Develop a Content Marketing Strategy to Engage Your Community

In the era of the Internet and social media, the market has never been as competitive as it is now. To face competition, companies must maintain a strong close relationship with their prospects and customers to engage and retain them. The more a company brings real added value to its audience members, the more likely they are to remain loyal. Also, to succeed in mobilizing a community around your brand and stay ahead of your competitors, your best weapon remains the implementation of a content marketing strategy adapted to your target. What does this involve? What are the key steps in implementing an effective content marketing strategy for your business? We take stock in this article. Follow the guide!

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves designing, producing, and regularly distributing high-value materials to your target audience.

There is a wide variety of possible formats: social media posts, blog articles, ebooks, podcasts, newsletters, tutorials, videos, infographics, customer testimonials, quizzes, surveys, contests, webinars, etc.

These contents are distributed across various touchpoints between a company and its prospects and customers, such as social media or the company’s blog.

The objectives of content marketing are to:

• Generate qualified leads,
• Encourage purchases and acquire new customers,
• Retain your customers,
• Develop your visibility on the web and your e-reputation,
• Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and appear on the first page of search engines,
• Attract visitors and redirect traffic to your website,
• Engage the members of your community,
• Etc.

Content marketing is an integral part of a broader Inbound Marketing strategy that aims to naturally attract visitors to you. Indeed, Inbound marketing is based on creating attractive, useful, educational, entertaining, and relevant content for your targets to convert your prospects into customers.

Why Implement a Content Marketing Strategy to Engage Your Community?

Content marketing is king for engaging a community! At each stage of the customer journey, the goal is to capture visitors’ attention and make them want to return, so that ultimately, they buy your products and services.

By implementing a content marketing strategy, you publish quality content that is truly useful and addresses the needs, expectations, and issues of your community members. Thus, you gradually gain their trust and create a strong relationship with them that lasts.

You support them, educate them, answer their questions, and thereby increase your credibility in their eyes. You position yourself as an expert in your field.

Moreover, according to a 2019 study conducted by Vivendi Brand Marketing, 84% of people expect brands to produce interesting content with real added value and a differentiated experience.

Regular, omnichannel content marketing production centered on your customers is therefore a key success factor for engaging your audience and standing out from competing companies.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy to Engage Your Community?

A content marketing strategy develops over the long term and requires rigorous and almost daily involvement of your marketing team members. For your content marketing strategy to be successful, here are the key steps to follow:

1. Define Your Target Audience

The first step in implementing an effective content marketing strategy is to clearly define the target audience. Who are you addressing? What are the characteristics of the people following you? Who are the typical customers of your company?

A good understanding of your personas or buyer personas allows you to produce content tailored to your community members, as well as publish it at the right time and place, meaning on the communication channels used by your targets.

As a reminder, personas are fictional, stereotyped people who represent a typical profile of target buyers.

Each persona is characterized by a set of information: first name, age, profession, place of residence, family situation, passions, hobbies, motivations, expectations, issues, obstacles, etc.

You must identify them and detail as much as possible what characterizes them: their behavior on the Internet, their consumption habits, the type of web content they like and share (format, tone, source, length…), the platforms where they can be found (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.).

Active and regular monitoring of social media will give you valuable information for implementing your content marketing strategy. Don’t neglect this step! The goal is to achieve an in-depth understanding of your target audience to create quality marketing content that captures their attention.

2. Determine the Best Content and Platforms on Which to Publish

Thanks to the previous phase, you have a good idea of the types of content your targets consume and on which web platforms they like to find them.

You also know the needs and expectations of your target audience as well as their issues. This should allow you to determine a list of topic ideas that could potentially interest and inspire them.

Always keep in mind that your goal is to offer original, unique, and quality content in order to mobilize a community around your brand. The marketing content you produce must create real excitement among your subscribers and make them want to follow you in the long term.

Then determine the formats in which you will address these topics: social media posts, podcasts, newsletters, videos, e-books, infographics or images…

Then, choose the publishing platforms according to your objectives and your targets (social networks, blog, forum, etc.).

Note that each web publishing platform has its own specificities and codes. The way of communicating, the type of content, and the format are not the same on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn for example.

Moreover, if in your content marketing strategy you opt for creating blog articles, know that it’s not enough to just throw yourself wholeheartedly into writing.

Your blog articles must be both interesting for your readers and well-ranked on Google to be easily found by internet users.

For this, keyword research is necessary to create articles optimized for Google and search engines. SEO is the number one ally of content marketing. This marketing lever allows you to capture more qualified visitors (leads) and thus generate more traffic to your website.

3. Define an Editorial Charter and a Publication Schedule

The Editorial Charter

Once you have determined the topics you will address, their formats, and the publishing platforms most suitable for your audience, formalize all the elements of your content marketing strategy in an editorial charter.

This is an essential step if you want to fully master your editorial strategy and achieve your objectives.

The editorial charter is an essential document that describes the entire creation process for each of the contents you will publish, both in substance and form.

The Publication Schedule

Your goal is to successfully engage your readers enough to create a real attachment to your brand.

To do this, you must offer them content that meets their needs and expectations regularly on each web platform where they are found.

As part of a content marketing strategy, all of your materials should be thought out and created in advance. The number one mistake would be to create your content on the fly without a real strategy and objectives.

To engage your community, you must be present at each stage of the customer journey. This is why it is necessary to anticipate, plan, and have a global vision of all the content you will produce.

A publication schedule or content plan allows you to offer your audience diverse, balanced content adapted to each key moment of the customer journey.

Moreover, these documents, accessible to all your collaborators (marketing manager, communications manager, writers, community manager, graphic designers…), serve as guidelines and allow you to maintain good coherence in the creation of all your marketing content.

4. Engage Your Community to Maximize the Effects of Your Content Marketing Strategy

Once all your content is created, it must be published regularly and consistently for your content marketing strategy to be truly effective.

Entrust the role of engaging your community on social networks to a Community Manager. This dedicated person will be responsible for managing the timely publication of all your content.

They will also be in charge of responding to all questions and comments from your target audience clearly and quickly. They have the role of an animator, encouraging members of your audience to interact, soliciting them, and asking for their opinions.

The Community Manager can set up contests to reward your followers, and they relay content spontaneously created around your brand by community members: graphic creations, videos, or images.

All these marketing actions allow you to engage your community and increase your followers on social media, but also to generate leads and visitors to your website.

The Community Manager establishes a climate of trust, friendliness, and proximity with your audience. This individual humanizes your brand and plays a key role in the successful implementation of your content marketing strategy and in engaging your community.

If you don’t have a dedicated person in-house, call on a web marketing agency that will guide you step by step in the proper execution of your content marketing strategy.

5. Analyze Results and Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

For your content marketing strategy to be fully successful, it is essential to measure and analyze the results obtained by each content publication.

Also, get into the habit of regularly creating reports on the performance of your marketing content.

Based on your predefined engagement objectives for each of the platforms you have chosen, you can determine key performance indicators (KPIs) to achieve.

Rely on specific tools to track the performance of your content such as Google Analytics.

Check in with your teams to know how your community’s engagement is evolving and whether each piece of content you offer them is generating the expected enthusiasm.

Based on the results, constantly refine your content marketing strategy.

As you can see, clearly defining the outlines of your content marketing strategy is crucial for it to serve the set objectives. Creating marketing content is not improvised. It requires time, appropriate resources, creativity, and analysis. Thanks to this article, you now have all the keys in hand to effectively deploy your content marketing strategy and engage your community around your brand. It’s your turn to play!