Every business owner is looking to increase his online visibility. Some will choose to rent an audience, via advertising lilke Adwords, Newspapers and Billboards. Those who would rather earn their audience, will lean on content marketing services, including blog posts, ebooks, SEO, landing pages, social media marketing and email marketing. They will use content marketing strategies to build their traffic, leads and revenue.

Whether you hire a content marketing agency or execute the content strategy on your own, let’s look at the five steps that make up any business owner’s smart content marketing strategy.

Content Marketing - Step One: SMART Goals

All plans start with goals, but we must ensure that our goals are SMART goals. SMART goals are:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Relevant

• Timely

Work with your content marketing agency to define and solidify goals. They must be specific, attainable and measurable, and will ideally tie back to revenue.

Content Marketing - Step Two: Marketing Personas

You must create personas that define your target market. No business has just one customer. Most businesses sell several products or services and each is relevant to 3-5 customer types at the least.

Personas allow us to target distinct groups of people who could benefit from your product. You should create several personas for each product or service. You can use these to guide your content marketing efforts and to guide partnership opportunities.

Content Marketing - Step Three: Content Marketing Strategy

You should create an Editorial Calendar, with content mapping wireframes, that will guide your content marketing efforts.

Content Marketing - Step Four: Execution of Content Marketing Strategy

Content creation commences in this phase. You, or your content marketing agency, will execute, perhaps with a team of freelance writers, your content marketing strategy. They will create content that educates and supports your customers and prospects in their business efforts. The content will also walk them through the sales process, with support from forms, CTAs (calls-to-action), and great downloadable offers and webinars.

The materials created by your content marketing agency will create a buying need and affirm their smart purchase. The content generated will reinforce the buying decision and create a desire to share your product with others. In short, people will understand the product, the story behind it and will love it and desire to share it.

Content Marketing - Step Five: Measure and Refine

Any content marketing agency worth its salt will religiously monitor your efforts. If you are managing your own content marketing services, you should make it a point to monitor your efforts on a regular basis.

How many leads did content offer #2 bring in? How does that compare with our Webinar efforts? How much time and spend went into each? Was the email marketing template effective? Is that effort worth the spend? Can we repurpose the content into another avenue?

Content Marketing isn’t rocket science, but it does require significant effort and a dedication to writing and continued measurement. If you believe in the value of content marketing but do not have the time to make it happen, consider outsourcing the content strategy, content generation or both to a marketing agency with strong content marketing experience.

Whether you choose Mariposa for your content marketing needs or decide to go it on our own, please feel free to utilize our tools to assist you in your efforts.