If your business is intent on growth, you only need to start with one thing: content strategy. A solid content strategy can do more than market and promote your business. It speaks to your target audience or brand personas and identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It details the specific and measurable goals. A well-planned executed strategy enables the business to check performances and achieve goals. This type of clarity throws more light to investors. Who wouldn’t invest in a business who shows a clear path to growth? A content strategy protects the very idea of your business.
Simply put, your business cannot survive without it. Let’s dive into the steps to start one:
1. Marketing Funnel
When starting the project you have to decide where it lies in your marketing funnel. A marketing funnel represents the process of turning generated leads into customers. As in the proverbial funnel, a business captures a buyer’s attention. Hence, they are perceived to be on top of the funnel. They then move through a purchasing decision (middle of the funnel). And come out as final customers.
It also illustrates the different stages of the marketing funnel:
Use marketing campaigns, consumer research, trade shows, or advertising to attract potential customers. But your strategies should have content strategy.
This stage is where lead generation takes place. Use data gathered in this stage to understand and attract future buyers.
Our project lies in the awareness phase of the marketing funnel.
Another stage of the content strategy is to establish your ideal customer in the form of a buyer persona. This is the visualization of your ideal customer based on market research and data. It’s essential to base this on your existing customers.
A well-portrayed buyer persona should focus on their needs, and wants. It should dig deeper into their goals and their motivation. When done with the right research, you’ll be able to develop the right products for them. When you can identify who you wish to serve, you can attract the right leads.
A SWOT analysis gives you the opportunity to access the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to your business idea. SWOT analysis also evaluates the threats. You’ll be able to tell if the main objectives will be met. Or if it’s worth the risk or not.
Start by creating four quadrants on a piece of paper. Then label the quadrants strength, weaknesses, opportunity, and threats. Now take a deep look and analyze the strengths of your plan. Include where the selling points of your business would be and your edge over your competitors.
Next, analyze the weaknesses and the shortcomings of the project. Ask yourself, what factors might contribute to the business failing. If you can identify those factors then you can work on them and overcome those challenges.
On the third quadrant, write down opportunities you discovered. There might be new avenues to invest in or could lead to groundbreaking success.
Let’s imagine that you could create an app that could remind patients to take their medication. It’s an opportunity if no one else has created one.
Like Snapchat. When they were developing the app, no other app like it existed. They knew people were going to love it. They took the opportunity, and now Snapchat is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world.
Next, analyze the threats to your project. You can evaluate that a competitor is a threat. An even bigger threat is a competitor with deep pockets. So list out all these threats and come up with a plan of how to overcome them.
After completing your SWOT analysis you should have a clear understanding of the pros and cons of your business plan. You can them make decide if it’s a risk worth taking.
When starting up a business your aim is to achieve the goals you set. Setting up goals is a very important aspect when undertaking a project or business idea. It lets you set up priorities and what you will like to achieve in every aspect of your goals.
Without goals everything haphazard and unmanageable. SMART goals are one of the most effective tools for achieving goals. It keeps your goals track-able and structured. And it creates a straight path towards certain objectives.
SMART goal settings stand for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. They help achieve transparency in an organization, clarifies the purpose of a goal, and the plan and the path it took to achieve the particular goal.
Marketing strategy is a forward, progressive and long-term approach to planning a project. It analyzes the initial situation and the formulation and creation of market-oriented strategies.
Even companies with existing strategies need to reevaluate their approach. Adopt a promising strategy that could yield successful results. A few ways to achieve this is by looking at some key metrics and working on them to get to desired results.
In the course of implementing strategies, it’s important to measure the goals at specific times. You can decide if you need to apply more resources or less.
Analytics tools provides statistical data about customers and your marketing strategies. You can access information that will upgrade your business.
One example of a good analytics tool is Kissmetrics. It’s a little pricey but if you have the budget for it, it provides a better sense of your users.
A business cannot succeed without a clear cut well defined plan on what it exactly seeks to achieve. In the online world, they say content is king, and this remains true. A very well thought out content strategy is your business’ only hope of achieving surpassing its goals. If you are looking for a clear route to follow for your business in developing its content, reread the list above.
Once you’re all set, give us a call and we’ll get right onto brainstorming with confidence. Email us to start the brainstorming session info@www.donnasantos.com
Posted By
Donna Santos
Categories
Corporate Media, Industry News
Tags
branding, corporate video, marketing, photo and video production, videography