How to Create a Marketing Campaign from Scratch

Yes, the numbers say it all.

According to the Content Marketing Institute’s report “B2C Content Marketing 2014—benchmarks, budgets, and trends—North America”:

• 90% of B2C marketers use content marketing (and that’s up from 86% last year).
• 44% of their B2B colleagues claim they are effective at content marketing.
• 60% plan to increase their content marketing budget.
• 67% of B2C organizations have someone in place to oversee content marketing.
• 72% of marketers report producing more content than they did a year ago.

Content marketing adoption is on the rise, and the confidence in content strategies is growing.

But you’re still not convinced to use it.

Why?

Is it because you don’t believe that it can deliver any real benefits for your business? After all, it’s not a sales channel. Content can help with many things, like brand awareness, visibility, or reputation. But, content strategy rarely results in sales.

Or do you feel that content is a doomed strategy in the long term, and it’s better to focus on customer experience instead?

But perhaps you have been toying with the idea of marketing with content. You just don’t know how to launch a structured strategy. If so, read on. This post will tell you exactly what steps you need to take.

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy is a plan for producing, distributing, and managing content that satisfies your company's objectives. It requires understanding your audience, developing clear objectives, and producing content that people would like to read. With a content strategy, you ensure that each piece of content you produce has a goal—to inform, entertain, or even convert clients.

At its heart, content strategy is all about matching your content development with your company objectives. For instance, if you aim to boost brand recognition, you may write shareable blog articles, shareable social networking updates, and videos promoting your brand's experience.

Your content strategy should also incorporate a consistent tone, style, and quality across channels. Considering the whole content lifecycle, from concept and development to analysis and distribution, can help maximize impact.

Why Marketers Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Creating a successful content marketing strategy is essential for ensuring that your content marketing efforts are purposeful and effective. Without a strategy, you might find yourself producing content aimlessly, with no clear goals or a cohesive plan.

1. Align your Team on Goals and Objectives

A well-defined content marketing strategy aligns your team with your business objectives. Having a strategy, whether you want to increase brand recognition, drive leads, or boost consumer engagement, helps everybody achieve the same objectives. This alignment can make your marketing more cohesive and increase your chance of measurable outcomes.

2. Guides Your Content Creation and Distribution

Having a strategy in place means you know what content to produce and where to share it. It offers you a roadmap, so you are not making content on your own. Instead, you are producing content that gets viewed by your intended audience and sent out through the proper channels. This means your content reaches the right people at the right moment.

3. Optimizes Your Resources

A content marketing strategy helps you to use your resources like time, budget, and personnel more efficiently. Knowing what content you have to create and what media you will distribute means you can concentrate your efforts on activities that yield the best return on investment. It lets you use the resources you have and reduces waste.

4. Builds Brand Authority and Trust

Producing quality content positions you as a thought leader in your industry. A content strategy ensures your content grabs attention and provides value, establishing trust and credibility with your target market. With time, that trust builds into long-term relationships and consumer trust—all essential for your business.

What You Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Making content marketing strategies may appear overwhelming at first glance; however, with the correct tools and approach, you can develop a results-oriented plan. Here’s what you need to get started:

1. Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines are essential. They ensure that all your content is consistent and aligns with your brand’s identity. Think of them as your brand’s rulebook.

These guidelines typically include your brand’s color palette, typography, tone of voice, and overall style. Whether you’re writing a blog post or designing a social media graphic, you want everything to look and feel cohesive. Consistency helps create trust since your audience knows what to expect of you. Additionally, it makes your brand readily identifiable, something that is essential in a crowded marketplace.

If you don’t have brand guidelines yet, start by defining your brand’s personality. Are you professional and formal, or casual and friendly? Once you have this down, document the visual and verbal elements that represent your brand.

2. Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar is your roadmap. It helps you plan, organize, and schedule your content in advance. Without a calendar, it’s easy to lose track of what needs to be done and when. You might end up scrambling to put together content at the last minute, which can lead to inconsistency and stress.

