What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing approach that involves creating high-quality, relevant, and personalized content to attract a target audience. Through it, businesses can establish themselves as an industry authority, raise brand awareness, and promote their offers.

Effective content marketing strategies often include a variety of content formats, such as:

Blog posts
Videos
Case studies
Social media posts
Newsletters

How to create a successful content marketing strategy

To develop a content marketing strategy that drives results, follow these basic steps:

1. Choose a marketing automation platform

A comprehensive marketing automation platform helps you:

Identify and segment your target audience
Gather consent
Create relevant content
Choose the right channels for pushing your content
Monitor the campaign’s performance

The right marketing automation platform will make it easy to build your subscriber list, segment your audience, and push content out to your owned email and SMS lists.

2. Identify your target audience

Not everyone will find your content relevant, so pinpointing your target audience is crucial. Explore their preferences, interests, online behavior, and challenges they’re facing through forms, feedback, market research, or competition research.

If you want to focus on multiple audience groups, create distinguishable segments for more personalized, relevant content.

3. Define your goals

Consider what you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy. Your goals will shape the type of content you’ll focus on and help you stay on the right track. Some common goals include:

Growing your email list
Boosting engagement
Improving website traffic
Generating revenue

4. Choose content types and channels

Consider the type of content you want to focus on to achieve your goals and engage with your target audience. Think about whether you’ll distribute the content through:

Emails
SMS
Social media
Your website

You’ll likely want to use a combination of these channels to reach your audience in multiple ways—and often, these channels work together to amplify your message.

5. Create a content schedule

Craft a schedule that aligns with your goals, budget, and capacity. Some best practices to follow are:

Don’t plan too far in advance: When you’re first starting out, you’ll find out what works and what doesn’t. Avoid planning too far in advance to account for this learning.
Track your production time: Determine how long it takes to create and disseminate content so you can best use the resources you have.
Track frequency tolerance: If you’re using SMS or email in your marketing efforts, track unsubscribes so you don’t end up inadvertently sending too many messages.

6. Monitor and refine your strategy if necessary

Set and track KPIs to monitor your marketing initiative’s progress. If you notice you’re not hitting targets, revise your strategy.

Over time, you’ll have more data to work with, so tweak your marketing approach if needed to improve performance.

Use a marketing automation platform like Klaviyo to create the foundation for your marketing strategy. Access options for gaining consent and segmenting your audience, and use Klaviyo AI for writing and scheduling content and extensive reporting.