If you are a content marketer or you want to start content marketing for your organization, developing a killer content strategy is a must-have factor.

If you already have a content strategy, but it is not working for you, it is never late to revisit the strategy.

Seat with your team, find out the points that are not working for you. Remember, you have such a huge competition out there that one wrong step can destroy your entire strategy and the outcome.

According to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers are creating more contents this year than ever.

So, it is a high time when you take your content marketing strategy seriously.

Crafting valuable content constantly is so hard sometimes that you feel banging your head on the wall. You will either run out of ideas, or you will have so many ideas that you will struggle to wrangle and decide.

That is the reason you need a proper list of tips, tools, and procedures to follow in developing a winning content strategy.

Keep Your Strategy Simple, Clear and Understandable

In the course of creating a core team and developing valuable contents, you may forget about the simplicity and clear process of the whole strategy.

Is your content marketing strategy is describable in a few words or sentence?

Is it clear enough to let an outsider understand the entire process easily?

If not, you need to fix your content creation process.

Give a detailed look at your process and find out what you can do to make it clearer and simpler. Sit with your core team and discuss the entire process.

Take advises from them, let your team land their views on the strategy and how they feel the process can be better.

Use Old School Tools

Although there are hundreds of new tools out there which can help you to run a great content marketing campaign, for a small organization, it is always better to use old school tools like Excel, Google Sheets, Google Docs, Outlook, Gmail, etc. Use the tools that can everyone is aware of. It saves your time and also streamlines your process.

For example, I use Google sheets to keep a record of every project. It helps me to have all the details about the writers, clients, topics, campaign style, and target, etc. in one simple place.

Target Audience

If you are around this industry for a fair bit of time or if you are just a starter, you must have heard the word “Target Audience.” For a very good reason, this term is always the primary factor of any content marketing campaign.

Without the in-depth knowledge on your target audience, you will not be able to produce relevant, reliable and worthy content. You are probably creating great contents day and night, but if your content is not what your target audience cares about, then there is no use of those words.

Keyword Analysis

Although the keyword is not the primary SEO factor to rank your website in google anymore, keyword still has a significant part to play in your content strategy. Keywords are the key factors that let you determine what kind of content you should produce.

Use keyword analysis tool to find what search phrases are bringing you the traffic and find out what keywords you should concentrate on to develop your content strategy.

The keyword trend changes with time, so it is very important to keep an eye on the keyword changing pattern all the time. Google keyword planner is the most used keyword analysis tool. I use KW Finder tool that lets you find you the keywords that are working well in your niche and also lets you find keywords that are still easy to rank and can be used to improve your content strategy.

You can also use other tools like SEMRush to do a thorough SEO analysis of your website and improve the performance of your content according to the data you receive. 

Management

Like any other sector of your organization, the content strategy also needs structured and dedicated management. Without a proper management team, it is always next to impossible to rank your website in this competitive era. Almost every niche is populated by millions of blogs and high-quality contents. To stand out, you always have to keep your content planning updated. Create a core team that is dedicated and experienced in this task. Hire top writers and SEO experts. Many organizations are hiring freelance content writers and creating high-quality SEO contents that help them to rank higher.

Check out this content marketing report for detailed observation of how content marketing can influence your brand reputation.

Creating a killer content strategy is always tricky, but following the aforementioned steps, you must be able to give the entire process a solid structure.