When creating your editorial calendar, consider the following:

• Frequency: How often do you want to publish content? Daily, weekly, or monthly?
• Content Types: Will you focus on blog posts, videos, social media updates, or a mix of the two?
• Themes: Are there specific themes or campaigns you want to focus on each month?

Your editorial calendar must be flexible. Adjust when needed; however, having a plan helps you remain organized and consistent in offering value to your audience.

3. Content Clusters

Content clusters will help structure your content strategy. They help you to cover a subject thoroughly and establish your authority in your industry.

Here’s how it works: You begin with a pillar of content. It is a broad guide. Then, you build related content ("cluster") that deals with particular subtopics. Each cluster piece links back to pillar content and the other way around. The internal linking structure helps with SEO and keeps your audience interested by supplying much more relevant content.

One of the content marketing examples in this aspect can include: If your pillar content is about “Content Marketing Strategy,” your cluster content could include topics like “How to Create an Editorial Calendar” or “SEO Tips for Content Marketing.” This approach makes it easier for your audience to find the information they need and encourages them to explore more of your content.

4. Marketing Funnels

A marketing funnel guides your audience from their first interaction with your brand to becoming a customer. Understanding how your content fits into this journey is key.

Your content should cater to different stages of the funnel:

• Top of the Funnel (Awareness): Create content that attracts new visitors, such as blog posts and social media content.
• Middle of the Funnel (Consideration): Offer content that helps your audience evaluate their options, like case studies or comparison guides.
• Bottom of the Funnel (Decision): Provide content that encourages conversions, such as product demos or customer testimonials.

By aligning your content with the stages of the marketing funnel, you ensure that you’re meeting your audience’s needs at every step of their journey.

5. Competitive Research

Competitive research helps you understand what’s working in your industry and what opportunities you can capitalize on. By analyzing your competitors, you can identify gaps in their content and find ways to differentiate yourself.

Begin with their content topics, formats, and platforms. Pay attention to what gets the most engagement. This helps you understand your audience and improve your content strategy.

Steps to Start Your First Content Marketing Campaign from Scratch

Content marketing is simple. You create valuable content to pull customers toward your product or service, aiming to build enough recognition and trust so they will want to do business with you. Starting with a clear plan and actionable steps, you can create a campaign that drives results.

And you may know this already. But chances are that your manager, CEO, or business partner doesn’t. They may have heard about it but are not sold on the idea yet.

Your first task, then, is to convince them of the importance of content marketing and the need to invest in it. A fair chance is that without their approval, your campaign will never get off the ground.

By the way, the Content Marketing Institute, an invaluable resource on the topic, offers great tips on achieving this here.

Here’s a comprehensive guide to help you launch your successful content marketing campaign from scratch.

1. Define Goals

Any marketing campaign needs to be aligned with your business goals for it to succeed. Before you create any type of content, you need to define what you want to achieve with the campaign.

Typical goals used by companies engaging in content marketing include:

• Raising brand awareness. When publishing content, your hope is that upon finishing consuming it, a reader is going to ask, Who wrote this?
• Increasing brand loyalty. Once your prospects start finding themselves coming across and reading your content whenever they search for specific solutions, they start to see your brand in a new light—as a credible but also likable resource.
• Customer education. Content is also a powerful vehicle for answering your customers’ most common questions and problems.
• Building Connection. Content offers you a chance to initiate and engage in conversation with readers, building a connection that can result in trust towards your brand.

The purpose of these goals is to help you quantify your results and justify your budget and investment. Make sure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. At this stage, determine which goals are most important to your business.

2. Define Metrics

Once you have defined your goals, you need to decide how you are going to track and measure the performance of content marketing campaigns. Even though every goal will have different KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), there will be a few common ones across your campaign:

• Traffic: Monitor the number of visitors to your content and the sources of this traffic (e.g., organic search, social media, referrals).
• Engagement: Measure metrics like time on the page, bounce rate, social shares, and comments to assess how engaged your audience is with your content.
• Lead Generation: Track the number of leads generated through forms, downloads, and other conversions.
• Conversions: Measure how many visitors are taking the desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.
• SEO Performance: Monitor your keyword rankings and search engine visibility to evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.

