In 6 Steps to the Content Marketing Strategy

1. What is content marketing, really?
2. What does content marketing bring? Is it worth it?
3. In 6 steps to the content marketing strategy
4. Which tools are useful for the content marketing strategy?
5. Last but not least: What makes goodcontent marketing?

2022: We have never spent as much time in the digital world as we do today. 10 hours screen time– new record! Work, leisure, shopping – everything on the World Wide Web. At the same time, we are increasingly becoming numb. Anything that doesn't immediately promise added value is clicked away annoyed or doesn't even get through. Our search and buying behavior has changed massively in recent years. Success rate traditional advertising – free fall. Content marketing has been supposed to help just here for quite some time. Relevance & expertise instead of advertising slogan & product.

Content is King! And content in combination with marketing offers new opportunities to attract attention unobtrusively, to stand out from the competition and perhaps again – or even for the first time – to penetrate customers.

But how does content marketing actually work and how do you develop your own content marketing strategy step by step? Is it worth it and which tools help?

Our guest author Cassie Kübitz-Whiteley has summarized it for you in this article.

Table of contents

1. What is content marketing, really?

2. What does content marketing bring? Is it worth it?

3. In 6 steps to a content marketing strategy

4. Which tools are useful for the content marketing strategy?

5. Last but not least: What makes good content marketing?

What is content marketing, really?

“Traditional advertising is dead” – a thesis that has long since been represented not only by the Mastercard CMO. Endless banners, ads, spots, videos, advertorials and that on countless channels. According to a survey by “The Futures Company”, 65% of people now feel harassed by it. Many online users have also developed a “banner blindness” - consciously or unconsciously - or block advertising entirely. Worthwhile, relevant information and good entertainment, on the other hand, are very much in vogue.

Colorful pictures and ads are hardly getting through. What counts, is content. Content is king! So content marketing = content? Also yes!

There is no THE definition of “content marketing”. The fact is: content is the focus. Products and advertising messages take a back seat. Instead of explaining to the world why your own products are better than the competition's, the focus is on customer needs and problem-solving. Content marketing is customer-centric. People should be informed, advised and entertained with relevant, value-added content.

Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, defines content marketing as:

“Content Marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Content marketing is a strategic approach. Useful content is made available along the entire customer journey to attract and inspire people. It is about building trust and winning not only customers but fans through this.

What does content marketing bring? Is it worth it?

Long story short: It's worth it! Content marketing is now indispensable and one of the drivers of success to penetrate customers at all. The four main benefits are:

• Brand building and positioning (Brand Awareness):
• (New) customer acquisition & lead generation
• Customer loyalty & building a fan base of users
• Search engine optimization

So content marketing creates trust in customers, it helps build the brand. It increases website traffic and ultimately also brings qualified leads.

A miracle weapon then? Well. Content has never been produced as much as today. For content marketing to really pay off, the following should be considered:

1. No advertising! Products are uninteresting in content marketing. It's about people and their needs.
2. It needs helpful expert knowledge & relevant added value.
3. Focus instead of mass. Stand out with your topics and focus on your niche. And deliver better content than the competition precisely there.
4. Be consistent and authentic. Your brand must stand for the content.

In 6 steps to the content marketing strategy

To churn out texts, images, podcasts and videos – is that enough? Unfortunately not. Content marketing is time-consuming and costly. So that you don't waste time or money, you need a plan; rather a good “content marketing strategy” and a comprehensive one that includes the conception, production and distribution of the content.

Before you get started, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I want to achieve? (Knowing goals)
• Who do I want to help? (Know target group)
• How do I solve the problems? (Relevant & authentic content)
• How/Where do I reach my customers? (Attention-grabbing formats/channels)

The following graphic illustrates the process and the individual steps that you should at least go through in the content marketing strategy process.

SCM: Process of content marketing measures.

1) Goals: Before you do something, you should know why you are doing it.

What exactly do you want to achieve? Is it about positioning the company. About Brand Awareness or more visibility? Or more traffic, engagement or leads?

There is no right or wrong here. What is important is that you Your set goals and above all write them down. Only in this way can you create a specific roadmap and procedure that is aligned with them. In any case, formulate the goals SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timed). This makes checking it easier afterwards.

