Guide to Content Marketing

Tabla de Contenidos

Content marketing is the digital marketing strategy that focuses on the creation of relevant and useful content for the user in order to reach potential customers, raise awareness of the product and the brand and generate more sales. It is a strategy that is multichannel because the content is created and distributed in several channels: Social Media, E-mail, Video, Blog, Web

But does content marketing work? The statistics speak for themselves: 81% of companies consider content marketing a fundamental strategy of their core business, because it helps them reach potential customers and achieve more sales.

This is because useful content helps companies to position themselves as a benchmark in their sector, to get into the top of mind of their potential customers. At the same time, it helps to attract investors and specialised media and portals.

In this content marketing guide we will go through all the steps to create your content strategy for your project. We will start by preparing the ground with the considerations of your business that have to do with the situation you are starting from and what you want to achieve. Also about the resources you have.

Then, it is essential that you know the basic steps to create your content strategy and put it into action. We will go through each one and explain how to carry them out. And of course, you will know what you have to analyse and how to do it once your content is in circulation to judge with all the data on the table whether it is working or not.

As you can see, working with content is much more than searching for keywords and creating articles at random. In this guide we will see all this and more, because we will also tell you how to manage your content strategy from start to finish with a tool that makes everything easier.

Benefits of content marketing for your company

First of all, it is worth knowing the advantages of betting on content:

1. Content marketing is the cheapest but most effective strategy there is

First things first, content generation is going to be very cheap compared to other forms of promotion and acquisition in traditional marketing. Exactly 62% more.

Your results are also better and digital content is able to generate up to 3 times more leads.

Why? Very simple: the high capacity of segmentation and knowledge of our user that digital tools allow and that helps us, among many other factors that we will see, to better direct the impacts in our content strategy.

I’ll get ahead of your question: yes, content marketing tools have a cost and the time invested by you and the professionals who help you develop your content strategy is worth money. But the ongoing impact that (for example) SEO-optimised content generates on users is more than worth the initial time investment.

Oh, and as for the tools… The days of having to hire 5, 7 or even 10 tools are coming to an end. We created Keytrends so that companies, startups included, could work each of the phases of their content strategy with a single tool. So everything we will see in this guide can be done with our tool, not one more.

2. Content marketing generates brand authority

This is the first consequence and reward that your content will have: increase your presence in those channels where you are focusing your efforts and that more and more potential customers and investors will get to know your brand.

Have you heard of the paradox of repetition? It consists of repeating your message in several different ways so that your target audience definitively associates you with a sector and perceives you as one of their references.

Thus, when they need a product or service that you offer, the first option they will consider will be you. This is called being in the top of mind of users, and it can only be achieved by being visible and being perceived as an authority in your sector.

The second great consequence of this is that you will generate more trust and your product will be much more attractive than those of your competitors. These are two key aspects to get more sales, but also funding from investors and even potential buyers when it comes to a startup.

A fact that proves it: for 66% of startups, content is their main source of growth.

3. Content educates your audience at every stage of the sales funnel.

People need information before buying a product or contracting a service and 80% of them take to Google and social networks to find it. On average, a user consumes 10 pieces of content in various formats to get an idea of the product and brand that can best meet their needs.

People also appreciate it when brands provide them with as much information as possible to get the most out of their product or service. So creating educational content helps you educate your audience and helps them move faster and more confidently through each of the buying stages.

They are part of what is known as the sales funnel and it is one of the essential aspects that you need to know in order to create content suitable for each of these stages, which we will see later.

Once the purchase has been made and they have passed this funnel, their level of involvement with the brand is maintained and their loyalty to it increases. This will lengthen their lifetime value or life time as a customer and, in addition, will turn them into an indirect seller of your brand, because they will recommend it to more potential customers.

In short, you must make known how your product or service solves the needs and problems of each of your potential buyers or customers in order to convert them and make them loyal.

4. With a content strategy you get more and better leads

Do you know about inbound marketing? It is part of content marketing and, in fact, you can apply its approach when you generate specific content to capture leads. How? By offering something in exchange for the user leaving their details.

