According to a study by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs only 38% of B2B companies think their content marketing is effective. The same study also states that only 35% of the companies have a documented content marketing strategy.
My guess is that some of these companies do not even know whether they are effective or not. They cannot say what “effective” really is in regard to content marketing without goals, metrics etc. It would certainly help with effectiveness of content marketing to have a strategy at hand.
Here are 9 essential elements any content marketing strategy should include:
Goals/Objective
Why do you do content marketing? What do you want to achieve?
Without a clear objective in mind, your content marketing is likely to get sidetracked. It is hard to keep focused on a goal, when you are unclear what this goal (or goals) is. You should be absolutely clear about what you want to achieve. Even though goals might change with more experience – without goals you cannot even know if you are getting any closer to achieving success. A “soft” goal like “getting better” with something is no real help. You might either feel not successful enough or very successful, depending on your mood.
Make sure you have a usable metric for each goal and an idea how you can measure this metric. Sometimes numbers would be nice to have, but cannot be had.
