In the marketing world, any content created needs to be relevant, digestible, and valuable to the consumer. There are numerous possibilities for content creation. An excellent marketing plan comes in handy for increasing brand awareness, establishing thought leadership, and capturing new customers.

Your content should naturally reach the target audience, the best being creating a content narrative or telling them a story. When your audience relates and resonates with the narrative, the content feels more engaging, authentic, and tailor-made for each client. Here is the ultimate marketing strategy you should adopt in 2021.

1.     Set SMART Goals

The first step to creating a marketing strategy is setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely)goals. These goals need to be specifically tailored for your business, and they will complement your overall company goals. Some SMART goals include:

• Improving brand awareness
• Boosting revenue
• Increasing conversions
• Building trust and rapport among clients and prospects Attracting strategic business partners
• Improving brand loyalty
• Increasing customer engagement

2.     Determine Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Set KPIs (Key performance indicators) for the SMART goals. KPIs are data points(quantifiable) that you use for measuring your performance against your set goals. For example, if your SMART goal is Brand awareness, your KPI should be social media followers, site traffic, mentions by partners and customers, and subscription sign-ups. For Brand loyalty, the related KPIs could be product reviews, referrals, and returning clients.

3.     Know Your Audience

Your content strategy will be successful when you know your audience. You can get valuable information by checking the sites your potential clients are visiting, the type of content on those sites, and the social media platforms they share the content on.

You can do this by using Google demographics and Interests to see the sites they visit, use Google Analytics for content, and reviewing the more popular social media platforms for content sharing. Knowing your audience helps you know what type of content to create.

4.     Choose Which Channel to Use

Once you know the type of marketing content to create, you need to decide on the content channel to use. For some content, the channel to use is self-explanatory. For example, if your content is for Facebook, you should share it on the Facebook platform.

5.     Listen to Your Customers

Data analysis is a valuable tool, but it cannot give you more subtle data. This data can only be accessed by listening to what your customers have to say. Your customers need to feel that you are listening to them on social media. Ask them for their suggestions, answer questions and listen to their feedback. This enables you to collect valuable data and also makes them feel that you value their opinion.

Conclusion

Content creation needs to come with a plan. Mindlessly creating content without due diligence is a waste of valuable time and resources. You have to develop a strategy to market your content that consists of setting goals and KPIs, knowing your customers, and taking their feedback seriously. Once customers develop brand loyalty, it is hard for them to shift goalposts, and you will have return clients.