Looking to step up your content marketing game in the new year? Here are 10 simple steps for mastering your content marketing strategy:
- Document your starting point. What is it that you want to measure? For Summit CPA, I recorded our Domain Authority and number of external links to our website. This gives you something to look back on to see your progress. In 18 months, we increased our domain authority by 10 points and the external links to our website by almost 100%.
- Define your target audience. Your target audience is your ideal client or customer. Clearly defining your audience will help you and your team focus your content on the specific type of person who will be most likely to find value from it, engage with it, and potentially convert to a paying client/customer.
- Determine your core topics. What are the primary topics your content should be covering? Your core topics might be your primary service area(s) and/or general topics that your target audience will be interested in and relate to the product or service that you offer.
- Do your keyword research. Use SEO tools such as Moz and SEMRush to hone in on the keywords where you have the most opportunity for ranking. This can take quite a bit of time up front, but once you determine these keywords, your strategy can include targeting opportunities for SERP features (i.e. Featured Snippets, Videos, Reviews, etc.) which will help get your content in front of a larger audience.
- Optimize your landing pages. Optimize your core pages for performance as well as SEO. It’s extremely important that when someone visits your website or landing page, the information and next step(s) are clear. Whatever you want them to do next – i.e. download a guide, sign up for your email list, purchase your product, etc. – make sure that’s clear and easy to find.
- Develop your content. Now that you’ve developed the resources above, you’re ready to write content on your core topics for your target audience, using your specific keywords and linking to your optimized landing page(s).
- Publish your content. You will likely want to publish some of your content on your own blog, Medium, LinkedIn, etc.
- Establish collaboration partners. Research websites and blogs you can reach out to with your content ideas. You can use a tool like SEMRush to get recommendations on sites to pursue for your specific keywords. Collaborating with other sites helps get your content in front of their audience and increases the links back to your site which is important for SEO.
- Share your content. Share your content on all of your social media channels. Establish a list of “evergreen content” that can be shared multiple times.
- Find ways to repurpose content. For most of my tips above I was referring to written content. If you have a podcast or do video marketing, you should also be mindful of your target audience, core topics, etc., and you should, of course, collaborate with other sites and share this type of content on social media. You can also repurpose audio or video content by converting it to blog posts and articles.
Those are my 10 tips around mastering your content marketing strategy. If you have other tips, share them in the comments section below.