With the right strategy and execution you can easily create a successful content marketing plan to gain more traffic & online sales. In fact, content marketing is actually one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies around. According to Nielsen, content marketing drives three times the sales as digital advertising.

So how should you approach your first content marketing campaign? We’ve broken it down into 4 useful tips.

1- Prepare Your Content Based on a User Persona and Use the Right Tools

Content writing is both an art and science. Before you start preparing content for your audience, it is essential to identify the various user personas based on the behavior and demographics of the audiences. You can easily create a user persona using Xtensio. Once you have your target audience in mind, then it’s time to actually start preparing the content using the right tools as explained below:

• • Use content discovery platforms like BuzzSumo to identify content titles that have worked well for other businesses.
  • Once you have the idea, use Portent’s Content Idea Generator to generate unique titles for your blog posts.
  • Then check out whether your title has the punch to make people click with CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. As this analyzer tool will look at your headline type, character count and word count to increase your overall score.
  • You may even use Thrive Headline Optimizer from Thrive Themes that permits you to test many headlines until you find that perfect headline for your epic content.
  • Now, start preparing the content and check the grammar with Grammarly.

2- Create a Brand Story

The common mistake people make when creating brand stories is that they confuse storytelling with selling. Remember these are two different things.

Storytelling is a strategy aimed at generating powerful relationships with customers. You are trying to identify & connect with your consumers. Don’t force a loud sales pitch down their throats. The below image describes how to craft a reactive storytelling.

Neil Patel and Quick Sprout have clearly described how to develop and tell a brand story. You just need to be clear and conversational. Don’t give confusing marketing talk! Instead craft real and honest content that clearly projects who your company is and what it stands for. #bereal #beauthentic

3-  Perform a Content Audit

It’s essential that you take a deep look at your current content before launching a campaign. A full content audit will allow you to:

• Identify problems with content, broken links, performance issues so that your current content performs well.
• Determine content that you could repurpose or reuse for your new campaign.
• Evaluate your content’s quality and assess what needs to be updated for new visitors.

The objective for this audit is to identify if the information you provide about your products or services aligns with your new strategy.

4- Publish, Syndicate and Follow Up

Share your content on various social media platforms by using Buffer.

Thereafter, find key influencers to promote your content with tools like Influence.co and finally track the impact of your content strategy, such as retweets and likes with the help of Klout.

Promote and syndicate those posts to your social media networks as a brand as well as an individual after publishing. Follow up by engaging with those who choose to comment or share your content.

Carefully evaluate the performance of your content. Implement KPIs such as increase in number of page-views, increase in number of blog traffic, or increase in number of newsletter opt-ins. Take learnings from the performance of content posts to reveal where there’s room for improvement. Identify and list out points of attack for future posts. Take what you learn and publish optimized content for future posts.

If you have had some strategies which you personally implemented and earned an effective output, we’d love to hear about it. Please share with us.