How to Create a Content Strategy that Drives Results

As a creator seeking to create impact and deliver high ROIs, one of the most realistic ways to achieve your goals is to create a highly effective content marketing strategy, that can drive results.

Doing this gets you started from the get go, gets your content well coordinated and more targeted at delivering on expected outcomes.

Although most content creators do not have an idea on how to create an effective content marketing strategy that can deliver on expected outcomes, the few that have a marketing strategy in place have been able to create impactful results.

In this guide, i’ll be i’ll be showing you in the following paragraphs, the key steps you can use to create a content strategy that will deliver on your content outcomes consistently, regardless of whether you’re a beginner or not.

Now before we get started, let’s get to explain some terms below…

What is effective content marketing strategy?

An effective content marketing strategy is a strategy that delivers the expected outcomes for a content marketing campaign.

For a content marketing strategy to be effective, it means that the strategy has successfully delivered on all (or a large percentage) of your deliverables or expected goals for the content.

Now, in the following paragraphs, I’m going to outline the most important elements of an effective content marketing strategy below…

Goal Oriented

An effective content marketing strategy is goal oriented. It is targeted at getting you to achieve specific outcomes, set out for your content marketing effort. This is what you should go for.

Before setting out your strategy, you want to outline the goals you aim to achieve with the content marketing campaign, alongside the impact these goals will have on your business.

As soon as your goals are all sorted out, you can then bring in on board, the other key aspects of your strategy.

A Clearly Identified Audience

An effective content marketing strategy is one built around the right target audience.

Without knowing your ideal target audience clearly, there’s a large chance your content marketing will flop because you’ll be targeting the wrong people.

So, before you get started with evolving what’s supposed to be your strategic content marketing blueprint, you need to find out who exactly you want to shoot out for.

Since you already understand your goals and the kind of content you’re creating, you now have to identify the target audience that will be interested in that kind of content.

Find out some important data on them that can help you create content just the way they’ll like to have it.

After that, work on using this data to create your content and get it across to them, right where they are.

Well Understood Strength & Weaknesses

An effective content strategies puts into considerations, the fact that just as much as you have strength and unique opportunities, you also have weaknesses and factors that may impact your success.

When you get to this point during the creation of your content marketing strategy, you want to work on a SWOT analysis of your chances.

You want to understand clearly, what are my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or what are the observable threats I can utilize to get a better delivery for my content strategy.

With a good knowledge of your strengths as a brand, you’ll already get to know the areas you can project in your content marketing.

Same goes for your weakness. With a good understanding of your area of weaknesses you will fine tune your strategy to reduce it’s impact on your overall success.

Also, the more you understand your opportunities and threats, the better you’re able to position your content to feed on opportunities while limiting the effects of possible threats before it happens.

Data based Strategy

As a creator, understand; an effective content marketing strategy utilizes a data driven approach to deliver on successful content marketing.

Reason?

The digital world is very dynamic. Trends change easily. And sometimes, what’s important to your audience today can become outdated, a few weeks after you post it.

So, you don’t just want to create content, you need data on what’s trending because you don’t want to be left creating content on topics that your audience have stopped caring about

For this reason, you want to be on top of the trends.

You want to know what’s happening in your industry and then create a content strategy with this in perspective.

Also, to create consistent result with your content marketing strategy, you need a deep knowledge of the data on your industry and how these data affects trends.

Knowing this will get you to project possible trends and then evolve a more dynamic marketing strategy that’s realistic and in line with industry trends.

A well Understood Competition

As you work on evolving an effective content marketing strategy for your platforms, you also want to have an idea about where your competition is going.

Knowing this is not about creating a marketing strategy that’s similar to their own…

It’s about identifying who you’re competing with, finding where the industry is going or key areas you can use to improve your own strategy and drive better results.

Also, a good knowledge of your competition can give you data to work with especially where you want to capitalize on a competition’s weaknesses or otherwise.

Well researched Keywords

An effective content marketing strategy is built around a well grounded understanding of the important keyword dynamics that will deliver results.

Without using these keywords or search terms, you’re very unlikely to create the result you want.

You don’t want to create the kind of content that’s not findable on the search engine or the ones that will not get you the traffic you are aiming at.

For this reason, you have to clearly identify your important keywords and utilize them as part of the key variables that will drive your expected deliverables.

Content Promotion & Distribution Channels

Content marketing thrives on promotion, distribution and getting your content right where your audience is gathered.

Whether you’re well optimized for the search engine or not, an effective content marketing strategy has to feature its preferred content promotion strategies and distribution channels.

These are key elements that will improve visibility for your content and subsequently create a better overall ROI on your marketing effort.

Work on mapping out the important promotional strategies you need for your content and the target platforms for content distribution.

KPIs Analysis

An effective content marketing plan acknowledges its key performance indicators (KPIs) and is also ready to measure this at intervals to really understand its performance.

The KPIs or key performance indicators are important variables that indicates the level of success or failure of your strategy.

Without setting out your KPIs, you can’t really measure whether you your marketing strategy is effective or not.

So, based on your overall goal, after setting out your content strategy, you need to create a set of factors that will determine whether your content strategy is successful or not.

And from time to time, work on analyzing and measuring your outcomes, based on these KPIs.

This periodic analysis will decide whether you’ll need to improve on some part of your strategy, remove some part of it or effectively create something different altogether.

Final Words

Creating a content strategy for your marketing effort is very important. But even more important is creating an effective content marketing strategy that delivers consistent results.

While utilizing each of these steps you just learned in your content marketing strategy, always remember that consistency is very important. And the role of a dynamic content strategy cannot be overemphasized.

There you have the sure proof content strategy that will deliver your marketing outcomes. And of course, you can get equipped to create a far more improved marketing outcomes by joining our content marketing certification course here.

Also, reach out to us here if you need any help as regards your content marketing. Let’s help you.

Now, it’s over to you! When it comes to creating an effective content marketing strategy, what exactly are your biggest challenges? Drop your comments below.