How To Create a Content Marketing Strategy

The Six Steps Of A Content Marketing Strategy

1. Formulate Your Goals

Let’s say you want to get more customers to buy your music software, so you decide you need a great content strategy. You calculate that you want at least 10 new people (unique visitors) to download your content every week and at least 10 unique visitors to read your blog and stay on the page for at least 2 minutes. Now you have measurable goals.

2. Examine Your Audience

Next, learn everything you can about your audience. They are professional musicians and amateurs. They are weekend wedding band warriors and music teachers, accountants, and college students. They all use your music software in different ways. And they all love it for different reasons. Survey them. Interview them. Host focus groups with them. Learn about their goals and dreams, the ways in which they interact with your software, and why they love music in the first place. The more you know your audience, the more you can create content that they will really care about.

3. Cater To Niches

In getting to know your audience, you will examine their beliefs, values, fears, and desires. It’s likely that you also identify some common themes among your audience’s thoughts about your product. In the case of our hypothetical music software, let’s imagine that you discovered that some of your customers have been letting their pets plink out tunes on a piano or keyboard, only to create loops of the melodies. Others have been playing live to scenes from hit series like “Game of Thrones” and record their orchestrations for playback later.

Discovering these unexpected commonalities (niches) are where the gold is. If you use this knowledge to create consistent, compelling content, you will tell your audience “we get you, we really get you,” without actually having to say it. And people will form an emotional connection to your brand because of it. (Think Starbucks and how cultish people are about the place.)

Now you know you need to write a “pet music: blog post, as well as establish a “Game of Thrones” blog where people can upload their music clips and chat with other musicians about them. Essentially, you can make your content marketing platform the go-to place for musicians interested in these niches.

4. Measure The Outcome

As you progress and more people visit, upload, and chat on your platform, you can look at the analytics of the engagement. How many views, downloads, shares, mentions, tweets, or other relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) does your content receive? Use this as feedback to strategically optimize your efforts.

5. Adjust & Augment

Perhaps as you measure the chatter and listen, you discover some common questions the audience has about your music software. In response, you create a how-to video with step-by-step instructions that address all their questions. You can monitor their conversations and discover other shows they are creating music for, or learn that songs by parakeets get four times the engagement as dog or cat composers. You make changes and optimizations to your content based on what you learn. This takes your content marketing solution to the next level where you can engage in an ongoing conversation and feedback loop with your customers.

6. Promote Your Content

The first five steps have given you a relationship and emotional connection to your audience. Now do the digital equivalent of shouting it from the rooftops. Let people know about your awesome “Game of Thrones” and pet song blogs and how-to videos. Post it on social media. Guest blog in music mags about it. Invite famous and not-yet-famous musicians to take over the blog with their songs for a day. (Instagram-famous Jiffpom and Nala the Cat might be prolific songwriters.) Find every avenue available to let musicians know about your song blog.
With those six steps, you have completed a content marketing strategy and are on your way to content marketing solutions that will bring you more customers and raving fans.

Contact Content Marketing Pros

Don’t want to go this alone? Inciting Marketing Solutions creates content marketing strategies for some of the most successful companies in Colorado. Contact us to discuss your goals and content marketing needs.