It can be a specific landing page for this purpose or a blog article or guide where you give useful information and solutions to problems but, in addition, you offer a free resource that the user can download or receive in their e-mail after leaving it in a form with their name or company name.

Depending on the type of article you have made and in which the user has left their details, you will know what stage of the funnel they are in and therefore whether they are more or less qualified. What does this mean? It means that they are closer or further away from making a purchase decision.

Therefore, to make them move forward you will have to create different types of content knowing what needs your buyers have at each stage of the content funnel, which we will explain later. In addition, and this is the interesting thing about leads, you can use contacts to impact with complementary strategies, such as e-mail marketing.

5. Content is the 2nd strategy with the best ROI

Sales are the first objective of any business and the end result of a successful content strategy. It is the consequence of the rest of the advantages we have seen and the best thing is that by applying it you recover every cent you have invested.

Content marketing is the second digital marketing strategy with the best ROI or return on investment. The 1st is SEO, but this is very good news, because search engine positioning is the first cousin of content marketing. Or how do you think you are going to get your articles to stand out in the SERPs and attract visits?

roi estrategia contenidos ENG
Source: Mdirector

Therefore, we have a winning combo. Add to your strategy the 3rd best ROI strategy, email marketing, and as long as you reach the right users at the right time, results are guaranteed.

Wait, you don’t know what I’m talking about when you read the word ROI? I believe it. Hubspot documented in a study that only 3% of marketers make calculations to check it. Without it, it is impossible to know if you are getting benefits from any investment, as it is the only measure that allows you to check if the monetary result of any campaign or strategy is being positive or negative.

To calculate it, just apply this formula:

ROI formula

An example: you spend a total of €700 on a social media campaign and, as a profit, you get €1600. With the calculations, you get an ROI of 129%, which tells you that you are heading in the right direction with your digital marketing actions.

Add to this calculation appropriate metrics depending on the channel and you will get a global and more specific view of what has worked to replicate it in the future and maintain or improve your results.

9 steps to create a content marketing strategy for your business

Now, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, and we’ll go through each of the steps you need to follow to have your strategy ready before you start creating and publishing. Because, yes, some previous steps are necessary to define what your objectives are, who you are targeting, how you are going to do it and much more.

1. Analyse your current business context or your Product Market Fit

Let’s start with something that goes way before all this: the business context. If you did your homework before creating your startup or your project, you should already have many of these aspects clear, as they are an essential part of the Product Market Fit or process of defining your company.

Be clear about your brand positioning and the value you bring

Having your brand identity and the positioning of your product or service well defined is essential so that all communication is moving in the same direction: to show the world your strengths and how you can help the different buyer personas.

As we said before, this will generate brand image and users will perceive what your solutions to their problems are and, therefore, know what they can expect from you. They should get this from your content and you have to know how to capture and meet these expectations to ensure a good information experience.

In order to be clear about your brand positioning, and if you did not do it at the time, you can answer questions such as:

  • Which customers already consume my product and what characteristics and needs do they have in common?
  • Who are my potential customers and what are they like?
  • What is the value of my product or service or what makes it stand out and differentiate itself?
  • What is the perception of my brand in my sector and in the market, and does it fit with my value proposition?
  • What is the market and consumer situation around me and how does my brand fit into it?
  • How are my competitors working their brand and what can I do better?

And, above all, be clear about the mission of your product or service. You can use this formula to devise it:

“The mission of [name of your company] is to facilitate our customers [service 1] and [service 2] through [action 1], [action 2] and [action 3], for [objective 1]“.

For example:

“Keytrends’ mission is to make it easy for our clients to create their content strategy and be able to automate it through trend discovery, AI-powered copywriting and post management and measurement to get more visibility online.”

Define your objectives as a company

The other fundamental aspect of business before developing your content strategy is to be aware of what your business model is and what objectives you have as an organisation, because based on this you will know what you want to achieve with your content and what you can expect based on your productive capacity.