Also, since this might be the first such campaign in your organization, you should develop a reporting system that’s easy to follow for everyone involved.

3. Assess Internal Capabilities and Resources

There is a fair chance that you will do the bulk of work on the campaign in-house. Therefore, you need to assess and decide who is going to contribute to it and how much time they can devote to it.

You should work out how much content you will create in-house and assess the need to outsource.

Another aspect of the campaign you need to think of is management. Who is going to oversee various aspects of a campaign? What resources they can devote to it?

Depending on the size of your company, this task could be divided among a number of people who need to report in an easy-to-understand way, another aspect that should be decided upon.

4. Create Content Personas

To develop a successful campaign, you need to understand your audience. You need to know their pain points and what type of content they prefer to consume. Such knowledge will help you develop content personas—representations of your ideal reader, someone you will be creating content for.

Having content personas means that you can better model your users' buying behavior and target specific content at the different stages of the buying cycle. Once again, CMI offers great insight into developing content personas here.

5. Perform Content Audit

Before you launch a campaign, you also need to take a deep look at your current content. A full content audit will allow you to:

• Identify problems with content, performance issues, broken links, and anything else that might impart the way your current content will be consumed by new visitors.
• Identify content that you could reuse or repurpose for your new campaign.
• Evaluate your content’s quality and assess what needs to be updated for new visitors.

The aim for this audit is to find out if the information you provide about your products or services aligns with your new strategy. In short, you must ensure that your web copy will assist prospects in become customers.

Steps to Conduct a Content Audit:

• Inventory Your Content: Create a list of all your existing content assets, including blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media content.
• Analyze Performance: Use tools like Google Analytics to assess how each piece of content is performing in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversions.
• Identify Gaps: Look for topics that are important to your audience but are not currently covered by your content.
• Prioritize Updates: Determine which pieces of content need updating, repurposing, or removing.

Content audit is a lengthy and quite technical process. This post, however, offers a very good starting point for evaluating your content on the site.

6. Define Your Unique Take

Another aspect contributing to the success of your campaign is originality. With so much content already published, unless you show a unique take on the topic, your efforts might be ignored. A unique take will give you an unfair advantage—one no one else can copy from you.

Your unique take might be proprietary data or experience and expertise no one else has. Regardless of what, you should define it in your strategy.

7. Generate Content Ideas

For many content marketers, generating ideas is by far the most paralyzing aspect of the process. After all, there is a high demand for unique and valuable content that will stand out from the so many “me too” posts. Luckily, there are certain techniques you can use to come up with ideas:

• Focus on your passions and write about what you know. This is, in fact, the most powerful strategy of all.
• Build off others’ content. Join and add to the discussion, or
• Ask your customers and social media fans to gain first-hand information.

8. Create a Content Calendar

An editorial calendar will help you track your content creation and ensure it’s posted on time. It will also offer insight into content personas, topics, keywords, and distribution.

However, a content calendar is crucial not only to keep you in check but also to oversee a content strategy, which might be simple in a small organization. However, when you have to deal with other departments contributing to the campaign, you need a solid system to manage them all.

To create a content calendar, start with key dates. Mark any important dates, such as holidays, product launches, or industry events, that you want to create content around. Decide on the main themes you want to cover each month or quarter.

Assign specific content types to each theme and schedule them for publication. If you’re working with a content marketing team, assign tasks and deadlines to ensure everything runs smoothly.

9. Create Content

You need to pull your sleeves up and start creating content that is in line with your calendar. There is a ton of advice to offer on content creation, but for the purpose of a strategy, here are the things you need to ensure:

• Your content must be created by someone who specializes in a given content type (even if it means having to outsource it).
• You should spend considerable time on headlines (as they will play a big role in dictating the success of a campaign).
• It should be aligned with your marketing strategy. In other words, your content shouldn’t contradict your main brand message.

Based on the information you have gathered so far, you need to define what content types you will create for the campaign. In most cases, you are not restricted by one content type. Instead, you can publish a wide range of types, depending on what your audience prefers to consume.

You should mix tactics when creating your content strategy to reach and engage your audience. Your content types could be anything from blog posts, white papers, research papers, infographics, and more.

