Content Marketing Optimization Checklist

The complete content marketing checklist:

• Determine your long-term objectives

  The first step in creating a content marketing strategy is determining your startup’s goals. Be as specific as possible when naming these goals so  that you can later examine the performance of your content and make necessary improvements.

  Don’t simply state that your startup wants new leads. What is your target number of new customers? How will you measure the new clients you’ve attracted? How long do you plan on taking to get those customers – 5 months, a year, more? Then, you’ll want to match those startup objectives to your B2B content marketing objectives. Determine how your content marketing can assist you in achieving your business objectives.

• Identify your target audience

  How do you ensure that your content reaches the right audience when Google processes over 2 trillion queries per year? Create buyer personas to figure out who your target audience is. Buyer personas help you segment your audience based on their individual needs, pain points, challenges, behaviors, goals, and concerns, so you can personalize your content and message more effectively. The idea here is to conduct extensive research to ensure that you have a thorough understanding of your target audience.
  Here is a cool tool for creating a buyer persona.

  Examine your current customer list, email list, prospects, referrals, and third-party networks to get a sense of who they are. Then conduct simple interviews that include questions like: where do you work? What size company do you work for? What are you responsible for? You can use HubSpot’s buyer persona templates.

• Perform a content audit

  Keep in mind the content you already have. It can be quite useful in assessing where you’ve had success or difficulty, and determining what your future actions should be. Do you have blog posts that don’t receive any traffic or conversions? You might want to consider removing it entirely. When doing a content audit, there are a few things to consider: unique views, keywords, bounce rate, external & internal links, and social shares.
  If a piece of content isn’t performing well, do one of the following:

  1. Update it to be of more value to customers.
  2. If it’s too outdated and isn’t performing well in terms of visits and pageviews, don’t hesitate to delete the article altogether.

• Conduct keyword research

  The keywords and key phrases you use inside your content will impact your search engine ranking. These keywords show your areas of expertise, and where you can offer the most value to your customers. Remember that half of all searches are four words or longer, so long-tail keywords and phrases are essential.

  Consider your industry, services, products, buyer personas, and search trends while deciding on keywords. Begin by establishing a list of topics that are relevant to your startup. If you’re an AI startup, for example, you might have topics like “Machine Learning”, “ Deep Learning”, “Big data” etc. There are a number of free tools available to assist you in finding the ideal keywords and phrases for your business such as: Semrush, Moz, KWFinder and more.

   

  

• Create targeted content

  Once you’ve figured out who your target audience is and what your aim is, you can start brainstorming content ideas. Take into account the three stages of your marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, decision), as well as the sorts of content that should be supplied during each of them. Determine which stage each of your personas is in, and then give material that corresponds to that stage.

• Content promotion

  You should promote your content to guarantee that it reaches your target audience. This can be done in a variety of ways, depending on the type of content you publish. The following are the four most effective content promotion methods:

  • Social Media: Social networking is a great tool for reaching out to a larger audience. It’s an excellent way to promote your blogs, link to landing pages, and announce new services and products.
  • Email Marketing: Most customers want to receive promotional emails from companies with which they do business at least once a month. You can send out regular emails to specific buyer personas using a tool like Hubspot to share your latest news, blogs, and services.
  • PPC: There are a variety of locations where you may pay to have your content reach a larger audience. Facebook Ads, AdWords, LinkedIn Ads, and Outbrain are all popular paid advertising solutions for startups.
  • Influencer Marketing: Key influencers and industry leaders can assist you in raising awareness and reaching potential clients.

• Repurpose successful content

  When you produce new content, you should make the most of it. So don’t just publish one great blog post and call it a day. Instead, you should repurpose the content as much as possible. Transforming your post into videos/podcasts/eBooks/webinars etc.

• Create an editorial calendar

  Create an editorial calendar to stay on track with your content. Bloggers and publishers use an editorial calendar to keep track of and control the release of content over a set period of time (a month, a quarter, or a year). You can also use the calendar app on your computer or Google Calendar. Select a calendar and begin filling out the following details with your content strategy in mind: What is the best day of the week to publish? At what time? Should each piece be published on a different platform? What content theme will you follow?

• Analyze and optimize

  You can only know if a content marketing strategy is successful if you can track it. It’s important to determine how your content is helping you in reaching your target audience, converting leads, etc. The trick is to identify and track your key performance indicators for each goal. Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking metrics like page views, demographics, unique visitors, and acquisition. You should also keep track of metrics like shares, followers, and comments on social media.

   

  

   

   

  If you have any other questions don’t hesitate to contact us.

   

  For more checklists, you can visit our resources page.