The most common objectives that you surely have as a project are 5:

  • Getting investors (funding)
  • Increase sales to customers
  • Improve brand visibility
  • Positioning the project vis-à-vis the competition
  • Obtaining leads for the commercial strategy

All of them can work with content marketing, but before doing so you need to be aware of where you are as a company. For example: what is your MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) or monthly recurring income? How many expenses do you have? Do you have the budget to invest in new digital marketing strategies? Are the ones you are carrying out working or not? Are they complementary to a content strategy? Do you have the necessary team to take on new tasks?

Creating content is neither easy nor free, because it requires an investment of time and qualified personnel. And if not, read the following section.

Put your available resources on the table

To implement a content strategy you need 3 things: time, money and staff.

The first one will be needed to carry out each of the phases of both the creation of the strategy and the generation of each content; the second one will be essential to use some tools and to pay professionals to help you. They are the third resource.

In addition, bear in mind that you also have to allocate them for promotion and for measuring the impact of the content once it has been published.

In this guide you will have a clear roadmap to create your strategy because we will talk about all the phases and tasks, but are you aware that you will need several professionals to carry it out?

Depending on the channels and the format of the content, you may require:

  • A content writer or copywriter, if possible specialised in your sector
  • A graphic designer to create the creatives, in case you decide to make an impact on Social Media. Also for your e-mails and landings pages
  • A video maker: highly recommended if you decide to go for platforms such as YouTube, or want to generate corporate videos
  • Editor: although not always necessary, if you are going to generate a high volume of content it is advisable to have someone to validate it.
  • Analyst: without measurement there is no awareness of results and therefore we cannot make changes to improve. It is essential to have someone who is an expert in data analysis and measurement.

Of course, you should adapt it to the needs of your company and decide how far you want to go with your strategy. This has a lot to do with the content objectives you are going to set for yourself.

Set goals for your content marketing strategy

This step is essential to be able to measure the ROI and know the profitability of your content strategy, but also to know which KPIs or indicators you will need to analyse to know how each content works in each channel.

Before we see how they are related, a piece of advice: your content objectives should make it very clear what you want to achieve, they should be relevant and realistic for your business model, they should be measurable and you should be able to set a date to achieve them. These are the requirements according to the SMART technique (Specific – Measurable – Attainable – Relevant – Timely).

If you want to know more you can click on the image to read an article about it.

Objetivos smart ENG
Source: Asana

What are the objectives you may want to achieve with your company’s content marketing strategy? Some of the most common ones are:

  • Improve the organic positioning of your website to increase brand visibility
  • Increase web traffic and user interaction on your site (i.e., users stay longer on your site)
  • Get more subscribers to your newsletter
  • Reach a higher number of followers on your social networks or have more comments, mentions or content of yours that has been shared.
  • Obtain a specific MRR at the end of a month, quarter or year

So, according to the SMART technique, you could define the first one like this:

“By the end of 2023 we want to increase the visibility of our brand by increasing organic traffic by 35% with a budget of €25,000”.

Define the KPIs or indicators that will help you measure your content

Depending on the objectives you have set yourself, you can already foresee which KPIs and metrics (the KPI value number) will be of interest to you, and that you will have to complement and adjust with others depending on the channel (SEO, Social Media, E-mail Marketing, Video Marketing, Website…).

Examples of KPIs are:

  • SEO => Nu. Generated Content / Sessions
  • Social Media => Nu. Interactions / Nu. Publications
  • E-Mail Marketing => Difference % Turnover / Nu. Emails Sent

These are just a few, but depending on your strategy and goals there may be many more. As you publish you will have to analyse the numbers of each one and compare them with the previous time period to know if your content strategy is having a positive impact on your business.

If you want to know more about KPIs, we recommend this talk by Iñaki Huerta where he talks about KPIs for SEO, which can be extrapolated to any other area.

2. Analyse your competitors and their content strategies

Right after analysing everything that has to do with your business and defining objectives, it is time to stop navel gazing and analyse your competition.

Doing so is essential to know how each of your competitors or players are working their content in all the channels that may be of interest to you. This will help you to check where your competitors are present and what content works best for them, whether it be in terms of organic positioning or on social networks.

To obtain all this information, the first thing you have to do (if you didn’t already do it when you started your company or startup) is to identify your competitors, those who sell a product or service that is the same or similar to yours.

