concentration in some department, you have to revisit that step again, followed by a series of next required steps.

Also, if you’re not getting results, don’t give up. Workaround your strategy, make the require changes, and do it again until you get the results you’re looking for!

Not sure where to start with your content marketing strategy? Don’t stress! Call the content marketing experts at Joseph Studios and let us do all the work.