A whopping 82% of marketers actively used content marketing tactics in 2021. It’s no secret that content marketing effectively boosts brand awareness, drives sales, and increases engagement with your target audience. 

But with more marketers jumping on the content marketing train each year, how do you stay competitive? 

The key lies in the quality of your content, not the quantity. 

You can post three articles a week and multiple social media stories every day, and you still won’t get the results you want if you aren’t providing value to your audience. 

Still, many brands put all of their faith in quantity. That’s because they don’t have a straightforward process that helps them create content that provides real value to people. 

But not you. You’re here, which means you know that quality is the most critical part of your content marketing efforts. 

Keep reading to discover how you can use the 5 W’s and H framework to ensure that all of your content resonates with your audience.

What Are the 5 W’s?

The 5 W’s and H are the essential questions you should ask yourself if you want to create content that your audience will love. The questions are: who, what, when, where, why, and how. By answering these questions, you better understand your audience and what they want to create content that provides real value.

Once you learn to create value for your audience consistently, you’ll keep them coming back. 

These six questions are a powerful tool you can use in all aspects of your marketing strategy, from blog posts and videos to your email campaigns and website layout.

Let’s dive in.

Who

The first thing you need to know is: 

• Who am I creating this for? 
• Who will benefit from this content?
• Which segment of my audience am I targeting? 

To understand your audience better, create a standard buyer persona for your typical customer, and take time to outline their interests, behaviors, and habits. 

If you don’t know enough to create a persona, there are several ways you can learn more about your customers, including: 

• Surveys – Use surveys to gather customer feedback.
• Interviews – Chat with customers to learn more about their interests and buying behavior.
• Help desk chats – Review your customer service requests or support tickets to see what kinds of questions your customers ask and where they need help. 

Building customer relationships is an essential part of your business model. When you engage with your audience, you learn more about what they need from your content, and you build a strong foundation of trust with your brand. 

​​

Image Source

If you haven’t started implementing information-gathering tools, it’s not too late to integrate them into your website and customer interactions.

Besides understanding who will benefit from your content, you need to decide who will create the content. That is your internal stakeholder. 

Based on your knowledge of customer needs and habits, who has the skills and expertise to create high-quality content efficiently?

It may be more effective for small businesses without a large marketing team to outsource content creation to an expert freelancer. It all depends on your team’s capacity to turn around content.

Identifying your internal and external stakeholders will help you narrow down answers to the rest of the questions on this list.

What 

Like the “Who” question, your “What” question has an internal and an external element. 

Internally, you need to define your objective and what you want to get out of the content piece. Then, choose relevant metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs), to measure success. 

Here are some common objectives and the digital marketing metrics you can use with them: 

• Increased engagement – likes, shares, email opens, link clicks, time on page
• Drive traffic to your website – link clicks, website visitors, search engine ranking
• Maximize sales – purchases, average cart value
• Improve retention/customer experience – customer ratings, repeat purchase, subscription renewal

In addition to your internal goal, you must also know what your audience wants to get from your content. What’s the specific value your content piece offers? 

Potential customers engage with your content for several reasons, such as learning a new skill, finding a solution to a problem, or completing a task. Knowing your customer’s goal helps you understand what to include and which content type best suits their needs. 

Let’s look at an example:

Quickbooks offers a suite of accounting products, and some of them are targeted at freelancers. Here’s how they might tailor their content based on what that audience needs:

• Learning a new skill – Article on how to file taxes as a freelancer
• Solving a problem – Tutorial video demonstrating how to use Quickbooks for freelancers
• Completing a task – Customer invoice templates for freelancers

Image Source

As you can see, the answers to each question begin to build on one another. 

When

Now that you know who you’re creating for and what format your content will take, it’s time to set a timeline. 

First, ask yourself how long it will take to create the content and what’s a reasonable timeframe for getting it done. 

Then, to help set priority, consider how the publishing time affects your customer’s value. 

Is this problem urgent for your audience? Is there seasonality involved? When does your audience need the solution? 

Some types of content are only valuable if they’re delivered on time, while others can be more evergreen. Examples of seasonal content include back-to-school shopping guides, holiday recipes, and tax tutorials.

Image Source

Where

In addition to deciding what kind of content to create, you’ll need to choose where to share it. 

In technical terms, what’s the best marketing channel for your target audience? 

You want to deliver your content on the channels that receive the most engagement. That’s why it’s essential to understand your audience’s behaviors and habits in the first question. 

Email marketing newsletters are an excellent way to deliver helpful content to your existing customers and subscribers. Plus, drag and drop email builders make it easy for you to create engaging newsletters for all types of content, including video.