Know who your competitors are

You may already know, more or less exactly, who you are competing against in your market. But it is important that you research which companies similar to yours enjoy good visibility in search engines.

To do this you can use a content management platform such as Keytrends, and in particular, the keyword and entity tool that is included in any plan. You can approach the task in 2 ways:

  1. Do a little brainstorming of keywords related to your business.
  2. Let Keytrends do the search for you by entering what you consider to be your seed or defining keyword for your product. From there, the Keytrends keyword tool will suggest others. In this example you can see the suggested words for the keyword “content marketing”:
adwords1

You can export them all and choose the most relevant ones for your business, but in this step do not yet extract the questions and queries from users, but the keywords that define your product or service.

Once you have your keywords thanks to your brainstorming or Keytrends, go to the words you have selected and you will be able to see for each one which are your competitors better positioned in SERPs (without having to do several Google searches!). You will see it like this:

serp

The best part? You will be able to export the data to see, for each of your keywords, which are your direct competitors and select the most repeated ones.

The best thing to do is to see it live by registering or, even better, scheduling a demonstration with us so that we can show you how you could use it in your day-to-day life and ask us all the questions you need.

Find out where they are present and what is their best content

Once you have your list of competitors, check which channels they use and what their best content is:

  • Search

With a tool like Spyfu (or any other tool that allows you to do so), enter the domain or subdomain where your competitor hosts its content and go to the Top Pages.

They will appear sorted by monthly traffic valued in SEO clicks and you will be able to see their position in Google and how it has changed compared to last month. Keep the pages with content related to your business in order to analyze them and see why they have such a good visibility.

In parallel you can assess whether you can make better content to rank better and become more of an option for users. Thanks to this you will gain a lot of visibility and start building your brand image in the industry.

A trick: use the CrowdTangle extension to see the number of shares your articles have had on various social networks, including Reddit.

  • Social Media

Look at each competitor’s website to see which social networks they are present on and target them. You can do the same as you have done with the Top Pages but with the posts with a Social Media tool that allows you to do it.

Hootsuite, the best known, has a specific Benchmarking tool to discover and monitor the competition. But it is one of the most expensive tools and as an alternative, its free application for companies Synapview will also work for you.

You will be able to monitor several competitors and hashtags on various social networks and save the posts you want to be inspired by. Look, above all, at the interaction generated by the posts (likes, comments, shares…) and the level of engagement. Another good tool to do this without relying on Hootsuite is Social Blade, which is free.

  • E-mail marketing

Subscribing to your competitors’ newsletters to see what kind of emails they send to their database is a viable, but cumbersome option. You can use Owletter to monitor the mailing list of several competitors and get valuable data such as the days and times when they publish, around which keywords and if they follow any seasonality pattern.

It won’t tell you the open rates or click-through rates, but it seems to me that we haven’t reached this level of witchcraft yet 😉

Document your competitors’ content insights

With all this information collected in each section with your research, it is best to make a table and write down all the data. To summarize and make it a little easier for you, these are the ones you should include for each competitor:

  • Channels in which it is present
  • Type (format) of content created in each channel
  • Amount of content published on each channel
  • Frequency of publication in each channel
  • Topics covered in each channel

This will allow you to discern in which channel each competitor puts more effort and which one is giving them better results.

3. Define your target audience and create buyer persona profiles

Good: we already have our best positioned competitors and with whom we will have to compete in the generation of content. With the previous analysis you have surely identified their weak points and that you can improve.

Now comes the best part: confirm whether your buyer persona, which for many of your competitors will be very similar, is really in all channels or only in one of them. This will be very conditioned by their needs and problems, and the best content format to solve them.

