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One common challenge that I observed in almost all marketing teams I was a part of was that the content marketing efforts weren’t delivering desired results.

Over time, while driving content strategy in multiple roles I read many articles by people who did it right and implemented what was relevant for me at that time. I tried multiple things and kept on refining my approach till it worked consistently across business lines. Through this post, I am sharing my approach to creating a content strategy that should drive the desired results for your business too.

I call it the RCM approach. It covers three broad sections — a) Research, b) Create & Distribute and c) Measure.

Please note, the content strategy applies to all the content you create across all channels and not just blog. Most of the sections of the article will be covered as independent topics soon. For now, I have tried to explain what is required to understand the context.

Here are the sections we will cover, depending on your context YMMV:

1. Research:

1.1 Understand the business

1.2 See if you need an extensive content strategy

1.3 Set goals & benchmarks

1.4 Define buyer personas

1.5 Do competition research & figure out a niche

2. Create & Distribute:

2.1 Create an extensive smart topic list

2.2 Prioritize using keyword research

2.3 Define content guidelines & create an editorial calendar (To get my custom templates, share your email here and I will send it to you)

2.3 Create topic clusters

2.4 Create, Repurpose & Distribute

3. Measure

3.1. Analyze & refine

Let’s deep dive into all sections. Do subscribe if you find this post helpful:

1. Research:

1.1 Understand the business

Over the years, I have come to realize that if you understand your business well, you end up creating a lot more value for the organization via your marketing activities.

It is a good idea to catch up with your colleagues from sales, account management, customer success, product, and other teams. Apart from understanding the business, you will also get great insights into your target audience, their problems, what you are offering, what your competitors are doing, etc.

1.2 See if you need an extensive content strategy

This is the first question we should ask ourselves before getting to work. While every organization would need a content strategy, its depth & breadth may vary depending on the stage of the company and the resources they have at that time.

For Example:

An online car portal that sells new cars (in partnership with multiple OEMs) would need to create tens of thousands of articles around upcoming cars, model details, reviews of new cars, comparison of various models, etc. The more traffic they get, the more leads they can pass on to the OEMs and make a commission on every sale. Hence they will need an extensive content strategy and content will play a primary role in their marketing activities.

Same would be true for an online travel portal that sells holiday packages and also facilitates hotel & flight booking. They would have a plethora of content around places to visit all over the globe, itinerary required, etc.

But an O2O (Online to Offline) business buying used cars from customers at its retail stores will not be generating as much content. It is because the content relevant for car owners and people interested in selling cars would be limited.

1.3 Set goals & benchmarks

As with all marketing activities, the user has to be at the center of your content efforts. Your content must be useful to users. Apart from this, you should identify the end goal you want to achieve via content.

It can be:

Traffic Generation Lead Generation Thought Leadership Brand Building

….or some other depending on the business need.

Once the goal is decided, set some metrics to be tracked on a weekly or monthly basis. You should know where you want to be and all activities/efforts should help you move towards that goal.

For Example:

In one of the projects, we were setting up the blog as a part of our overall content efforts and we decided to track blog traffic till it reaches a decent stage. After researching online, we realized that there was a huge variation in benchmarks for every industry/organization and the traffic growth for any business depends on multiple factors.

But one thing was very clear, it takes a lot of time to build good content & get decent traffic.

To put things into perspective, I am sharing the screenshot of a tweet by Benedict Evans showing how his blog traffic grew over the years.

Screenshot of a Tweet by Benedict Evans

So, we decided that we will take our first month’s traffic as a benchmark and then set our targets to increase it at least by 10% on a MOM basis. This was all to be done organically without spending money.

1.4 Define buyer personas

Businesses need to get this right. If you know your personas well then only you will be able to create products/services for them and market those well.

I follow a three-step approach here:

STEP 1: Talk to multiple teams, create a hypothesis on personas — When you talk to your colleagues in marketing, product, UX, operations, customer success, sales, KAM, etc. you might observe that they all have a different view on personas. Make a list of all those personas, create some hypothesis on what personas would your business have.

— When you talk to your colleagues in marketing, product, UX, operations, customer success, sales, KAM, etc. you might observe that they all have a different view on personas. Make a list of all those personas, create some hypothesis on what personas would your business have. STEP 2: Look at your data and validate your personas — Now that you have a hypothesis, look deeper in your database to see which personas get you most of your business, which personas show good retention, etc. Validate the hypothesis you created in step one. Looking at data is important because data will give you trends that hold at scale. List all your personas and download list of customers who fall into those personas.

— Now that you have a hypothesis, look deeper in your database to see which personas get you most of your business, which personas show good retention, etc. Validate the hypothesis you created in step one. Looking at data is important because data will give you trends that hold at scale. List all your personas and download list of customers who fall into those personas. STEP 3: Interview customers & prospects representing your personas — Take interviews of customers that you got from step 2. HubSpot has beautifully explained how to do buyer persona research in this post. You can also download HubSpot’s free persona templates here.

For Example:

A business buying used cars from consumers might have personas like:

First-time car owner

Frequent car upgrader

Economical upgrader

Women car owner

Car enthusiast

Some Sample Buyer Personas

1.5 Do competition research & figure out a niche

Writing what most people have already written won’t get us anywhere. In most of the cases, you will find a niche that competition would have missed out on. The only way to identify a niche is by doing thorough competition research.

Competition research would also help you understand your competitor’s content strategy and see how you can differentiate and do better than them.

Analyze what kind of content they are writing, what categories are they covering, is there a gap between what target audience need & what they are writing, what is their publishing frequency, which articles are getting more comments, where all are they distributing it, what are the various content formats they are creating etc.

For Example:

In one of the projects that I did with a used car buying company, we observed that our competitors were broadly covering the following categories:

New Car (Reviews, Comparison, etc.) Used Car (Reviews, Comparison, etc.) Car Maintenance Tips Sell Car — Untapped category

The first two categories weren’t relevant to us. The competition had done well in the third category “Car Maintenance” but the last one “Sell Car” had a few articles and the category was mostly untapped.

In the used car category, our competitors were writing on topics like — Why not to sell your car to relatives, How to negotiate while selling your car, etc. While these topics are relevant but a person trying to sell a car would be more interested in knowing the technicalities of selling a car. Some useful topics for her would be — How does my RC transfer happen post selling, What are the documents required to sell a car, What are the RTO regulations for selling a financed car, etc.

Bingo! We had found a niche. We knew the process & technicalities of selling any kind of car across states and we started compiling information from all teams. This turned out to be our competitive advantage as we were able to organically convert people who had a very high intent of selling their car. This further reduced our CAC. Our blogs still appear as featured snippets and rank 1 on Google :)