The 5-Step Content Marketing Strategy for Growth-Hacking Conversions

Is your content marketing strategy flat-lining? It’s time to growth hack your way to more conversions by using this 5-Step content marketing strategy.

The 5-Step Content Marketing Strategy for Growth-Hacking Conversions

If you’re current strategy isn’t working — it’s time to just walk away from it.

To make your content marketing work for your business in 2019, you must have a well thought-out and researched content marketing strategy. There’s no other option.

The reason why it’s time to get serious about it is that having content alone doesn’t enhance your online marketing results. In fact, you may have the best content in the world, but if you put it out there with no purpose, no target audience, and no strategy, chances are high that you’ll fail miserably.

To have a meaningful impact on your business’s bottom line as well as your prospective customers, your content effort needs a clearly defined plan.

Here’s some evidence to back this up.

Content Marketing Institute’s 2018 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends – North America report found that strategy was the number one factor contributing to B2C marketers’ increased content marketing success.

Content Marketing Institute’s 2018 Benchmarks

Credit: Content Marketing Institute

As you can see, marketers thought that strategy was perceived as more important than content creation and distribution, which supports the whole idea that a lack of strategy and planning leads to failure even with great content.

The same report also claims that 59 percent of the most successful marketers have a well-defined and documented content strategy while only 15 percent of the least successful ones do.

Obviously, a documented content strategy is a major precursor of success in online marketing. To help you with creating one for your business, I’ve compiled these five steps that you’ll need to take.

This framework will help you to create a plan that’s strong enough to assist you in making your online presence felt by the right people.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy for High Conversions

Step #1: Establish Measurable Goals

Before you do anything, ask yourself the following question:

  • What’s the main goal of the content strategy that you’re about to create?

If you’re not sure, here are the most common business goals that online entrepreneurs pursue:

Content marketing can help you with achieving all of that. So, spend some time thinking about the goals for your strategy and explain the main reason why you should try and accomplish them.

For example, your current number of leads that you get might be low, which is a legit reason for making “increasing the number of leads to X” one of the strategy’s goals.

Also, keep in mind that all the goals you create should be measurable to be able to assess your performance in the future. Here are some examples:

  • Get 700 new email newsletter subscribers in three months
  • Hit 2,000 followers on Facebook and LinkedIn by the end of June.

Step #2: Truly Understand Your Customers

Customer-centered content is a must for businesses in 2019, so you need to find out what your prospective customers want to be able to create content they’d find interesting and engaging.

To achieve this goal, you need to conduct some research. Go to your Google Analytics and other tools that you use to collect customer data (don’t forget that you can ask them directly as well with tools like surveys), and build buyer personas.

These are representations of ideal customers that identify their interests, preferences, common problems, and needs. To maximize the ability of content to meet the needs of your audience, however, you’ll need to go beyond traditional information included in content personas.

“One way to do that is to divide each persona into demographics and psychographics. The first respective group includes traditional information such as age, gender, location etc.,” explains Troy Evans, a content specialist at Studicus.com. “The second one, however, contains feelings and thoughts of that persona; for example, here you describe the lifestyle, beliefs, attitudes, and personality.”

Here’s an example:

Explorer: psychographic variables include experience, new frontiers, independence, and challenge. In terms of choice of brands to follow and buy from, this persona values instant effect, adventure, uniqueness, and sensation, therefore, they are often first to try products and services from new brands.

 

Step #3: Generate Content Ideas and Determine How to Share Them

Once again, we’re going to place the customer at the center of everything we do in this step because our content should be interesting enough for them to click on it, and ultimately convert.

According to this methodology, all content ideas should be focused on helping your target audience – buyer personas we discussed in the previous section – to achieve certain goals or resolve some issues.

For example, let’s suppose you’re running a wine blog. The main goal is to help people become wine experts as well as experienced wine lovers to discover more about their favorite alcohol drink.

In this case, you’ll have to create at least two buyer personas: a beginner and an experienced wine drinker, and produce content for both of them. For example, you can write a beginner guide to Chilean wines for the first respective persona and something more advanced like a guide to rare wines or blending.

Ultimately, you can produce different content types such as blog posts, guides, videos, and even podcasts, and sell a range of merchandise, including both print and electronic wine guides, wine maps, books, and tasting tools.

At this point, you also need to plan content distribution channels. The most common ones include a website and social media profiles, but you can also consider guest posting, email marketing, and paid ads.

 

Step #4: Distribute Your Content

Now that you began producing your great content, it’s time to share it with your target audience.

As I repeatedly mentioned above, content distribution should follow a specific strategy to be effective, and that’s what we’re going to do.

While there’s no universal formula on the best time to share content online to achieve maximum conversions, some trends show that bloggers and businesses tend to profit more from following certain distribution patterns.

For example, a recent survey performed by OrbitMedia found the following percentage of bloggers who reported getting “strong results” by publishing frequency.

publishing frequency

Obviously, sharing content often is a great way to go to achieve good readership, and therefore, increase the chance of great conversion rate.

 

Step #5: Measure the Performance of Your Strategy

The last step in our guide is actually the most important one because it shows whether your effort is helping to accomplish the goals you defined in the first step.

Use Google Analytics and other analysis tools to determine the most popular content as well as the content that doesn’t work so you can focus on the best performing types.

Bloggers who measure results by checking analytics often are more likely to report good results, according to the aforementioned OrbitMedia survey, so don’t underestimate the power of this technique for improving your content’s performance.

measure results

The essential indicators that should be monitored include customer engagement (opens, views, shares, time spent on page, and downloads), and business impact (the content that has the most impact on conversions).

 

The Bottom Line

If you want to win at content marketing, you must take time to go through all of this and plan for success. Develop a thorough understanding of your customers before you do anything, work on fresh and original content ideas, and be consistent with production, and you’ll dramatically increase the chance of growth-hacking conversions.