A content marketing strategy is essential to business success. Here’s what you need to do to have a successful content marketing strategy.

Develop Goals

First, you’ll need to develop goals. It’s important to create specific measurable goals. Make sure they are relevant to your overarching brand or company goals. Be concise as well. To have a clear strategy, you will want only a few, specific goals.

Set Yourself Apart

Develop a strategy to reach your goals that sets your content apart from the pack. The market is inundated with advertising, so it’s important to determine the one thing that will make you stand out. This should be something that inspires, is useful or entertains. It needs to be unique to you and differentiate you in the market.

Check to See if Your Content is Working

This means checking data and analytics to see if your content is doing what you think it should be doing. This is why it’s important for your goals to be measurable. Check statistics like consumption, sharing, lead generation and sales metrics.

Identify Top Audiences

If you want to be relevant, it’s important to understand who you’re targeting and talking to. On the highest level, look at your audience and see what they have in common. Look at smaller segments of your audience and identify things that they have in common as well. Now narrow these audience metrics down to five audiences and focus on them as you’re creating your content marketing strategy.

Research Audience Networks

To better understand the wants, needs and expectations of your audiences look at their networks. Look at their top questions at each stage of the marketing funnel to better understand these wants, needs and expectations. Going through this process will help you know your audience on a much deeper level.

Less is More

If you’re having content problems, the solution is not to create more content. There’s so much content out there, you don’t want to get stuck in that clutter. Instead, find ways to reuse content that you already have to better meet the needs of your target audience. Update old content with new information or republish in a way that makes old content new. Even breaking a big piece of content into smaller chunks can make it seem new, and this is a much better strategy than creating something new.

With all the content that’s out there, it’s important to have a content marketing strategy to set yourself apart.