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In the world of content marketing, strategy is king. The Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 B2C Benchmark Report shows that 47 percent of the most effective content marketers have a documented strategy, while only 5 percent of the least effective do. This trend is mirrored in B2B content marketing, where 54 percent of the most effective practitioners have a documented strategy, compared with 11 percent of the least effective.
Having a documented strategy–and following it–seems to be the secret sauce behind content marketing success. But how exactly should you build that strategy?
A Modern Approach to Traditional Market Research.
Content strategy should be determined by research and hard numbers, not hunches. With the proper tools and processes, you can use data to take the guess work out of marketing, thus creating the greatest likelihood of winning.
As with all marketing initiatives, it’s important to conduct research to understand the four W’s–who, what, where, and why–in order to maximize effectiveness. And when it comes to content marketing research, those four W’s translate into four critical components that every strategy should have baked into it: audience, trends, media, and competition.
