It’s no surprise that those companies who DO have a strategy are most likely to feel that their content marketing efforts are successful.

Without a strategy, success or failure is just a matter of luck – and you risk all your efforts going to waste.

Recommended Resource: Need to jumpstart your content marketing results? Get more traffic and conversions with our Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing in 2020.

That’s likely why a similar percentage (64%) say that learning how to build a content strategy is one of their greatest educational needs.

CMI-Greatest-Content-Management-Educational-Needs-Jul2017
If you’re in that group and have been wondering how to create a content strategy for your business, we’re here to help.

We’ve successfully used content marketing to grow our own traffic and boost conversions since OptinMonster first launched in 2013, and we want to share with you what we’ve learned along the way.

This guide will walk you through 11 simple steps to developing and executing a content marketing plan that’ll help you grow your business without wasting time and money.

Here are the steps for easy reference:

Step 1. Set Your Mission and Your Goals
Step 2. Establish Your KPIs
Step 3. Know Your Audience
Step 4. Assess Your Current Position
Step 5. Figure Out the Best Content Channels
Step 6. Decide on Content Types
Step 7. Identify and Allocate Resources
Step 8. Create a Content Calendar
Step 9. Create Content
Step 10. Distribute and Market
Step 11. Measure Results

You convince yourself you just need an example or something to model your post after. That’s all! You click over to [insert name of any high DA, beautifully designed website that ranks for everything] for some inspiration and notice that in the past hour they’ve posted seven original blog posts. All in a different format. How do they make it seem so easy?

Blog writing is a skill that takes time and practice. Whether you’re a digital marketer working with an established brand or an entrepreneur trying to create an online presence, a well-crafted blog post can increase your visibility.

To help you save hours of aimless writing, we’ve created eight blog post templates to guide your content. While some of these are created with SEO optimization in mind, other templates are geared toward building your voice as a thought leader.

Regardless of your goal, these post structures have been proven to drive results. We’ve created how-to posts that gain 3,000+ monthly visitors, infographic posts that earn 65+ links, list posts that rank page one earning a $2.5k monthly value and the list goes on. Read through to find how to choose the right type of post for your topic and how to properly structure it so you can generate similar results.

graphic that explains how to choose the structure of a post

How to Choose the Right Post Type
Some topics have a clear post-type while others can be more of a gray area.

Once you’ve landed on a topic idea, you’ll want to look to Google to see what types of posts are ranking. Not only will this give you an idea of what’s needed to rank, but you’ll get a better understanding of user intent.

Fill them, customize them, and save yourself a ton of time. It’s that simple.

You’ll see results, too.

1. Social media strategy template
Screenshot of the social media strategy template

Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to improve your current social marketing strategy, you need this essential resource.

The template makes it easy to:

Set social media goals that lead to real business results
Better target your ideal customer
Gather intel on the competition so you can stay ahead
See what’s already working and what’s not
Create or improve your social media profiles
Develop a thoughtful content strategy and set a publishing schedule you can stick to
Track your progress and adjust your plan as needed

Product Brand Strategy
The three brand strategies commonly used amongst large firms for deciding which products will contribute to which brand names are Multi-product Branding, Multi-branding, and Private Branding.

Multi-Product Brand & Benefits
Multi-Product Branding, also known as family branding, or corporate branding is when a company uses one brand name for all of its products within a class. For example, the brand name Sony is used on most if not all of their products. Sony is the company or parent brand name, but you will also see it on televisions, and on their PlayStation series. The benefits of Multiproduct branding is brand equity return, lower promotion costs, and growing brand awareness. These benefits come about through the extensive use of your brand name over a wide array of product offerings. The idea is to take a brand name which has established itself in one product class and apply that brand name to another product, in another product class, expecting for the brand awareness to carry over. However, there is also a negative effect on the multi-product brand strategy.

How to Avoid Multi-Product Brand Issues
The downside of multi-product branding is that it will spread your brand thin. When a company spreads their brand thin the result is often a weaker brand image. The more a brand name is used on products of a different class, the greater the diluted effect on brand equity. In order to avoid the negative effects of Multiproduct branding, companies use sub-branding. Sub-branding allows a company to use the big brand name while giving each product a little brand of its’ own. For example, Gillette’s Mach 3 razor for men. The Gillette brand is clearly marked on the package so consumers associate the new Mach 3 with Gillette quality. This gives the Mach 3 a sub-brand and distinguishes it from other Gillette razors.

In this all-new guide you’ll learn:

How to promote your content
Content formats that are working right now
The top content marketing trends in 2020
New content creation strategies
Lots of advanced tips, strategies and techniques
So if you want to get more traffic from your content this year, you’ll love today’s guide.

Let’s get started.

Content Marketing This Year
Contents

Chapter 1
Double Down on Video Content

Chapter 2
Promote With Email

Chapter 3
Publish “Be The Source” Posts

Chapter 4
Get Engagement (and Reach) on LinkedIn

Chapter 5
Create More Epic Content

Chapter 6
Jump On Emerging Topics

Chapter 7
Content Repurposing 2.0

Bonus Chapter
Content Marketing Tactics for 2020

CHAPTER 1:
Double Down on Video Content
Is video really “the future of content marketing”?

Yup!

In fact, the number of businesses that use video as part of their marketing is up 38% since 2017.

And 72% of consumers say that they now “prefer videos” over text-based content.

