High quality content is still the king in online marketing.  Most businesses are now focusing on creating more content than ever before. The major thing to note is that the content is used everywhere and influences every other type of marketing strategy; let that be emails, blogs, articles, press releases or even social media comments. A smart content marketing strategy helps to drive more organic traffic to your website.

Pushing out fresh content that keeps your audience engaged is the requirement that helps you score better in SEO. Professional SEO companies use advanced strategies to promote your brand and business.

Let us discuss some points that help you create a content marketing strategy that best describes your business goals.

Know your goals – Before you begin planning, define your goals. Think about how your content marketing should help you meet your objectives such as

• Organic traffic
• Developing brand awareness
• Generating sales leads, and more

Your audience is your asset

Determine your target audience and get to know them. Before you start suggesting topics and creating titles, you need to know exactly what your target audience is looking for.

Knowing your target audience needs will help you to produce more relevant and valuable content. Understand your audience clearly either using Google Analytics traffic report or with surveys. Learning to provide the right content for the right reader makes your job much easier.

There are few more tools that provide insight on your audience’s interests and requirements. Tools include

Answer the Public

The auto-suggest results provided by search engines provide insight for content marketers. When users start typing a word, Answer the Public allows them to link the keyword that relates to their product or service, the people’s queries about the concerned service, and it comes up with a number of search phrases drawn from Google, Bing and other search engines.

Twitter Audience Insights

This latest analytics tool from Twitter will provide marketers with relevant information about what kinds of people are interacting with their brand. The tool offers access to information such as key demographics, interests, lifestyle, purchasing behavior, and mobile footprint, which helps marketers know exactly what kind of people follow their brand and what sort of content attracts them to their website.

Competitor analysis, a great way to reach the right path

Grab a list of competitors, analyze them and understand what makes them different. Realizing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats helps to find what exactly your customers are searching for in your industry. This analysis also can discover the most useful keywords your clients may be using to search you.

Quality, a priority

High quality, engaging posts with useful details are likely to get more shares on social media platforms. With top quality blogs and articles, even you can get attention from your competitors or even from other industry who take your company as an expert. Also make sure to choose trending topics that are relevant for your business and include a back link to the source, which helps them to know about your article.

Get familiar with content types

Once you establish goals and your target audience, try to provide content that includes informative data that is of use for your audience.

Useful content types include

• Infographics
• Video tutorials
• Case Studies
• Social media ads
• Email newsletters
• Ebooks
• Templates
• Podcasts

Don’t just create content, track them too

Set a goal to publish one piece of content daily, weekly or in alternate days. Don’t just leave the content after publishing. Promote them and track the progress of your content. For instance, if you have posted a blog in Facebook, check how many people liked it, respond to the comments, provide answers if any questions were asked and write a follow-up blog with more updated information. This helps to keep your audience in track.

Editorial Calendar helps

Once you have an idea as to how great content can be created, then it’s the right time to go for an editorial calendar. This calendar, which includes social media posts, audit rates and more, helps to keep track of your content. They are extremely helpful to organize our workflow without any error.

Editorial calendar –

• Provides chance to carefully plan content creation beforehand
• Helps writers to overcome writer’s block
• Allows to keep track of every single post in social media
• Maintain the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content on website

Social media is your friend

Engaging with your audiences in real conversations will bring better results and add more value to your social streams. Know your audience’s priorities as you plan. Focus on what they want to know and not what you want to tell them. Also stay up to date with latest social media changes.

Learn ways to distribute your content

Ways you choose to promote your content is also important. A detailed plan will help. Few suggested ways include

• Using paid ads on social media platforms like Facebook
• Preparing a list of sites and bloggers whom you need to contact, which helps in getting a steady traffic and fresh leads
• Sending Emails and following up them using tools such as Yesware and Mixmax.

Creating a content marketing strategy may be time-consuming, but provide fruitful results for SEO.  If you are not that familiar with SEO or content, consider choosing an experienced SEO firm that can work as an extension to your company.