Image Source

You can also automate emails so that customers receive them at precisely the right time. If you sell software or SaaS products, you can use email automation to welcome new customers and deliver tutorial videos right after they sign up.

Reviewing your internal goals for the content can help you choose your channel too. For example, if your goal is increased engagement and your KPIs are likes and shares, you should share your content on social media. 

Why

And finally, the last of the W’s  —  “Why?” Why does this content matter to you? 

Start by ensuring that every piece of content you create has a clear mission. Ultimately, your content strategy should align with your overall marketing goals and business model. 

Then, consider your customer and see if you can answer the question, “Why does my customer want this content?” What’s the big picture? 

Maybe your customer wants to improve their business by increasing their customer base or enhancing their marketing strategy. 

Or, your customer could have more tangible results-driven goals such as increasing web traffic or maximizing revenue. 

Image Source

Tying your mission to your customers’ why helps you create content that goes beyond solving a problem or teaching a skill; it resonates deeply.  

How

Now it’s time to put it all together. 

With your new information, develop a content marketing plan that incorporates the 5 W questions:

• Who are the stakeholders?
• What do they want?
• When do they need it?
• Where should I provide the solution?
• Why is it important? 

Creating the right solution depends on your internal (your business) and external (your customer) stakeholder needs. There’s no “one size fits all” solution that works for every business. 

Image Source

You may even find that you need different approaches for the various segments of your customer base. Try starting with a general template of your content type and then personalizing it to maximize engagement from your target buyer persona.  

Final Thoughts: Mastering the 5 W’s (and H) for Killer Content Marketing

Let’s face it. When it comes to content creation, the options are endless. Without a set process, it’s easy to feel like you’re taking a shot in the dark every time you try to figure out what type of content to create next. 

Delivering the best answers starts with asking the right questions.

The 5 W’s of marketing help paint a picture of your audience and how your content creates value for them. The questions also help you consider your business goals. 

All of this information lets you narrow down your choices until you have an effective plan that delivers value for your customers and your business. 

The post Killer Content Marketing: How to Use the 5 W’s (and H) Like a Pro appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.

Are you struggling to get quality traffic on your website despite spending lots of time creating content? If yes, this post is for you.

Irrespective of what you sell, good content is the foundation of any marketing strategy. To get an edge over your competition and actively engage with your audience, you need to have a cohesive content marketing plan in place.

Here’s a quick guide on how to create a content strategy plan. I’ll also show examples of effective content marketing strategies you can draw inspiration from to plan your content effectively and ultimately drive traffic to your website.

Let’s dive in!

1. Define your objective

Content marketing helps you create and promote resources that will enable your target audience to learn more about your brand. But how do you ensure that your content marketing is moving in the right direction?

Identify your goals before you begin planning.

Is your goal to generate more leads, spread brand awareness, or drive more people to visit your store? Having S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals is key to setting realistic benchmarks.

Source

But what is a S.M.A.R.T goal? Let me illustrate with an example. “Increase New Customer Reviews by 30% Year Over Year,” for instance, is a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound goal. Here’s why:

Specific: The goal is clear. There is no room for interpretation.

Measurable: The increase by 30% of new customer reviews is quantifiable. 

Achievable: If you increased 20% reviews last year, 30% is an achievable target.

Relevant: Let’s assume the goal is relevant to the overarching sales objective. Time-bound: There is a timeframe within which you should have achieved your target

If you follow the SMART goals methodology, you can help your business achieve its strategic objectives. The method will allow your team members to align their efforts in one direction so you can achieve those goals.

2. Conduct a persona analysis

To develop a successful content plan, you need to create buyer personas based on their age groups, demographics, preferences, and interests first. If you know your audience, you can create content that will resonate with them and get them to you.

Source

For instance, Red Bull, a leading energy drink brand, creates content keeping its target audience— the young, dynamic, and adventurous ones–in mind. Here’s a perfect video example from their library.

Red Bull doesn’t focus much on hard selling. Instead, it covers topics its audience is interested in, like extreme sports and thrilling life experiences. That helps consumers associate the brand with other values that go far beyond Red Bull as a mere product and energy drink. In the end, that encourages customer loyalty..

Whether you are an established business or are just about to enter a new market, a persona analysis is crucial. It will help you determine what your buyers want. You can also create content that will resonate with them.

3. Examine the content you already have

If you’ve been in business for a while and have a good content repository, it’s best to review it. A content audit can help you understand how you can reutilize your existing content in unique ways.  

It can also give you insights into what works and what doesn’t. Just analyze existing data sets and check the actual state of your content. Ask yourself the following questions:

• How is your content performing?
• Is your messaging resonating with the customers?
• What content brings you the best results?
• What do you need to improve?