2) Target group: Who is your target group – for whom are you solving a problem?

Customer need is at the center of content marketing. This means that you will only be successful if your content also fits exactly to your target customers respectively. This means that you first need to define what the target customer looks like and find out how she or he ticks.

In addition to sociodemographic data such as age, gender, education, it is primarily concerned with questions such as: Which problems need to be solved? What are the needs? Which channels and media are preferred?

So-called buyer personas have proven themselves. A good tool that can be used to create these quickly and easily is “Make my persona” from Hubspot. The tool also provides comprehensive information and details about the persona concept.

Reading tip: There is also a vivid application example for personas in the OMR contribution: Buyer Personas for Social Media Campaigns.

3) Topics, content, formats: What and how do you want to say it?

Enough of theory! Now it's about content. Reminder: Authentic, believable content is crucial. First and foremost, this results from your business model. Which need are you satisfying? How do you help and with which topics and content can you translate this?

It is best to start with a content audit, which is a quantitative and qualitative inventory. What do you all have? What can you offer? Where are gaps? View your data and content and if already published, check how the performance was.

Alongside this own analysis, it is helpful to look at what the competition is doing. Of course not to copy them, but to differentiate yourself. Look at what can be improved and at which points you had “aha moments” or “yes-but moments” and do it better.

The key is: Make your content unique! Everything seems to have been said or written already. Reprocessing and rephrasing doesn't work. You need to create relevant added value with which you will stay in the memory of your customers.

Tip: The customer need is the focus. So there is no reason not to simply ask your customers which topics interest them.

In the next step you will do a topic research. Which trends, topics, keywords do users search for most often. How do certain keywords rank.

There are some good tools that support you here. My Top 5 for topic finding / keyword research / search volume:

1) Answer the Public 

2) Google AdWords Keyword Planner 

3) BuzzSumo

4) ahrefs

5) sistrix

Reading tip: In the OMR Reviews Briefing “SEO Tools” there is a detailed classification of fourteen tools and the market leaders.

Back to the content: The best content is of no use if it is not noticed. Essentially, the themes / content are the gift and the formats are the packaging. And everyone knows - in the end everyone wants the packages with the most beautiful packaging.

There are really no limits to your creativity when it comes to formats.

So that you don't lose track, it is helpful to classify the formats according to the benefit / purpose matrix from Hubspot. This way you keep an overview of where you are already well positioned and where there are gaps.

Hubspot Content Matrix

4) Production: Now it gets operational!

Content production is the heart of content marketing and is often underestimated. This applies both to effort and quality. Just casually creating content half-heartedly – fails! Plan sufficient time, but above all, have someone do it who is passionate about it and can do it – in-house or with external support. What expectations you should have of the topic and what you should definitely avoid can be found very vividly summarized in the OMR article “Challenges Content Marketing“.

Start with a plan where you list all planned posts by topic, format, channel and creator. It is best to do this in an editorial calendar. Works in Excel, but there are also helpful tools that make work easier – for example Scompler or Contentbird.

Tip 1: Create a fund of so-called evergreen content. This is content that simply does not “become outdated”, i.e. remains relevant for a topic for a long period of time. You can prove your competence and expertise for certain keywords with this. This way you can ensure traffic in the long term and increase your ranking in search engines.

Tip 2: Use User-Generated Content (UGC) – i.e. content that is not created by you, but by your community. UGC is trustworthy and authentic and can help to improve your brand image, increase reach and achieve higher conversions.

5) Content distribution: How do content and target group meet?

At least as important as the content production is the distribution or spread of your content by playing it out over certain channels. What use are the greatest posts if they are not found or seen. You can orient yourself to the PESO model for distribution. PESO stands for:

• Paid: Channels where you have to pay for distribution
• Earned: Content that is published without consideration
• Shared: Your content that is spread and shared via social media
• Owned: all content created and published by you

PESO model by Daniel Goodal

Try not to serve all channels at the same time, but to focus here too and learn what works best for your content.

6) Success measurement: Almost there!

The last step is the success measurement. Have you achieved your goals? How did the individual content perform? Which channels ran well, which ones rather less? The prerequisite is of course that you determine beforehand what you want to measure and how you want to measure.