So before defining what we are going to talk about in the content strategy, it is essential to know who we are going to target. For that you have to create one or more buyer persona profiles, in which you include:

  • Demographic data: gender, age, profession, job position, income, location, personal situation (single, couple, family, children…) and type of daily life.
  • Interests and habits: personal tastes and favorite leisure activities.
  • Pain points: problems they may have that your product or service can solve.
  • Solutions you can give him: how you can help him for each of his pains
  • Possible objections: possible obstacles why your product or service might not fit (price, more or less functions than required…).
  • Preferred content: publication format that best suits your needs.
  • Channels and/or social networks consumed: according to their profile, the ones you foresee them using and the ones they are likely to find you on.
  • Degree of knowledge: if it is possible that he/she knows you and what perception you think he/she has of you.
  • Relationship with the competition: if they know and how they perceive your competition

You should adapt and focus these points to your industry and your specific product or service. In addition, as far as possible, it is highly recommended to complete these profiles with data that you can extract from surveys, personal interviews or customer service inquiries. Also from interactions on social networks. Thus, your buyer persona profiles will be much closer to reality.

4. Discover and define the topics to be addressed in your content strategy

We enter the most exciting part of the content strategy and that is to do the research of topics, queries and user questions to solve through content for different channels.

From your competitor research, by the way, you must have concluded which channels work best in your industry. Do you have the time and manpower to create content for all of them? If not, choose a single channel and master it to perfection, and complement it with a second one to distribute the contents of the first one.

The million-dollar question: how to extract ideas for content? Before solving it, you must be clear about the type of content you can deal with:

Types of content you can create for your strategy: fixed or trendy

This is something that is little taken into account in content marketing for companies but knowing the two types of content you can create can make the difference with respect to what others do. Let me explain:

  1. Fixed or evergreen content: it is based on ideas, questions or queries about a product or service that are repeated over the years and never change, because they are usually the most common topics around a particular subject. Covering them ensures a constant flow of visits and, in addition, they usually have a high search volume. They have the disadvantage that there is more competition and it is more difficult to position in SERPs.
  2. Trending or fresh content: every day there are 15% of new searches on Google, queries that have never existed before and for which users are looking for answers. Discovering them and solving them with content, as soon as possible, is a guaranteed success for any content strategy, because competition is almost nonexistent. The reason: there are currently no tools to detect them. In Spain there is one: Keytrends. Later we will see in detail how to use it to detect these valuable topics.

I know that you’re being plagued by a single question right now: what content do I make? And without a doubt, the answer is that you should do and combine the two. For the first one you can count on a plan and a defined calendar, but it is necessary that you reserve part of your economic and personal efforts to create fresh content on a daily basis.

The motive is not to position yourself before anyone else (which is also true). The real reason is what you convey by being present in these searches: to be a company or a startup up to date with all the trends and, therefore, with a high level of authority and expertise in the sector.

Keyword research for evergreen content

To collect keywords, queries and user questions about your product, the ideal is to do a keyword research. Traditionally, several tools have been used to obtain a global vision of what the potential customer is looking for: one tool for keywords, another for queries of interest, another for suggested questions…

Fortunately, some of this information is not only provided by Google with its PAA (People Also Ask) and Related Searches (suggested searches), but you can also find it unified in some tools. This is the case of Keytrends, and again, in the keywords and entities tool.

To discover topics for your strategy, just search for your main keywords in the tool. Earlier we noted that you could get keywords and your competitors, but the interesting thing is this:

synonym

In addition to the suggested keywords, you can get related queries from Google directly on the screen and download them to complement your strategy. Why are you interested in this type of keywords? They are usually queries for which no search volume is available because they are less popular, but which are directly related to your keyword and are of interest to users.

Many of them correspond to the type of keyword called long tail, longer and therefore more specific, and that allows you to stick closely to the search intent to cover it. And you know that this is one of the aspects that Google values in the content!

Two other blocks of ideas that also fit into this category of keywords and that you will get from the keyword research in Keytrends are those of Google’s suggested searches divided by preposition and by type of question.

prepositions

This same type of queries can be found sorted in alphabetical order and for each letter:

alphabetical

A lot of information, isn’t it? The most recommended is to make a selection of the suggested keywords for which volume, difficulty, CPC and other data are available (as you can see in the screenshot of the previous section of the Adwords suggestions); and on the other hand, another selection of related and suggested queries that you may be more interested in addressing in the contents. Even if no data is available, they respond to real doubts of the users.

Refine your keyword research with search intent and stage of sales funnel

There are two aspects of any keyword that you have to take into account; in fact, one leads to the other. The first is the sales funnel, also called the customer journey.

