What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
It has never been more important to establish your business as trustworthy and authoritative online. If you hope to establish your brand identity and become known as a leader in your niche, having a clear content marketing strategy is crucial. It goes beyond more than basic content creation. You must set objectives, conduct thorough competitor research and gap analysis, focus on optimizing existing content, publish your pages, and continue to track their performance using complex SEO tools like SEMrush, Google Analytics, or Screaming Frog.
However, unless you are a digital marketing professional, you may have no idea how to analyze your competitors or create a powerful content marketing plan. Acadia Content Solutions offers a proven method of developing comprehensive content marketing strategies designed to rank. When you are focusing on driving organic growth for your business, we can help you balance every element of the content creation process.
Your Business Needs a Comprehensive Content Marketing Strategy: Here’s Why
Your content marketing strategy should be designed to attract your target audience and convert web traffic into leads. This is most often done by creating, publishing, and promoting content that serves your target audiences’ needs.
What information is your target audience going to be looking for when they land on this specific page? How is this information going to serve them and ultimately lead them to contact your business for help?
The best way to be successful in your content marketing strategy is by building brand awareness and trust. Your content marketing strategy should build your company up as an authority within your niche. Because of your expertise in your field, your brand should convey that you are a trustworthy and authoritative source for the information your target audience needs.
However, it is more than creating blog posts, free downloadables, and other informational materials. Your content should leverage SEO to drive organic traffic so your target audiences discover you and ultimately decide to choose your company to solve whatever problem they are facing.
Acadia Content Solutions’ Elements of a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy
Acadia Content Solutions uses our comprehensive content marketing strategy to help our clients boost rankings, build authoritativeness and trust, and drive organic traffic. To start, we need to conduct an extensive analysis of your existing website and assess your competitors.
We do this through in-depth gap analysis, site audits, and competitor research. Once we have reviewed the analytics, we will have a better understanding of how to approach your content creation, publishing, and tracking records.
Competitor Research and Site Audits
Set Content Goals
Before we start working on your content marketing strategy, we need to determine your goals. Content marketing is only one element of the web optimization process. We need to manage expectations from the start if we hope to help your business achieve your marketing goals.
These goals will act as the framework of your entire marketing strategy. Some of the most common goals we have set for our clients include:
Boosting search engine rankings and organic traffic
Driving business growth and increasing revenue
Focusing on quality backlinks and long tail keywords
Increasing generation and brand awareness
Define Your Target Audience
Next, we need to define your target audience. This helps us truly understand our client's services, products, and what information their audience is going to be looking for when conducting Internet searches. Acadia Content Solutions uses the most powerful analytics tools available, including SEMrush, SurferSEO, AHrefs, Answer the Public, and Google Analytics.
As we define your target audience, we will also need to measure the current health of your website, the performance of live content, and your top competitors. We will make note of your preferred tone of voice and branding as we craft your content marketing strategy, keeping in mind your goals and managing expectations along the way. This will help us make data-driven and effective decisions about which types of content are going to be the most successful for your website.
Conduct Thorough Competitor Research
While building your content marketing strategy, we need to focus on competitor research. Generally, this involves identifying the top three competitors in your niche and which keywords they are ranking for. We will analyze your competitors to determine:
Which topics they are ranking for
Which of their web pages gets the most organic traffic
Which high-quality keywords they rank for
Which types of pages are ranking well
Which types of content they are producing
Comprehensive competitor analysis allows us to identify the most useful keywords, uncover relevant keywords you may not have initially been targeting, and the types of content we need to create to outrank the competition.
Run a Comprehensive Content Audit
After completing our competitor analysis, we need to carefully review your website's existing content. This does not only include your About Me or Home pages, but your blog posts, landing pages, press releases, FAQs, and any other content you have published on your site. Using analytics to measure conversions and engagement, we use Google Sheets to sort existing pages and determine the traffic, rankings, and quality of the content.
In some instances, we won't need to do anything if the page is already ranking and performing well. However, for the pages that are hindering your website, we will need to re-optimize or delete them. One of the most important parts of your content marketing strategy is figuring out which pages need to be adjusted for SEO value. With this information, we can start to build out your pillars and fill in the gaps with evergreen high-quality content.
Complete In-Depth Keyword Research
Keyword research is an essential element of any content marketing strategy. These are the search phrases and target keywords your audience is going to be searching for on Google. During our competitor research and gap analysis, we will develop a comprehensive list of high-value keywords that we should target. This will become the foundation of your content plan.