Depending on the goals you have set for yourself at the beginning, it makes sense to look at the following key figures – so-called Key Performance Indicators:

• Range & visibility: Impressions, page views, Click-Through Rate, number of backlinks, followers, rankings
• Engagement: Dwell time, bounce rate, likes, shares, comments, downloads, newsletter subscribers
• Leads: Registrations, sign-ups, app downloads, degrees, conversion rate
• Brand awareness: Search volume, brand, direct traffic

Here too, there are numerous tools to support you. However, with Google Analytics you already cover most of the key figures well.

Tip 1) : Focus – Don't just measure and track wildly. Take a look at individual key figures and draw the right conclusions from them.

Tip 2): Don't make yourself dependent on KPIs and above all, don't drive yourself crazy. Content marketing is always thought of in long term. So not a sprint, but a marathon. In the rarest cases, success will show itself overnight, but sometimes only after weeks or months.

Which tools are useful for the content marketing strategy?

There are a lot of helpful tools for the creation of the content marketing strategy, but especially for the implementation. The seven best and most popular of the OMR Reviews community are:

• ContentStudio
• Curata
• Talkwalker
• Adobe Experience Manager
• Outgrow
• contentbird Software
• Joomag

Reading tip: In the OMR article best content marketing tools you get a very good overview of the tools and their respective advantages and disadvantages.

And of course, you can compare all tools and software for optimal Content Marketing on OMR Reviews and find the support that suits you. Here you will not only find comprehensive reviews, but also helpful user reviews.

Last but not least: What makes goodcontent marketing?

Let's turn the question around: If the first question at the KPIs is how much revenue the measure has brought in, then this will not work. Content marketing will only be successful if it is not about selling products – not primarily and not secondarily. Content marketing is more a mentality & attitude – and that's exactly what you have to notice. It's a mindshift from “I have something here for you” to “I'm giving you something”. Anyone who can deliver this via content will get something back – interest, engagement & trust.

The following examples make this very understandable from my point of view:

The pioneers: the US tractor manufacturer John Deere. Because advertising was too expensive, John Deere started using content as early as 1895. Started with seminars for farmers about the “The Furrow Magazine”, which informs about new technologies and methods in agriculture. The magazine is still one of the highest-circulation publications in the agricultural sector and the focus is still on helping farmers run their businesses profitably. At the same time, Dr. Oetker  was also a content pioneer in Germany. In the small, practical paper bags, the focus was on the solution – namely baking powder precisely dosed for a pound of flour. In addition, each bag contained informative content in the form of baking recipes. The first school cookbook then followed. Again, it was not primarily about products, but about useful and helpful tips for running a household. By the way, the Oetker school cookbook is still one of the most successful cookbooks in Germany.

The curious ones: Michelin: You probably know the gourmet guide that reports on excellent eateries. Did you also know that it belongs to the Michelin tire manufacturer? The example dating back from 1900. The guide included excursion destinations in France. Gradually, more and more restaurants were integrated. Excursion destinations, restaurants & tires – does that make sense? For Michelin it does. A similarly successful strategy was conducted by the Irish brewery Guinness  which in 1955 first published the Guinness Book: Also here: interesting and entertaining content that has an impact on brand awareness.

The extreme one: Red Bull. I can hardly think of another company that lives content marketing as extremely as Red Bull. The commercial “gives wings” has little to do with it. Rather, the beverage manufacturer “gives” a feeling – fascination & enthusiasm. The product completely takes a back seat, instead the brand stands for sports, action and fun and produces unique content that perfectly satisfies the needs of its target audience. With a billion-content-budget it is not only extremely good, but also extremely unrealistic for “normal” marketers.

My favorites: Komoot: The platform has managed very calmly to become the most used app for hiking and cycling tours and stands for informative content around the topic of outdoor and tours. Sharp niche, but brilliantly filled. One of the success factors – the content is mostly generated directly by outdoor fans from the community. About You: From the very beginning, About You has differentiated itself from competitor Zalando and focused specifically on a different “persona”. Instead of advertising pressure via TV spots, About You focuses on customer loyalty through inspiration and personalization. The platform embodies fashion at its best and shows inspiring content and stories from its own community and known testimonials that customers are excited about.