How do you create an unbeatable content marketing strategy for your business? In order to achieve this you first need to understand whether you can create such a marketing strategy or not – do you believe it can be done? Kevin Spacey rightly says in the below-mentioned video that when it comes to whether a movie (which is content) is going to be a success or a failure, there is nothing like luck. Everything can be predecided. You follow the rules, you get the results. There are certain templates that get you success. Of course there are instances when people don’t follow certain templates and still hit the jackpot (he cites an example of The Godfather patriarch who constantly gets anxiety attacks), and that’s how new templates are created, but I personally believe you should dabble with new templates only when you have tasted success on the strength of existing, proven templates. Anyway, first the Kevin Spacey content marketing video:

Just like the templates people use in order to experience success in various aspects of life, there are some failsafe ways to create an unbeatable content marketing strategy. As I repeatedly say in my blog posts, every business and organization (or a person) has its own definition of success so whether your content marketing strategy is succeeding or not depends a lot on how you define success. Really, making money isn’t always the purpose, but let’s, for the benefit of clarity, assume that every business wants to get more business, more leads, more contacts and more traction. This is how success is defined – getting more with less. Content marketing gives you that provided you do the right things. Listed below are 10 failsafe ways you can create a content marketing strategy that packs a punch.

1. Have a clear idea of what you want to achieve: Some people think content marketing means getting more traffic from search engines. Yes, better content definitely improves your search engine rankings but this is not the only purpose of putting into action a content marketing strategy and in fact, you shouldn’t even call it a strategy. An “SEO” campaign, yes, even an SEO strategy, but definitely not a content marketing strategy. This is one of the goals and not the only goal. The main purpose of your content marketing strategy is building a platform and getting people to know you and trust you. It is to make it easier for people to find you when they actually need to find you. It is to strengthen your brand. It is to clear all doubts from people’s minds. Increase traffic? Yes, but that is natural outcome. It is a byproduct. So before you launch your content marketing strategy, have a clear idea of – write it down somewhere and put it on the wall – exactly what you intend to achieve.
2. Focus on the quality and the value of your content: This is also something that you should highlight and always keep in mind because as you publish and distribute more and more content, somewhere you’re going to lose track and get trapped in that vicious cycle of publishing as much content as possible. Be discriminating. Only publish the best content. This may frustrate you and it may also slow you down but sticking to quality always pays. Be ready to stick your neck out as Kevin Spacey suggests in the video. If you simply do what others are doing, there is no difference and there is no way people can distinguish you from the others. Make yourself distinguishable by providing people value. They should know that what they get from you they won’t get from anyone else.
3. Document your content marketing strategy: This way you know where you stand, where you are coming from, and where you are going. Documentation gives you a clear picture of what is being done and what needs to be done and what are the results you are getting and what changes you have to implement considering the results. As the scope of your content marketing increases it will become difficult to track everything. Remember that you are building an asset. Even when you are publishing a blog post you’re investing time and money in it. So why not get maximum return out of it? How do you get it? By building it as a precious business asset. Remember that a few loose bricks can bring your wall down and every blog post, every article that you publish is a brick in your wall of brand building. Documentation also helps you sustain an editorial calendar. I recently wrote about what you mean by documenting your content marketing strategy. This brings us to…
4. Maintain an editorial calendar: An editorial calendar saves you from going directionless. When you have an editorial calendar you don’t publish content randomly. You have a clear strategy. You can brainstorm on every blog post, on every article, on every infographic and on every social media update. You can intend its impact. You can make a list of keywords you would like to focus on while creating content on particular days and then how you’re going to promote that content. You can assign various content types to various social media and social networking channels because not every sort of content is suitable for every social networking channel. If you have a bigger content marketing team you can also assign various tasks to your team members using your editorial calendar. There are many ways and tools you can use to maintain a compact editorial calendar. Here is what I wrote about the importance of creating and maintaining an editorial calendar (you will need to scroll down a bit in order to come to the exact bullet point).
5. Regularly audit your existing content: Content auditing must be done in the beginning – before you initiate your content marketing strategy for the new content you should have already audited your existing content. Your existing content is the ground upon which you build the building of your new content, it is the foundation. So you need to make the foundation strong. Here is what I wrote about what is content auditing and how to audit your existing content.
6. Solve problems with your content: The greatest degree of success is reaped by the content that solves people’s problems. Don’t just create content to cover your keywords. These days I am writing content for a client who actually wants to cover his keywords but I’m writing the content in such a manner that every piece of landing page provides some useful information to the visitors. Whenever you are creating a blog post or an article think hard – is it solving a problem? The more problems you solve, the better you solve the problems, the more business you will get and the better will be the chances of creating an unbeatable content marketing strategy.
7. Always think like a professional publisher: How does a professional publisher think? He or she doesn’t just think about creating content. He or she has to take charge of everything from quality to adherence to guidelines to timely publication of the content and then distribution of that content to the targeted audience. As someone who is striving to create an unbeatable content marketing strategy the job of making sure that the right audience can access your content is as important as creating and publishing your content. Think like a book publisher, a magazine publisher or a newspaper publisher. Unless people read your content, it is of no use. So use all the tricks that you have in your kitty – your marketing acumen, your own brand, your presence on social media, your influence, your networking, your SEO skills, your knack for using the right channel for the right content format, whatever is at your disposal, use it. In fact if you want to think in terms of proportions, the effort spent on promoting quality content must be equal to or more than the effort spent on creating quality content (although, creating quality content is a must and without that, nothing can be achieved).
8. Nurture your broadcasting channels: As I have written above, distributing and broadcasting your content is as important as creating it. But how do you broadcast your content if you haven’t developed a channel for yourself? You either pay for an existing channel (which can be extremely costly) or you spend some time creating your own channel which is not very difficult on the Internet. Whether you want to build a presence on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, broadcast quality content on an ongoing basis. Be recognized for broadcasting quality content. Engage people on your channels. Even on your blog, make sure you respond to people’s comments. Approach people on Twitter and LinkedIn and have conversations with them. When they know you they are more eager to access and promote your content. Become a brand in yourself. Nurturing a channel to broadcast your content shouldn’t come as an afterthought. It is one of the main activities of creating an unbeatable content marketing strategy.
9. Don’t neglect the search engines: For a long time, a big chunk of your traffic is going to come from the search engines. They may come and go, but people will be using one or another search engine whether they do it on computers and laptops or their mobile phones. So producing quality content doesn’t mean neglecting search engines. In fact when I’m writing content for my clients my main intention is to provide value as well as write optimized content. By optimized content I mean content the search engines can easily evaluate and rank for the appropriate keywords and key phrases. Mind you, I’m not talking about needlessly stuffing your keywords, what I mean is, incorporating them logically with your main content so that they become a part of your writing. In fact, if you focus on the core message of your content, you automatically end up using the main keywords and key phrases.
10. Start building a mailing list from the word go: Many people make this mistake; even I have made it – they don’t pay much attention to building a mailing list. I started much later. People normally relate mailing lists to spamming but it is not like that. Publishing a newsletter builds you a solid platform for broadcasting your content. Lots of my work comes from my newsletter because I’m constantly posting quality content on it and broadcasting it routinely. In fact more qualified traffic comes from my newsletter compared to Twitter. Again, it takes time to build a solid mailing list so start as early as possible. Remember that people should want to subscribe to your mailing list. Don’t trick them into subscribing to it and make sure that you have a double-opt-in system to get new subscribers.

There are many ways to creating an unbeatable content marketing strategy and I could go on and on, but these are the basic 10 ways you can implement and experience great results.