3 Simple Steps to An Effective Content Marketing Strategy (Data Driven Case Studies)

Over the last 5 years, Content Marketing has established itself as the mainstream marketing tactic across all industries. As per CMI, Content Marketing is employed by 86% of B2B marketers and 77% of B2C marketers. But only 35% of B2B Marketers and 27% of B2C marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.

So what does it take to build and document an effective Content Marketing Strategy? Read on to find out.

In the following sections, we are going to illustrate how to answer the three questions. We are going to use EpicBeat for it. EpicBeat is one of the latest products in the market that monitors the popular content and influencers across the social web and provides useful insights on various topics of interest.

1) How to produce great content?

Simply put, great content is what the audience responds to. And audience’s response varies greatly by topic and by industry. Your content strategy needs to be driven by what kind of content your target audience shares and engages with.

For example, we compared two very different topics on EpicBeat- “Cloud Computing” vs. “Fitness & Exercise” – and the differences were quite significant:

• For Fitness & Exercise, more than half (56%) of shares were driven by Videos, whereas for Cloud Computing, dominant shares (68%) were driven by Articles.
• Within Articles, Fitness & Exercise shares were mostly driven by Listicles (72%), whereas Cloud Computing shares were spread across Listicles, How Tos, What & Why articles.
• 87% of Fitness & Exercise shares were for articles less than 1000 words, whereas 68% of Cloud Computing shares were for articles more than 1000 words.

For more details, you can explore the live data by following these links:

• Fitness & Exercise
• Cloud Computing

2) How to identify the right channels for distribution?

Once you have produced great content, next you need to identify your key channels for distribution. While you should share your content on all channels, it is important to identify the most important channels and deploy more resources and efforts towards those.

Continuing with the comparison of “Cloud Computing” vs. “Fitness & Exercise”, here are the differences we discovered:

• For Exercise & Fitness, 85% of shares happen on Pinterest & Facebook, with Pinterest attracting almost half of all shares.
• For Cloud Computing, 92% of the shares happen on LinkedIn & Twitter, with LinkedIn attracting almost half of all shares.

For more details, you can explore the live data by following these links:

• Fitness & Exercise
• Cloud Computing

3) How to engage the community to amplify your reach?

Audience behaviour varies greatly by topic. For different topics, the community tends to have a different post frequency, different levels of conversations, and different propensity to share. Your audience strategy needs to incorporate these details to set the right targets and plan the effort to reach those targets.

Continuing with the comparison of “Cloud Computing” vs. “Fitness & Exercise”, here are the differences we discovered:

• Exercise & Fitness attracts an average of 1,000 shares per post, whereas Cloud Computing manages to get an average of165 shares per post
• On Twitter, the average follower count is around 500 for both topics, but it is easier to reach that count for Fitness & Exercise, because of Reciprocal Followers
• To be in the top 10% of the community , Fitness & Exercise tweet frequency needs to be 1.5 times higher than Cloud Computing

For more details, you can explore the live data by following these links:

• Fitness & Exercise
• Cloud Computing

About EpicBeat

We discovered EpicBeat on ProductHunt in April 2015, and since then we have found ourselves using it quite regularly. We see EpicBeat as a must-have tool for Content Writers, Social Media Managers, and Marketing Planners.

It is a free product, and presents a powerful combination of information across four tabs – Content, Influencers, Content insights, and Community insights.

The topic coverage is extremely good, choice of charts thoughtful, and usability quite intuitive. We especially liked how they categorized the influencers based on behaviour like Retweeters, Responders, etc. We do wish that they would increase the share duration beyond one month, and would allow us to download the data as a CSV.

In Closing

Content Marketing Strategy is not simple. It has to keep evolving based on audience interests, your brand’s growth, your business objectives, and many other factors. But if you answer the 3 key questions we provided, you will give yourself a strong start. Because, in the end, you just have to make sure that you are serving the right content to the right audience on the right channel.