Don’t know how to create a content marketing strategy for your website? It’s more than picking the highest volume keywords relevant to your business and using similar tactics from your competitors. It requires a data-driven approach that’s tailored to your brand’s goals and website metrics for a better ROI on your content marketing.
Below is a step-by-step guide on building a content strategy for your site to help get the results you’re looking for.
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy for Your Website in Six Steps
Here’s how to create a content marketing strategy for your website in six steps, with best practices to follow:
1. Clarify Your Content Goals to Structure Your Strategy
The first step to developing a content strategy for your site is understanding your goals. Do you want to build brand awareness? Increase leads? Convert more visitors? While this may be all of the above for your business, answering these questions will help determine the approach of your content strategy.
Website content is structured by funnel stages:
- Top-Funnel (Awareness): How-to blogs, informational videos, etc.
- Middle-Funnel (Consideration): Case studies, comparison blogs, etc.
- Bottom-Funnel (Decision): Product pages, demo videos, etc.
Understanding which type of audience you want to attract ensures you create content with the right search intent. Some users may be ready to buy in the bottom funnel stage and want a short answer about your product instead of reading an in-depth blog about it. In contrast, others may be in the middle funnel stage and want to compare their options before buying.
Knowing the reason behind a person’s search online, combined with your goals, is critical to the success of your web content strategy.
2. Understand Your Target Audience to Personalize Your Content
Brands often have an idea of who their target audience is, but not at each funnel stage. They have different needs, concerns, and demographics at each step of their buyer’s journey—so your content strategy should be personalized for each one.
Before you start making content, conduct a buyer persona workshop with your team to create a general idea of who they are. You can find this specific user data on Google Analytics, customer data profiles, and past marketing campaigns.
There are also buyer persona templates and AI tools available that include details for you to fill out, including their age, gender, common pain points, and preferred online channels.
For example, the 25 to 30-year-old age range shows higher engagement metrics with your project management software demo videos than the 50 to 55 age range. The younger demographics are clicking and watching the video to learn more about your product, while the older personas are reading your case studies to determine your brand’s credibility.
These behaviors show that younger audiences have a more transactional intent at the bottom funnel, while older audiences have a commercial intent in the middle funnel, who want to compare providers.
Considering these core details will help your site’s content be more targeted to the exact people you want to reach.
3. Conduct a Content Audit to Discover Opportunities & Areas for Improvement
As mentioned above, you’ll need to leverage website analytics to determine the focus of your content marketing strategy. Do this by conducting a content audit of your website with tools like SEMRush, Google Search Console, and Screaming Frog. These platforms will analyze your site’s content performance and flag potential issues, like broken links, that may be impacting it.
You may find that your blogs are bringing in the most organic traffic, so you can expand on the highest-performing topics. In contrast, you may find that your service pages are generating minimal traffic, uncovering areas for improvement with optimization, like replacing wrong search intent keywords and adding higher-quality images.
A data-driven approach is the foundation of success if you don’t know how to create a content marketing strategy.
4. Decide the Type of Content to Create Based on Your Expertise, Audience, & Website Audit Metrics
After conducting a website audit and understanding who your buyer personas are at each funnel stage, you can decide the type of content to create in your strategy. This step is where you can leverage your brand’s expertise as an authority in your industry based on this information.
For example, if visitors are heavily entering the site from your Google Business Profile, this can be a great opportunity to create location-specific content. As a local business, you can utilize these metrics to make service location pages, like Denver Social Media Marketing, to target nearby audiences who live in these areas.
You can even expand upon this strategy’s success with related cluster blog topics like “What to Look for in a Denver Social Media Agency” and internally link back to your service location page. This approach is an effective way to strengthen your site’s on-page SEO and content marketing efforts.
5. Plan Your Content Marketing Workflows
With a better idea of the type of content to create and who you want to target, the next step is delegating who is responsible for executing these tasks. Create monthly content marketing workflows for everyone involved, such as SEO content writers and graphic designers for visuals.
You may need to ask website developers to embed features like calculators, maps, and social sharing buttons to produce higher-quality content.
These workflows should be done the month prior so they have enough time to prepare, including:
- Assigning tasks to each assignee
- Scheduling a monthly content calendar
- Organizing tasks at each production stage (plan, produce, and publish)
Establishing an efficient process for your content marketing strategy is key to staying organized with multiple teams involved.
6. Monitor Your Content Marketing Strategy Quarterly
Customer behaviors change and search engine algorithms evolve, so your site’s content marketing strategies must adapt. Do this by monitoring their performance quarterly to ensure it stays successful.
You can use these tools to track the following key content metrics in your reports:
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4): Review the page views, bounce rates, and conversions to see how visitors interact with your site’s content through Exploration reports
- Google Search Console: Look at impressions, clicks, and positions for real-time organic search data of your content
- SEMRush: Check rankings and keyword gaps against competitors to measure comparative content performance on search engines
From there, you’ll know which areas of your web content strategy are working and aspects to improve for ongoing optimization.
Work With a Content Marketing Team to Maximize Your Strategy’s Success
A successful web content strategy requires a comprehensive understanding of your site’s analytics and target audiences, with heavy time commitments. Let us help you with the workload.
At Reach Marketing Pro, we’re a full-service digital agency with extensive experience in all aspects of web content marketing. From optimizing existing website content with site designers to creating data-driven blogs with SEO writers and producing custom branded visuals with graphic designers, we can strengthen your content strategy.
Ready to see better results from your site’s content?
Learn more about our content marketing services or contact us to get started today!