How To Put Together A High-Growth Content Strategy

Content marketing is one of the most fascinating areas in the digital marketing world. It’s both an art and science, and perhaps that’s why it’s attracting highly skilled technicians with a humanistic bend.

Being skilled at content marketing means you are familiar with all the most popular content platforms and formats and know how to use them to attract potential clients to your offerings. If you want to succeed, it’s high time that you set aside the newest, hottest tactics and instead focus on a long-term strategy that will help you achieve a competitive advantage that’s nearly impossible to overcome.

Implementing the right strategy is a key success factor in any intellectually demanding endeavor, such as board and card games. For example, you need to know the difference between a hard hand, and a soft hand to win a game of online blackjack, and you simply can’t beat your opponents at chess if you’re clueless about the most common openings.

You can think of your content strategy in similar terms. Recognize where all the pieces fit on your content marketing chessboard and how to deploy them with maximum efficacy. Here are a couple of ways in which you can put together a high-growth content strategy today.

Perform extensive keyword research to attract targeted traffic to your website

It doesn’t matter if you focus on writing well-polished articles for your blog, or recording entertaining videos for your YouTube channel, you need to know which keywords to target.

There are dozens of top-quality keyword research tools so use them regularly to find high-volume low-competition words to target.

It’s best to always aim for keywords that fly under the radar of other content marketers, yet hold tremendous value for you and your company because there is purchase intent behind them (meaning, the person who types the keyword in the search engine is ready to buy).

Create your unique content marketing checklist

For your content marketing strategy to perform like a well-oiled machine, you need to maintain high standards for each content format you deal with.

That’s where detailed content checklists and templates with step-by-step instructions come in. Before you ever hit publish, make sure you check off all the boxes, and you will guarantee high consistency in content quality.

For example, you might have a specific word count requirement, use detailed research and statistics in each article, cover specific SEO guidelines, decide on the types of graphics included, deploy your keywords in the most relevant areas of the article, and construct your content to get a featured snippet in Google search.

Create a content calendar and a smooth publishing process

It’s so easy to get sidetracked and start working on everything except the tasks that generate all the results for your business, which is publishing and promoting high-quality content.

That’s why, at the beginning of each month, come up with a detailed description of all the content you will release over the next 30 days.

The deadlines you set for each piece will act as an accountability system that will force you to get your work done on time. To make the process easier, you can use free project management tools such as Trello or Asana, or paid apps such as CoSchedule or HubSpot that offer more features and integrate with your CRM and other marketing systems.

Calculate the ROI of your content marketing efforts

After persisting with your content marketing strategy for around 12 months, you should have enough data to calculate the average ROI (return on investment) you can expect from each content format.

To come up with relevant numbers, you need to check metrics such as traffic, conversion rate, content marketing costs, and average earnings per marketing channel (based on your traffic monetization method).

Once you crunch the numbers, you may realize that on average you spend $100 to produce a new article, but over the lifetime of an article, you get $220 back in earnings. This is a crucial piece of information that will allow you to make better decisions.

Scale your content marketing campaign to achieve more results in less time

Once you have all of your systems in place and know what kind of return you can expect from your ongoing content marketing campaign, it’s time to scale.

This usually means focusing on new segments of the market, targeting new keywords, and growing your marketing team so you can release more content over a shorter period which will translate into higher profits and more opportunities.