6 Tips For Developing An Effective Content Strategy On A Budget

#1 Start Out Right

The first thing you need to do is set your goals, they will be the guiding light of your content strategy. Are you trying to increase brand awareness, generate some more leads, or maybe just improve your user engagement? You won’t know what kind of content you want to create until you know what that content’s goal is.

Next, create a buyer persona. Get inside the head of your customer so you can get a good idea of what they’re looking for. You can get a pretty good idea of their worldview by examining factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, demographics, education level, marital status, the places they spend their time online, and preferences for content. If you don’t already have this kind of info, programs like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights can help.

#2 Do Your Research

Next, it’s time to see what your competitors have been up to, specifically what kind of content they’ve been putting out there. You can learn a lot from their successes and failures. What you’re looking for is, based on how their content fared, how to make yours stick out, and how to bring in your target audience.

Tools like BuzzSumo can give you some good data on how specific posts fared, and why. Your goal is to make content that follows the demonstrated success of existing content but also to make yours unique so people have a reason to engage. Do some research, using free resources like Google Forms, Google Sheets, and Google Trends. Find some gaps where there is interest, but your competitor has not taken advantage. Improve on existing content. You might even find there is an opportunity for you to create something brand new because of a lack of content in an area of interest.

#3 The Funnel

The sort of content you create should be contingent on where in the sales funnel your target is. If you’re looking at a group of people who are only vaguely aware of your brand and what you do, you should try to increase awareness and engagement. Try using content like blog posts, social media posts, and infographics for this group. If your target is a group that is considering your brand then why not try and sign them up for your email list. Offer them educational resources, webinars, and quizzes to help make their decision more informed. If your target group is your existing customers, you are trying to increase their purchase frequency and build up brand loyalty. You can do this with content such as free trials, customer stories, and online mini-classes. Make sure everything is formatted properly with content formatting tools like Academ Advisor and UK Writings.

#4 Quality, Not Quantity

Creating content on a budget means you’ll start small, don’t expect to be posting four or five times per week. Focus on creating quality content. Later on, the budget may allow for increasing the number of posts, but even then it’s not necessary. Try and maximize the gains from the content you create, rather than churning out a high volume of mediocre and ineffective content. That’s just not cost-effective. There are some very successful content marketers who still post relatively infrequently. Make sure everything is properly edited and proofread before publishing, with tools like My Writing Way and Academized.

#5 Optimize For SEO

There’s no sense in going to all the trouble of creating quality content if you don’t optimize it for SEO. Think up as many words and phrases related to your niche as you can. Tools like Serpstat can be very helpful for this step. Throw all your keywords and phrases into a spreadsheet, sorting them as primary and secondary. Use this spreadsheet as a resource as you create your content. StateofWriting and Boom Essays are also very helpful tools for using SEO in content writing.

#6 Proper Distribution

Don’t forget to include distribution as part of your strategy. Building up your email list and using it as a marketing tool can be very effective. Social media is another great, and free, way of getting your content out to your audience. EssayRoo is a very useful social media content writing tool, mentioned at BestAustralianWriters. As you’re preparing to distribute, it’s a good idea to double check how good your SEO is. Use Google Index and Webmaster Tools to make sure there are no security issues and to see how your traffic is. See what kind of backlinks are directing traffic to your site. Check the settings on your blog and make sure you are indexable by search engines.

Conclusion

There’s so much more to content marketing than just making some good content. It doesn’t matter how amazing your content is if it’s poorly targeted, or nobody comes across it in the search results. Follow these six tips for developing a killer content strategy on a budget!

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