Once you have the answers, start planning your content based on what you have and what else you would need. So, your content audit sheet may look like this:

Source

Let’s look at a real-life example. Robin Sharma, a best-selling author, and life coach knows exactly how to optimize content marketing efforts by using content in an efficient way.

Robin promotes his books across different marketing channels but he doesn’t create new content for each channel. Instead, he repurposes a single content to ensure it fits the requirements of each platform. In other words, all the podcasts, audiobooks, blog posts, and even social media posts about one book, for example, would have the same basic content. 

In other words, once you know what you have in your content repository, you can create a plan to use your content effectively and efficiently. The rule of thumb is – Audit, Repurpose and Repeat!

Your ultimate objective is to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses in your content strategy and adapt your content plan to your current marketing goals.

4. Decide on a content management system

A content management system (CMS) allows you to create, manage, and track your content. It helps you streamline your content marketing strategy. 

You can use popular CMS like Hubspot and WordPress to integrate all your content marketing efforts in one place. With the help of WordPress page builder tools like Colibri, you can design and optimize your website to drive more traffic. The tool lets you revamp aspects of your website–including the headers, page content, footers, navigation menus, and global and even individual styling–in a single interface. 

A content management system can also help you monitor progress and streamline communication across teams as you create your content. It allows you to manage plugins like free web forms, live chat, and email marketing.

A CMS allows you to do content creation, content dissemination, and content analytics from a single platform.

5. Come up with content ideas

Coming up with content ideas is probably the most critical step in the content marketing process. 

You can use online idea generator tools to get your content ideas off the ground. Automated tools help you narrow down topics based on your specific preferences. Choose the relevant topics and build your content around it.

Make sure you include relevant keywords in your content to make it more search-friendly. You can use various SEO tools to help you optimize the content.

The main goal, though, is to create content that people will love. For that reason, always consider your target audience before finalizing your content ideas.

6. Decide what kind of content you want to create

There are various types of content you can create for your audience. You can have blog posts, eBooks, infographics, videos, podcasts, and social media posts. You name it.  You can easily update blog posts and upload them on your website to attract new visitors. You can also use blog posts to inform your target audience about what’s new in your niche. If you’re struggling with creating citations for your sources, you can use a citation generator like Quillbot to help you create properly formatted citations.

You don’t need to create all those types of content, though. Pick your content format/s according to your target audience’s preferences. The idea, after all, is to get them to you.

You can easily update blog posts and upload them on your website to attract new visitors. You can also use blog posts to inform your target audience about what’s new in your niche. 

EBooks and podcasts are other engaging types of content. You can, for instance, run a podcast series on your site and create a hook for your customer to revisit it and listen to the next episode.

Infographics and videos are visually appealing. If you want to cover a lot of data and statistical insights, an infographic or a quick video are probably also your best option. They are great at making complex concepts digestible.

7. Manage and publish your work

Creating a seamless user experience on different content marketing channels can be a daunting task. It doesn’t have to be difficult, though. 

You can easily automate and manage your postings using an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar allows you to keep track of your posting schedules across multiple channels, including social media networks.

Source

Editorial calendars help you plan your content in advance. With a little bit of customization, you can schedule your content for publication across different platforms using the tool. That gives you more time to focus on improving the quality of your other content.  

If there are specific holidays that might appeal to your audience, it’s best to mark those on your calendar so you know what needs to be published on those days. 

It’s good practice to take into account important holidays when planning your content using your calendar. So, you can schedule the publication of a blog post on How to Increase Black Friday Sales, for example. That way, you can appeal to a more extensive audience base.

8. Track Your Results

There’s often a great sense of relief after publishing a piece of content. You feel like the job is done, which it is in part.

If you’re creating content for search engines, you’ve still got a lot of work ahead of you. You will need to build links to your content, and promote the article through various channels. Alongside this, you need to monitor if your marketing efforts are generating a positive result.

Source

You can check and track keyword rankings using tools like Keyword.com which helps you keep track of your progress. You can use these insights to track your progress. Keyword monitoring will also help you identify existing content that needs to be updated or promoted.

In closing

The methods used to get content before potential customers are continually evolving. The core principles to ensure success, however, remain the same. You need to plan and create a top-notch content marketing strategy first based on research. 

Define your objective and audience, audit your existing content, and use a content management system. Don’t forget to brainstorm new content ideas. Then, publish and manage your content using an editorial calendar.

Just follow these tips. You’ll create that robust content marketing strategy that will generate your desired results.

The post How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy to Drive Traffic  appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.