Before you can create any sort of content marketing strategy, whether it is online or otherwise, you need to get to know your target audience. However, contrary to most traditional methods, writing quality content for marketing purposes requires you to know more about your audience than simply who your target demographic is.

Content marketing requires you to write blog posts, articles, and create graphics that engage your audience. In order to accomplish that, you need to have a clear understanding of what your potential customers are looking for. Who are they? What are their interests? What help they are looking for? And what words and phrases do they use to find answers to such questions?

For example, a dental digital marketing strategy and a pharmaceutical digital marketing strategy may focus on two separate audiences, although both are healthcare related. While the dental business targets patients, the pharmaceutical field focuses on physicians, so the content is quite diverse.

One you have a solid understanding of your audience, you will be much more successful in your content marketing efforts. To achieve that you need to conduct thorough research and creating personas can be a great way to start.

While this may sound obvious it is not obvious to everyone. Once you know who your audience is, your writing should be addressed to them. Starting with topic selection and ending by your final edits, your audience should play a big role in the way you present your content.

Right from the get-go, you should cover topics that your potential customers may want to read and learn about. This process may be challenging and sometimes you may be wrong, but you can start with these ways to find good ideas that they’ll love.

Creating content that is primarily informative can be quite challenging and if you have been writing sale copy for years with the goal of driving conversions, it is too easy to fall back on such language.

So be conscious of this distinction, and draft your content carefully to so that it will inform your readers. Today’s consumers are more likely to tune out content that is promotional, so this type of content could easily ruin your chances of creating trust with your site visitors. As an alternative, when marketing your products or services to your customers through content, tell them what you do and why it is important. Try to get a clear picture of what the advantages are to your company, and how you can draw potential customers and turn them into paying ones.

Research your competitors

Given the fact that nearly 50% of B2B marketers and nearly 80% of B2C marketers utilize content marketing, you are probably not the first and only business in your industry who is attempting to generate more customers using content marketing. And despite the fact that you may have competition, this also means that there is a big opportunity to copy what other people are creating.

By looking at what other businesses in your industry, top competitors specifically, are doing with their content strategies. Important points to notice are the formats they are using, the topics they are discussing, and how their readers are responding.

While your competitor can be a great source for new ideas, you should try to avoid publishing content that is too similar. After all, the main goal of content marketing is to provide your customers with something new and not with information that was already covered and easily available online.

So, if you find a great idea, make sure to resist the temptation to simply replicate it with some minor changes. Instead, look at the topic as a starting point, and look for other ways you could create a unique angle.

Setting measurable goals

Similarly to any marketing strategy, you should create concrete goals for your site content. So before getting started, make sure you first determine what objectives you wish to accomplish.

Ask yourself if you are looking to boost site traffic, get shares on social media, attract first-time visitors, or generate sign-ups for an email list. With content marketing there are many metrics you can measure, so it’s crucial to figure out which ones are the most important for your business ahead of time.

Once you create and publish new content on your site, make sure to regularly study your progress and how and weather it meets your goals. It’s easy to simply look at the volume of pages you’ve published and feel like you’ve accomplished something, but it’s absolutely crucial to look at whether or not those pages are actually generating the results.

Make sure to check Google Analytics or any similar analytics program a part of your working routine. Tracking the metrics that indicate overall performance will help you tweak your performance. If things are moving forward as expected, keep doing the same. But if not, use that data to optimize your strategy to become more effective.