Content Marketing Strategy Questions!

The #1 reason when you start creating your content strategy should be to hone in your target audience segment and then create content that resonates with that audience segment. Your goal should be to create content that inspires readers to take action like signing up for your newsletter, buying your product, and any other strategy that brings them closer to your preferred business outcome.

Your social content should be a tool by which you can attract new visitors to your site then engage them with your meaningful and relevant content and finally inspire them to take action. Taking action could mean signing up for your newsletter, purchasing your product, or maybe simply liking your Facebook business page.

You need to first identify the goals of your current customers and their common characteristics. If you have no customers then start with creating your ideal customer persona and what traits or characteristics they have. These are the insights you should incorporate into your content plan.

Your content marketing strategy should always focus on specific business outcomes and not so much on Social KPI's like number of fans, retweets, etc. Even though KPI's can provide an initial boost for final business outcomes but your focus when creating your content strategy should be focused on end result which in this case is specific business outcomes. As Lee Odden said there are too many businesses focused on KPI's as opposed to specific business outcomes which is deadly sin of content marketing.

This was a study done by AOL in 2011 titled "Content is the Fuel of Social Web" and mentioned that 60% of Content-Sharing Messages Specifically Mention a Brand or Product Name.

With social content there are multiple customer touchpoints and so as content strategist it is critical you cover all your bases.

Network effectiveness can be measured with how engaged your network of followers are with your brand and if they trust your brand. This group of engaged followers who would retweet your messages can be seen as you have a better network effectiveness compared to your competition.

Lee shared the classic Hub & Spoke model with content as your hub and then social media sites as your spokes where you are leveraging social channels to distribute your content.

When you run out of ideas, Lee Odden suggested to tap into social monitoring tools where you can drill down into topics. Those topics will provide you ideas with what people are searching for and what are some of the hot topics and keywords. Also, your interaction with your customers can provide you with great ideas on new content ideas since if your customers are facing a specific problem then many others would be facing similar problems or issues.

The more specific type of keyword search implies that a searcher is way down the purchase funnel. Remember, keywords can be bucketed into research type keywords, comparison keywords, and then more specific keywords when they know the type of product they are looking to buy.