We will take into consideration keyword difficulty and search volume as we are building your keyword campaign. We will need to consider other factors as well, such as the strength of your site, which keywords your competitors are ranking for, and our chances of ranking for that specific keyword using SEO best practices. Our favorite part is identifying gaps where your competitors are falling short and you can reign supreme.
Map Out Your Topics and Content Pillars
Once we have completed your keyword campaign, it is time to map out your topics and content pillars. Once we have established which pillars or silos you will want to anchor to your content marketing strategy, we can use these to link out to topic clusters that will form your child pages and blog posts.
Create Your Custom Content Calendar
Now it is time to create your custom content calendar. Acadia Content Solutions uses Google Calendar and Tasks to stay organized and Gmail to communicate with clients easily. Your content calendar will outline the types of content we are planning to produce, the keywords we are targeting, when the content will be written, and when it should be published.
Your editorial calendar can be fully customized to meet your content marketing needs. We often create editorial calendars in 12-week intervals which give us enough time to strategize, create, and publish content consistently with enough time to analyze the page performance results and adapt our next round of content to maximize our client’s ROI.
Turn Our Attention to Content Production
After completing our site audit, competitor research, and target keyword analysis, it is time to focus on content production and SEO writing.
SEO Content Writing
SEO content writing involves writing content in a way that matches the search intent of your target user. Search engines do not rank based on keywords alone. Google will push pages higher up in the rankings if they offer solutions and provide relevant answers to reader's queries.
We use Google Sheets to organize our content plans for the weeks and months ahead. These sheets describe the H1 or target keyword, keywords that should be included in the content, content outline or topics that should be covered within the page, and a comprehensive internal and external linking strategy.
Acadia Content Solutions writes content using human writers. We never use AI programs like ChatGPT, Content to Scale, or other popular generative AI software, as these programs lack the human element and often generate incorrect, insensitive, and poorly written content. In fact, Google and other search engines are beginning to penalize websites that use AI-generated content. Our human writers ensure every piece of content:
Is search engine optimized with carefully thought out H1s, H2s, and H3s
Has bullet points, numbered lists, and broken-up content to improve scannability
Is written for the appropriate audience
Maintains a consistent brand voice specific to your business needs
Includes infographics and captivating images where appropriate
Keywords will be strategically included throughout the piece to enrich the quality of the content. We also ensure all pages are equipped with title tags and meta-descriptions, and include a call to action to close out the page and prompt your reader to respond in a way that will help you achieve your content marketing goals.
We use Grammarly to ensure all pages are free of errors, Copyscape to ensure the page is original, unique, and free from plagiarism, and a combination of Originality AI and Copyleaks to protect ourselves from potential allegations of AI use before submitting content to our clients for publishing.
Revitalize Existing Content
Not only will we create new content for your website, but we will also revitalize your existing content. When you have pages that are not performing well or should be scrapped, Acadia Content Solutions can analyze these pages through content repurposing. We will carefully evaluate the page using SEO best practices to determine why the page is not performing well and re-optimize it.
This might include implementing the placement of keywords and supporting keywords, including internal and external links, deleting instances of keyword stuffing, and writing additional content that should have been included on the original page.
Tracking Client Results
Once your pages have been created, edited, optimized, and published, we will forecast analytics and track metrics to ensure your content is reaching your intended goals. We will need to continue to audit your existing content and make updates as needed.
Acadia Content Solutions uses SEMrush and Google Search Console to track page performance, respond to search engine algorithm updates, and update keywords as needed.
Remember, Content Strategy Should Be an Ongoing Process
It is not enough to create a few landing pages and publish weekly blog posts. Your content marketing strategy should include creating and publishing valuable content consistently. It takes time to develop an effective content marketing strategy, and even longer to see results. Search engine optimization is not the fastest solution to your ranking woes, but it is the most effective.
Supercharge Your Content Marketing Strategy: Contact Our Content Marketing Professionals for Help Today
Anything less than a well-thought-out and high-quality content marketing strategy is unacceptable. If your content marketing strategy has failed thus far, and you are unsure of what you might be doing wrong, Acadia Content Solutions can help you find answers. Our contact marketing team can analyze your existing website content, analytics, and performance to determine where you might be going wrong and what we should do to address these problems so we can increase targeted traffic to your site and scale your business.
Fortunately, you do not need to attempt to go at it alone. Connect with Dianna Mason and Acadia Content Solutions today. Request a 100% free consultation to find out what your next steps should be. You can reach us through our confidential contact form or via email at dianna@acadiacontentsolutions.com to start working on your content marketing strategy as soon as today.
