Content marketing strategy is very important to the success of content marketing. There are a lot of things you need to consider when creating your content marketing strategy, such as your audience, buying stages, keywords, editorial calendar etc.

1. Content Marketing Strategy Checklist
By
Hephzibah Asaolu
www.hephzysocial.com

2. Once you have defined your business objective, it will be easy for you to design a
content strategy around it. Below are the key areas of your content marketing
strategy you need to take care of:
1. Audience
Most successful companies out there know and understand their customers while
the best marketers understand their audience. In order to know your audience
properly, you need to ask the following questions:
1. What did they care about?
2. What are their interests and motivators?
3. What are their pain points?
The issue now is to use your content to address the above concerns effectively.
You need to create content that your audience will consume using the channels
they prefer to consume it. Knowing your audience will help you to create
contents that are engaging and relevant that can convert your potential and
existing customers into loyal customers and passionate brand enthusiasts.
Buying stages
Now that you know who your audience is, it is time to know the stages they will
go through to buy from you. Here, we will use this model (shown below).

3. Suspects: These are potential customers that have not taken any action after
reading/listening to your content. They may or may not buy your product at the
end of the day. Here, you need to provide lots of valuable information that will
help your suspects.
Prospects: These are people who have read content and have at one point on the
other in the sales funnel supplied you with their personal information. The
content you provide at this stage will need to be able to make your prospects
want more information. This can be free e-books/reports, free e-course etc.
Leads: This is the stage where you know the prospects is interested in your
business by their actions.
Opportunities: This is when your content has helped your prospect and they are
looking to make purchases from you.

4. Your contents need to be constructed in a way that will encourage people to
move along the funnels above, so that you can convert them appropriately. It
needs to be evergreen contents i.e. fresh and provides information that readers
seek and read regardless of its timeliness. This way, it will continue to drive traffic,
long after it is written.
It will be helpful, if you can list the questions buyers are asking at each of these
three stages, so that you can develop content that will answer the questions
effectively.
For instance, for my company (hephzysocial), I cater for content marketing needs
of companies/businesses. Therefore, the question I need to provide answers on
are:
1. How do I create a content marketing strategy?
2. How do I decide what content to produce?
3. How do I best spend my content budget? etc
I need to create content that will answer these questions.
Keywords
Now that you know your audience and the buying stage, it is time to look for
keywords they are using to search for your business. These are the keywords that
will drive traffic to your website. There are a good number of keywords tools you
can use starting from the good, old Google.

5. Google suggest
The first one is called Google suggest. All you need is to type in your keyword and
you will see suggestions about what people are searching for based on your
keyword.
From the image above, you can see the suggestions of what people are searching
for based on my seed keyword "content marketing strategy".
Google Adword planner

6. This is a more detailed keyword tool, also from Google. You need a Gmail account
to use it. Once, you sign in with your Gmail account, click on "search for new
keyword and ad group ideas" as shown below:
Type in your product/service keyword. In my own case, just like before, I will put
in "Content marketing". Click on keyword ideas.

7. You can see a lot of keywords displayed below. All you need is to create content
based on the keywords and weave it together with your audience problems and
solutions and you have a winner there.
Now that you have what it takes to create a good, high quality and valuable
information for your audience, it is time to design your editorial calendar.
Editorial calendar
In my post "How to create a Content marketing editorial calendar" I explained in
detail on how to create a good editorial calendar. An editorial calendar should be
part and parcel of your content strategy. If you have a seasonal objective, your
calendar need to align with the content you would want to create. You can plan
an editorial calendar for a week, month, 3 months, 6 or even one year.

8. Resources
Now that you know the checklist you need to incorporate into your content
strategy, you need to prepare your resources adequately to tackle the
challenge. Know the number of content you need to create and the effort you
need to put in to get the desired result. You can outsource these tasks to be a
seasoned "content marketer" or build an in-house resources for it.
I invite you to check out my blog www.hephzysocial.com and read interesting
posts that will help you to skyrocket your business to the next level.
ABOUT HEPHZYSOCIAL
READY TO TAKE YOUR BUSINESS TO THE NEXT LEVEL?
Then you are in the right place.
Here's the deal:
If you need contents to:
* Generate leads to follow up by sales and marketing teams
* Help your sales team close sales more quickly
* Generate interest in your products
* Build and repair public opinion about your brand and products
* Develop friends and fans who interact with your brand socially
* Help customers get the most from your products
Then you are in the right place.
HOW HEPHZYSOCIAL CAN HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS
I'm a big believer that every online marketer must master the art of content
marketing and promotion. But with the increasing amounts of information out
there, how can you find practical techniques that will help you to achieve the
goals highlighted above?
That's where Hephzysocial comes in.

9. Hephzysocial has grown into one of the most popular content marketing sites on
the web for one simple reason:
Everything I publish is super actionable and designed to help you get more leads,
customers and sales.
You can get in touch with me through my contact page or send a mail to
hephzysocial@gmail.com.