  1. The role of the sales funnel and content funnel in your strategy

As the term itself says, it is nothing more than the path your target user takes to end up becoming a customer.

CONTENT FUNNEL ENG
Source: Ted Newel

This journey has 3 main phases: attraction, conversion and qualification. In each of these stages, the buyer persona or potential customer usually establishes a different relationship with the brand, evolving and strengthening at each step. The means to connect is none other than content.

Therefore, when working with content marketing you have to take into account what types of content lead to each stage of the sales funnel to help the user to advance in their relationship with your brand.

In inbound marketing, each of these stages receives a different name, which refers to the height of the funnel:

  • TOFU or Top of the Funnel: this is the widest part of the funnel and the main objective is to reach as many potential customers as possible. We achieve this by identifying needs and problems to provide answers through educational content such as blog articles, social media posts, podcast episodes or videos. At this point most users are meeting us for the first time or, if we are present in several channels, they may have seen us before (this, in turn, increases their interest).
  • MOFU or Middle of the Funnel: this is the middle part of the funnel and it starts to narrow because some of the users impacted in the first phase decide to trust us or see us as a suitable solution to their needs, but others do not. For the first ones, we must create content that encourages them to make the final decision, the purchase, when they are ready. To do this, it is recommended to create digital books, downloadable documents, lists, surveys and all kinds of educational resources to show the full potential of our product.
  • BOFU or Bottom of the Funnel: the upper part and for which we have been preparing our buyer persona. With all the previous educational work thanks to the content, when the user needs a product or service like ours, he will buy it, because we have managed to solve all his doubts and we have shown him how we can help him. The formats that best drive the final decision are those that show our product or service in action: demonstrations, success stories, customer testimonials, comparisons with other brands and events.

All these phases of the funnel are important, but the TOFU is decisive because it is the acquisition phase. In it our buyer has a first contact with us and does it through an attractive and useful content for him.

That is why from Keytrends we decided to put so much emphasis on keyword research and trend discovery (which we will see later), because without them we can not work the widest part of the funnel and reach the target audience.

  1. The importance of search intent in your strategy

And this is where the second concept comes in: search intent. Just as we classify the content format according to the stage of the funnel, we must do the same with the keywords in our keyword research. Because with each of them, the user expects different results in the SERPs, since the reason for their search is also different.

Therefore, in general terms, we can classify keywords under 3 different search intentions:

  • Informational: the user demands information about a topic, service or product. This type of keywords are undoubtedly the most appropriate to address throughout the sales and content funnel, because sometimes they also hide a purchase intention that can be immediate, or in the medium or long term. For example: “what are content marketing tools for”. In this case, it is very likely that this curiosity to know the functions of a content marketing tool is because you are considering hiring one.
  • Navigational: the user wants to access a specific content or site and searches for the brand or domain name. For example: “keytrends blog”.
  • Transactional: the user is clear that he wants to buy something, and usually uses the taglines “buy” or “hire” in his searches, either for a product in general or for a specific brand or model. For example: “content marketing tool buy”, or “keytrends buy”.

Well, when doing your keyword research you should discern these different keyword intentions and write them down. This will allow you to have an overview of what your potential customer is looking for at each buying stage and, most importantly, to know the right content format for these searches. It will also help you to adapt your messages and content structure.

A trick: depending on this, you can divide your buyer personas into a primary audience or a secondary audience. The former is the one that is more likely to buy from you because it has passed the TOFU stage, and the latter, the one that is less likely because it is still at the bottom of the funnel.

4. Trend discovery for your daily fresh content strategy

Choosing the best keywords for your potential customers in each of the stages of the funnel will cover their search intent and you will get better visibility with your content. But we already know that, at least in SEO, search engine algorithms take their time to evaluate a website as you publish and get to know you a little better.

For that, both to accelerate the results of your strategy and to work your brand authority, you have to cover the trends of your industry. As I mentioned before, this is something that very few companies do and that gives you a huge advantage over them. Both in SEO and Social Media, being the first to talk about something boosts your credibility.