When you define them, make sure to maintain a balance between education and entertainment. Customers want you to help them. But at the same time, they want you to entertain them as well. Therefore, it’s good to include a few lighter pieces of content, a comic strip, a meme, or a tongue-in-cheek post, for instance.

Some excellent content types to consider:

1. Blog Posts

Content marketing is built around blog posts. They generate visitors to your website, enhance your online search engine rankings, and build your name as an authority in the market. Create useful, informative content which focuses on your target audience's pain points and preferences. Regularly updated blogs keep your audience interested and returning for a lot more.

2. Ebooks

Ebooks are good for lead generation. They offer in-depth insights on certain subjects to your audience. Provide ebooks in return for contact information and develop a list of prospective purchasers. Make your ebooks researched and actionable.

3. Case Studies

Case studies demonstrate the way your services or products have solved real problems for your clients. They develop credibility and trust and are excellent tools for convincing prospective customers to choose you more than your rivals.

4. Templates

Templates are tools your audience can work with right away. Regardless of whether it is a content calendar template or maybe a budget planner, templates save time and reduce processes. They're also good for generating leads, as people are usually prepared to part with their contact details for these resources.

5. Infographics

Infographics present data and information visually to make concepts clearer. They are shareable on social networks and could bring traffic back to your website. Use infographics to present statistics, processes, or tips in a visual way.

6. Videos

Videos are engaging and versatile. They could be utilized to explain ideas, highlight products, or share customer testimonials. With the growth of video content, this particular tactic is crucial to attract your audience and keep them interested.

7. Podcasts

Podcasts reach your audience on the go. They're great for deep discussions, interviews, and storytelling. With the expansion of podcast subscribers, this particular format can be an excellent way to develop a following and interact with your target market in a more personal way.

8. Social Media Strategies

Social networking marketing includes distributing your content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You know what is trending on each platform, so tailor your social media posts accordingly. Social media improves your reach, engages your audience, and generates visitors to the website. Consistent posting and interaction are crucial to a strong presence.

Your content should be relevant to your audience’s interests and needs. It should provide valuable information, insights, or solutions that help your audience solve a problem or achieve a goal. Use compelling headlines, visuals, and storytelling techniques to engage your audience and keep them reading. Incorporate keywords naturally, use meta tags, and ensure your content is optimized for search engines.

10. Define Distribution Channels

In content marketing, distribution is everything. The main work on your campaign begins when you hit "publish." Yet, getting content in front of the target audience is still one of the biggest problems encountered by content marketers today.

Before you launch your campaign, you should come up with ideas and a clear path for reaching your target audience. Consider your internal resources: social media, press connections, newsletter subscribers, and existing visitors. Decide if there are any industry leaders who would agree to help. And if you can afford to run ads to promote the main pieces.

The content distribution channels include:

• Social Media: Share your content on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to reach a wider audience.
• Email Marketing: Send your content directly to your subscribers’ inboxes through newsletters and targeted email campaigns.
• Content Syndication: Publish your content on third-party sites, partner with industry blogs, or opt for influencer marketing to extend your reach.
• Paid Advertising: Use paid promotion methods like Google Ads, social media ads, or sponsored content to boost visibility.

11. Monitor Your Performance

Monitoring your content marketing performance is crucial for understanding what’s working and what needs improvement. Without regular performance tracking, you’re essentially navigating your content strategy unthinkingly, missing opportunities to refine your approach and maximize results.

To monitor your performance effectively, start by identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your goals. It includes metrics like website traffic, engagement rates, lead generation, and conversion rates. Regularly review this data to identify trends, understand audience behavior, and spot areas for improvement. If a particular type of content isn’t performing well, analyze why and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Conclusion

Beginning your first content marketing campaign from scratch might be challenging; however, sticking with these suggestions can set you up for good results. From determining objectives and knowing your audience to producing high-quality content and optimizing your work, each step is important to creating a successful campaign.

Content marketing and advertising are really a long-term approach. Consistency, imagination, and the capacity to learn and change are the keys to lasting success. So take these steps, apply them to your own campaign, and see your content marketing and advertising flourish.