Content marketing is very important to any business that uses a website to sell or promote itself. Not only is it a fundamental part of a marketing and sales strategy, but it’s also a mainstay tool for the distribution of information, and improving brand recognition and SEO.

Creating a plan for your content should be your first step. This will both save time and make what you do more effective.

Think about who, what and why

A successful content marketing strategy will have the target audience at its heart. Think about your readers, who are they, what they do, what do they read, why would they want to read your content?

Once you have defined and understood your audience you can begin to think about the subject matter and topics they are interested in, and how these might align to your own brand. For example, if you are a health insurance providers selling to the public you may decide you want your content to cover health issues and diseases, wellness including exercise and nutrition and different approaches to healthcare. All topics of interest to people considering health insurance.

Planning when each piece of content is published over a number of weeks or months should be central to your plan. Search for relevant dates aligned to your content and plan to post at this time, making your articles topical and potentially more visible from a search perspective.

You will also need to plan how you will promote your content through other online channels—such as social media—and how your articles will need to be adapted to do this.

Be flexible and adapt

Once you have created your content marketing plan you need to review and adapt it regularly. Being flexible is key. The global news agenda changes all the time and you need to be aware of current news and affairs particularly relating this back to your audience, and what is of interest to them.

Reviewing your content and adapting the time when content is published will ensure it stays in the moment and is relevant.

Don’t forget the SEO

Content marketing will also add to you SEO efforts – so think about the keywords that will be used for each content article. You will be adding another page to your site (important for SEO); you will have targeted a key-word that you haven’t used previously (important);  it may be shared socially by readers (important); and, if your content is strong enough, you may get back-links from other sites (very important).

We hope this has given you food for thought when it comes to planning and developing your content strategy. If you like this post, here’s another we’ve written about viral content marketing and how to use it for your business.

TMCC specialise in profit-driven marketing solutions, so if you’d like to explore options for your content, PR, media planning, social media marketing, copywriting or design, please click through to our ‘contact us’ page, and let’s talk!