So if you want to get started with video marketing — or double down on what you’re already doing — this chapter is for you.

In this chapter I’ll give you some of the tips and takeaways that I’ve learned from producing hundreds of hours of video content.

Unique challenges for B2B SaaS companies
1) Let’s be honest, most SaaS look the same.
2) Bro, that’s SUPER niche
3) Where’s the blog?
4) Booooring.
Write great content
Link building strategies that work for SaaS

Our SaaS link building playbook – the only strategy you need

Step #0 – Identify what you have to work with

Step #1 – How to build links to your home page
Step #2 – How to build links to your linkable assets

Step #3 – How to build links to your “quick win” pages

Step #4 – How to build links to your main landing pages
Whether you are a new or established SaaS company, you are probably already creating a ton of amazing, jaw-dropping content.

I’m guessing your blog is filled with articles like:

The ultimate guide to X and Y, the top X tools, how to do X, the top X statistics for 2021, etc.

Everyone talks about creating great content and how this will land you amazing backlinks naturally with time, right?

After working with SaaS companies for the past 2 years though, I’ve noticed a pattern…

Backlinks for SaaS companies very rarely come naturally. Especially cause everybody and their mom are starting a SaaS company in 2021.

No matter the niche, you are most likely going to have to manually build backlinks to your SaaS company to get your amazing content seen and consumed to eventually acquire new customers.

In this article, I won’t talk about specific techniques or tactics (plenty of that already online).

What I will do is give you the general frameworks that we at Growth Gorilla use to find link opportunities and ideas for SaaS companies based on what your target pages are.

Content marketing strategy, content strategy, and content plan.

People often use these terms interchangeably (which is understandable, as the lines are somewhat blurry), but each is a bit different:

Content marketing strategy
At its core, your content marketing strategy is your “why.” Why you are creating content, who you are helping, and how you will help them in a way no one else can. Organizations typically use content marketing to build an audience and to achieve at least one of these profitable results: increased revenue, lower costs, or better customers.

Content strategy
On the other hand, content strategy delves deeper into (in Kristina Halvorson’s words) the “creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” Note that content strategy often goes beyond the scope of a content marketing strategy, as it helps businesses manage all of the content they have.

Content plan
In contrast to the other two, a content plan is very tactical. It documents the specifics of how you will execute your strategy, and who on your team will be handling each task. It’s important to understand that you need a content marketing strategy BEFORE you build your content plan. Think of it as a marketing plan that specifically relates to content; thus, it should include details such as the key topic areas you will cover, what content you will create, when and how to share your content, and specific calls to action you will include.

Email your mailing list
The first thing you should do in the quest to get your first 100 podcast listeners is email your mailing list about it!

Seeing as this also marks the start of your podcast promotion, go ahead and also record the date you do this and the name of the podcast in the form field below.

Now, granted, this may not be applicable if you’re starting from scratch; in this case, go ahead and email as many people that you know who might be interested in the topic! If you personally know them, go ahead and ask them to share it too.

Update your signature in your email provider
The next thing you need to do is to update your signature in your email provider. Insert a link to your new podcast and record the new signature with the form field below.

Share via social networks
Now you should share the new podcast through every (personal) avenue possible! Use the sub-checklist below to keep track of where you have posted the podcast to, in order to avoid duplicates.

The goal: I wanted to see if I will get more traffic by splitting the long-form content into a set of smaller pages linked together and organized hierarchically in my website.

Each newly created page will focus on a specific section and a subtopic of the initial article.

I don’t want to keep the suspense too long (any way you’ve read the title, so you know the end of the story.)

Indeed, it was a successful update of a long-form article into a topic cluster.

Before the start of the experiment, the page generated about 50 page views per week.

Now the topic cluster makes almost 2’000 page views per week and generated 16’000 page views between May 2020 and October 2020.

It is a growth of 1000% compared to the four months before the update.

This section of my website is now generating 10 times more visits, and it keeps on growing.

You can see that the results are amazing, a couple of week after the update I got an increase of impressions in Google Search (for the pages of the cluster) and more visits to my website.

the topic cluster makes almost 2’000 page views per week.
At the end of the article, I will share more statistics, the number of keywords won, the ranking of the page on Google, and the traffic growth. (If you are a data nerd, you will love it).

But before, let me give more details about the process:

How I analyzed the long-form article
How I defined the topics of the cluster
How I used Google Search Console to unveil opportunities
How I managed the internal links between the pages
How I published the page and handled the redirection and deindexation in Google

But then you don’t.

To realize the potential content marketing offers, it’s critical to have a plan. It sounds simple, yet it’s a step many content marketers don’t take. Seventy percent of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy (Altimeter), and only 29 percent of leading marketers systematically reuse and repurpose content (Curata).

That’s because creating such a plan is daunting. It requires marketers to analyze where their marketing efforts have been and what they want it to achieve in the future.

If you are one of the 70 percent of marketers operating without a plan, take heart: we’ve got the information and templates you need to guide you through the planning process and produce a content plan that can generate results.

Content Marketing Plan Is More than Just Content
Why is it so hard for marketers to create a strategic plan for their content? Let’s start by taking a look at what content marketing is:

The Content Marketing Institute defines it this way:

Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Note the emphasis on strategy in this statement. Taking a strategic approach to your content plan ensures your message cuts through the clutter and reaches your target audience with the right information at the right time.