From Awareness to Conversion: 7 Steps to Create a Content Marketing Strategy That Generates More Leads

“Great content inspires action” – Dane Brookes

So when it comes to capturing the audience’s attention and prompting them to take action, content marketing becomes paramount.

And with the ever-growing number of online platforms and channels, it has become increasingly important for brands to create compelling and relevant content that resonates with their target audience.

However, creating content alone is not enough. To make people act through content, it is essential to have a well-defined content marketing strategy that takes you from awareness to conversion.

In this blog post, you will gain a deep understanding of content marketing strategy, its benefits, different types of content marketing strategies, and how you can create an effective content marketing strategy.

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a plan that outlines how a business or organization can grow an audience by developing, maintaining, and distributing standard and consistent information. This information educates, enlightens, entertains, and inspires people to become customers.

Content marketing strategies help businesses reap the following benefits:

• Build Trust and Increase Audience Retention
• Build Brand Awareness
• Boost Conversions
• Establish Credibility and Authority
• Increase Customer Loyalty

Now that we know what a content marketing strategy is, let’s understand the different types of content marketing strategies.

Types of Content Marketing Strategy

Here are the types of content marketing strategies that businesses can use, depending on their goals and target audience:

• Pillar-Based Marketing

A pillar-based marketing strategy helps you drive traffic through relevant and linked pieces of content (clusters). The main pillar page acts as the comprehensive authority on a broad topic. The pillar content is then broken down into smaller, related pieces of content, known as “clusters,” that cover specific subtopics related to the main pillar. This approach can help businesses improve their website’s SEO by creating a network of related content that links back to the main pillar.

• SEO

SEO content marketing strategy includes factors such as keywords, content quality, responsive content, authenticity, and more, to ensure the audience gets reliable content. This strategy involves inserting keywords, optimizing on-page elements, building high-quality backlinks, and improving website speed and user experience to attract more organic traffic from search engines.

• Thought Leadership Content

Thought leadership content is typically long-form, in-depth content that showcases a business’s expertise and knowledge in a particular industry or niche. This type of content can include whitepapers, case studies, research reports, and expert opinion articles. The goal of thought leadership content is to establish a business as a leader in their industry and build trust and credibility with its audience.

• Social Media Strategy

Businesses use social media strategies to develop their brand by participating in social media groups or sharing social content. This strategy allows brands to connect with their audience, build brand awareness, and drive traffic to their website. The strategy also includes paid advertising to reach a broader audience and drive conversions.

7 Steps to Create a Content Marketing Strategy That Converts

Now you know the types of content marketing strategies, let’s understand how to create an effective strategy that drives measurable results.

1. Define Your Goals

Every piece of content you generate should contribute to your objective. Start by setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for your content marketing strategy.

Your goals must relate to your prospects and align with your overall business objectives. For this, you need to understand your lead’s lifecycle stage to provide them with the right content at the right time.

2. Establish Your Target Audience

An excellent way to visualize your target audience is by creating buyer personas and conducting market research. Buyer personas include key characteristics, such as customers’ demographics, pain points, behavioral motivations, challenges, and more.

Further, market research helps you know your competitors and how your customers react to your product.

Buyer personas and market research help you create content that aligns your business with the ideal customers and provides solutions.

3. Research Your Keywords

Creating lead-generated content is essential. But it should reach the right people as well. Thus, know your customers’ online searches by researching relevant keywords with the help of advanced tools, such as Google Keywords Planner.

Use keywords in your content to make sure it has good online visibility.

4. Create High-Quality Content

High-quality content is the core of a lead-generating content marketing strategy.

You must develop a brand story that entices people to learn more about you. Make sure your content is instructive and well-researched. It should be written from the perspective of addressing your customers’ pain points.

Include everything in your content that holds the audience’s attention. In short, create great content.

5. Determine Your Distribution Channels

Once you have created your content, make sure it is optimized for leads. The next step is to distribute. Not only do you have to share it on your website but also on third-party websites, guest posting sites, social media portals, and online communities.

6. Select the Right CMS

CMS allows you to create, publish, and analyze content on your website. Choose a content management system (CMS) that allows you to easily create, manage, and distribute your content. Your selected CMS should be easy to use, have customization options, and support integration with other tools.

7. Create a Content Calendar

A content calendar helps you plan your content in advance. This will help you stay organized, ensure a consistent publishing schedule, and enable you to track your progress toward your content marketing goals.

How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Content Marketing Strategy?

After you create an effective content marketing strategy, here are some steps that help you analyze the performance of your strategy:

• Evaluate Your Organic Traffic

  Monitoring organic traffic is essential to know which pieces of content are driving the most traffic. It helps to evaluate the content performance. Determine the reasons behind the success of those pieces and use those insights to guide future content creation.

• Analyze Your Email Statistics

  Tracking email engagement is easy by monitoring the open rates and click-through rates. It helps you understand the content that works best for your audience. Use those insights to adjust your email marketing strategy and improve performance.

• Monitor Shares and Reach on Social Media

  Every social media platform has its insights report. Track the number of shares and reach of your social media posts to determine which types of content are generating the most engagement.

• Use Google Analytics

  With Google Analytics, you can monitor user behavior on your pages. Know the time spent on the web page, the number of visitors visited per session, bounce rate, etc. Also, knowing the number of subscriptions, conversions from blogs and videos, etc. helps you track your strategy success.

Creating a successful content strategy takes time, expertise, and effort. However, by following the above ways to create a content marketing strategy, you can get effective results for your business.

Want to Create a Content Marketing Strategy That Converts? Let’s Talk!