Who Needs a Content Marketing Strategy?

Who needs a content marketing strategy? Well, YOU do!

OK, with all the changes to the Google search algorithm, I think everyone gets the idea that a content marketing strategy is critical to the success of your inbound marketing campaigns. Of course, some don’t really BELIEVE content is so important and they’re not willing to commit resources to content marketing.

So, today, I’m going to discuss what resources you need to create an effective content marketing strategy.

Targeted marketing

Your content marketing strategy should be highly targeted to individual personas within your target market (if you don’t know how to create personas or need help, check out the great resources in the link).

1. What does each persona look like?


2. What do they need? Where are their pain points?


3. What do they enjoy? Find annoying?

Once you’ve identified issues with each buyer persona, you develop content designed to provide value to customers and prospects fitting that persona.

You can even find novel ways to engage in one-one-one marketing, which recognizes individual customers and their individual needs.

For instance, yesterday was my birthday and I got a personalized Google Doodle on my Google search page — see image above. Now, producing something like this is cheap for Google because they obviously use the same doodle for every users’ birthday and just add a little message that personalizes their birthday wishes with your name (which I didn’t capture). I realize this was an automated message based on information I’d shared when I set up my Google profile, but it still made me feel a little special that Google cared enough about their users to endure the effort and expense to create the campaign in the first place.

Consistency is key

A sound content marketing strategy requires consistency. Check out this graphic from Hubspot to see how posting frequently translates to ROI for your digital marketing efforts.

Based on this study, you need to create fresh content at least once a week. Not to put too fine a point on it, but fresh content means UNIQUE content of at least 300 words (preferably containing a link and an image) that provides value to at least one buyer persona.

Notice, I said unique. It’s OK to take another look at a topic covered already — either in a previous post or on another site — but not simply tweaking this content by changing around a few words.

I use Copyscape to check guest blogs and I’m finding many of these folks submit the exact same content to several sites just to get the backlinks. Bad form. Google now takes a very dim view of curated content, so unless you’re a curation site like Social Media Today or Business 2 Community, don’t publish duplicate content.

Being consistent is hard. I use a content marketing calendar to keep myself on track. I plan to publish 3X a week (although some of my clients want content less frequently), so my content calendar contains about a month’s worth of content for each site. In the content calendar, I list the working title, resources such as images and links I’ll use to build content, my target persona, and my call to action (this is really important for conversion – tell readers what you want them to do after reading your content).

Double dipping

Creating content is expensive (in terms of time and other resources). BTW, if you’re paying someone a few dollars to create content, you’re probably wasting your time and money. What you’re likely getting is rehashed duplicate content they sell to a number of sites, which could hurt your results. Content marketing is important, so treat it like it is.

Once you’ve created unique, valuable content, your content marketing strategy should include multiple ways to use that content. At a minimum, you should be sharing your long-form content (blogs) using social networks like Facebook and Twitter (I include these sharing strategies in my content marketing calendar).

Also, consider sharing your content in your newsletters or sending it to folks you think would benefit from reading the content. Create an ebook or infographic by combining several posts on the same topic together.

Well, that’s probably enough for today. Wishing you a Happy New Year from the team at Hausman & Associates

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