How to Implement a Long-Term Content Marketing Strategy that Works

Content marketing is a long-term strategy, and it takes time, dedication, and hard work to get a new online marketing system to pay off. Some marketing professionals state that it can take upwards of six months to make any sort of impact on your goals when you create a content marketing strategy, but by following a few tips with your implementation, you can increase your chances of success.

Define Your Goals

Before you start working on your content, it is important to both define and communicate your goals. Perhaps your goal is to create content in a way that will increase your total Facebook “likes”, or maybe you’d prefer to grow your email address database. By outlining your goals from the beginning, you can focus on creating content that will increase the likelihood of meeting those pre-defined benchmarks.

Determine the Right Formula for Your Content

Content marketing is about helping customers to solve a problem that is important to them. As part of your online marketing strategy, you need to create content that facilitates conversations among stakeholders, decision makers, and influencers. Create content that your customers want to read, and develop a variety of content options that can be deployed across multiple devices and channels in order to find the perfect formula for your initiative.

Use an Editorial Calendar

If you are developing a long-term content marketing strategy, it is important to have a schedule of what you will release and when. Your content calendar should provide a tentative outline of when different pieces of content will be published and on what platform. You should also consider when each new piece of content will show up on your social media channels. Work with your social team during the scheduling process to ensure all publishing schedules are aligned.

Plan for Content that is SEO-Friendly

When creating content for your website, it is important that you keep search engine optimization in mind. SEO is an ever-changing landscape that can sometimes be frustrating to navigate, especially when you consider that Google makes hundreds of algorithm changes per year. Therefore, you’ll need to ensure your content works for both human site visitors and search engines, so keep some of the following tips in mind when planning your content:

• Target a single keyword per page
• Use the exact term
• Optimize, but never to the point where you sacrifice the quality of your content
• Use the keyword at least 3-4 times in your copy

Measure Your Results

When using a content marketing strategy, you should remember that each piece of content that you create has a specific purpose, and there should always be a metric that you can use to measure its results. There a variety of analytics tools that can help you to understand the numbers, including which of your articles are generating the most traffic. Some of the most popular include:

• Google Analytics
• HootSuite
• KISSmetrics
• Addvocate
• SumoMe
• Quintly

Is Your Content Marketing Strategy up to Date?

Your long-term content marketing strategy will only be as effective as you are willing to make it. All of these guidelines are extremely useful, but they will be worthless if you aren’t ready to put in the hard work. By committing to the long-term success of your content marketing, you’ll see your business – and profits – improve.