An effective content marketing system is crucial for growing your online presence, connecting with your audience, and achieving consistent results. However, designing and implementing a successful strategy can feel overwhelming.

But here’s a secret: Your content marketing system can be simple. In this quick and easy guide, we’ll show you the key elements you can leverage to create an effective marketing process that supports business success.

Define Your Goals and Objectives

What do you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts? Start by establishing goals and objectives before identifying the digital marketing strategies and components to help you get there.

The SMART framework is a great way to set clear goals. This acronym stands for:

• Specific. Start with a clear picture of what you want to accomplish. For instance, you could increase the ROI of your current email campaign.
• Measurable. Make your goals measurable so you can track results and assess outcomes. Measuring click-through rates and conversions would be relevant for the email ROI example.
• Achievable. Set realistic goals given the resources available. Increasing your email ROI by 5% is a good example.
• Relevant. Focus on goals that are relevant to your organization-wide objectives. For instance, increasing your email ROI will support growth while helping you get more out of your marketing budget.
• Time-bound. Give yourself enough time to achieve your goals. Two months is a realistic timeframe for increasing your email ROI by 5%.

Understand Your Target Audience

With 71% of consumers expecting personalized experiences, failing to understand what your target audience hopes to accomplish online is costly.

The best way to build an impactful content marketing system is to incorporate what you know about your target audience into your marketing efforts:

• Start with current customers. Look for shared data points in demographics, interests, pain points, or spending habits.
• Social media data, customer service interactions, and web session analytics can help you go further by revealing how users accomplish different tasks throughout the buying journey.
• Collect more data through surveys, questionnaires, feedback, interviews, and focus groups.

Once you have a comprehensive overview of your target audience, identify segments based on shared data points. Focus on behaviors rather than quantitative data points to achieve a higher level of personalization.

You can then decide to prioritize some segments or adapt your messaging and offers based on the needs of each cohort.

Create Valuable and Relevant Content

The content creation process is at the core of your content marketing system. However, only 40% of marketers have a content creation strategy, and a majority (83%) of marketers who differentiate their content say they do so by focusing on quality.

You can get results by taking a simple but effective approach. Start by identifying a few pillar topics that align with your audience’s central questions and pain points. These content pillars will shape most of your content creation efforts, but you can supplement them and branch out as new trends and topics emerge.

Next, you should adopt a content calendar. This simple tool will help you stay on track and consistently meet your publication goals. Lastly, quality and value should be your top priorities when developing content.

Regardless of your niche, publishing quality content will always be a winning strategy that helps you rank higher in search results while connecting with your audience. Follow these simple rules to produce quality content consistently:

• Make sure your content aligns with the search intent you’re targeting.
• Each piece of content should directly support a task in the customer’s journey.
• The main takeaway must stand out, even if users skim the content.
• Quality content should be engaging, entertaining, or educational. It can also inspire.
• The format and publication channel should reflect your audience’s preferences. For instance, 31% of marketers are seeing an appreciation for video content.
• The tone, sources, and information you share should be trustworthy.

Choose the Right Distribution Channels

Get more out of your content by publishing it on the proper channels. Focusing on where your audience is active and engaged allows you to concentrate on a few effective channels that consistently yield results.

For most organizations, an effective content distribution strategy includes a mix of owned, earned, and paid channels:

• Owned channels are the platforms you control. Examples include your website, blog, and social media pages.
• Earned channels can expand your outreach and build your social proof. These channels include reviews, mentions, and shares. With 31% of consumers turning to social media for pre-purchase information, engagement is a crucial earned channel.
• Paid channels help grow your audience and improve brand awareness. Examples include search ads and sponsored content.

Implement a Measurement and Analysis Framework

With AI and other innovations powering advanced analytics, data-driven insights are more effective and valuable than ever.

Thanks to the SMART goal-setting framework, you should have a measurable goal for each marketing project. The next step is identifying the right key performance indicator (KPI) to measure and track this goal.

KPIs can include clicks, views, engagement, conversions, click-through rates, brand sentiment, or sales.

Plan regular reviews of your KPIs and use your findings to inform future decisions. Building a flexible content marketing system with room for continuous improvement and testing will help you achieve content marketing success.

Build a Simple But Effective Content Marketing Process

So, as promised, building a successful content marketing strategy can be simple, and focusing on a handful of practical principles will help you develop a solid foundation for your content marketing system:

• Always start with clear and measurable goals. Follow through by measuring progress with analytics.
• Find out as much as possible about your audience. Identify the most relevant distribution channels and personalization strategies.
• Leverage quality, value, and authority to differentiate your content.

You can unlock your content marketing ROI by getting help from a managed services provider like Tempesta Media. At Tempesta Media, we leverage the latest tech tools and years of industry experience to develop customized marketing roadmaps for businesses like yours.

Besides building a successful content marketing system for your organization, we’ll help you improve continuously through our advanced analytics solution, Analyticlab.

Contact us today to learn more and get started with your complimentary marketing assessment!