How to discover trends automatically

How to discover trends and work them into your content? Easy: using Keytrends trend search engines (as you can see, you don’t even have to change tools). You can do it in 2 ways, and both have in common that they extract ideas that are experiencing a very sharp growth from the main keywords of your business.

  1. Trending opportunities finder: here you can get growing ideas for your content by entering the main keywords of your business or any topic you would like to cover and specifying a long period of time. For example, the last 30 or 90 days, or even several years ago. This way you collect other keywords or queries that have been trending until today and that you can also use for your evergreen content, because you know that their growth has been maintained over time and will bring you continuous traffic.
  2. Real-time trend finder: the idea is the same, but changing the temporal focus. In this case you will be able to choose from the last 7 days to the last hour of the moment you are searching to discover new, fresh and unrivaled content ideas. Positioning opportunities that are 100% trending and that no other content marketing platform gives you.

Also, check this out:

You don’t need to filter or hand-select the list of results that Keytrends throws up and that you can see under “My topics” or “Your Realtime Topics”. You have two sections that filter them:

growing law

In both search engines, the “Growing” section filters them by growth so that you know at a glance which ones are increasing the interest of users. While in “Top Keywords” you will have the selection of those that have grown the most and that you have to cover because they are in high demand. Seen in the traditional way, they are the ones with the highest volume.

How to manage the daily creation of trending content

I’m sure this question has been on your mind since I started talking to you about trends: If they are new searches, how can I plan the content I’m going to create around them?

With the first search engine ranking opportunities you can plan the content just as you would with the keywords from keyword research. Real-time trends can also be scheduled, but you should not take more than 2-3 days to create the content.

Otherwise, the exclusivity and freshness of the content is lost, and with it the possibility of positioning and gaining visibility against your competition. When we created Keytrends we also thought about this and that’s why, if you look at the screenshot above, you have two buttons.

One is to save the keyword, and the other to create the content. A little further to the right you have a drop-down, “Assigned to” where you can see the names of your editors. So, when you choose a trend you can plan the tasks on the fly.

In fact, if you click on the button to create content you will go directly to the AI Content Assistant, and from there you can create the SEO briefing for the writer and save it. You will be able to do a quick but very detailed research of everything that should be included because you can see your top 10 competitors in SERPs, related queries and suggested Google searches, and much more:

By the way! Both what you extract from keyword research and trend discovery can be applied to both your SEO content strategy and your social media strategy, even e-mail marketing if you decide to create a newsletter with an educational focus.

The best thing to do is to see it live by registering or, even better, scheduling a demonstration with us so that we can show you how you could use it in your day-to-day life and ask us all the questions you need.

5. The content calendar: how to organize and plan the topics of your strategy

Once we have all the topics we are going to talk about, both in fixed content and in trending content, it’s time to set them out in a content calendar that will help you to get organized.

Plan your content in the traditional way with a template

If you want to do it the traditional way, using an excel template, you have to include at least the following sections:

  • Fixed delivery date
  • Expected publication date
  • Subject to be discussed
  • Intended title
  • Content (explanation)
  • Type of content (format)
  • Publication channel
  • Keywords

In addition, I recommend that you organize your topics or content ideas into groups according to the overall theme.

These groups are called “Topic Clusters”, and they are important because they allow you to create a pillar content (for example, a guide as exhaustive as the one you are reading right now) and several contents around it that deal with related topics.

This will allow you to work on internal linking for SEO, in the case of blog articles or academy sections.

Upgrade and schedule your content automatically with Keytrends

This is without a doubt my favorite way to manage content: with the same tool I can also research keywords, discover trends and select topics for all the types of content I make. I told you before: in Keytrends we have created a dashboard for managing content and writers, and it looks like this:

publisherspanel

Here you save the content opportunities, assign them to the writer of your choice, write the briefing, give your feedback and also approve the final versions ready for publication. To quickly locate content you can search by keyword, by task status (in process, pending approval, finished…) and by writer.

It is a very easy and visual way to organize and plan your content but depending on your business you can combine using a tool like Keytrends with the traditional content calendar in a datasheet.

6. Before publishing, keep this in mind

  1. Have an editorial guide that catches your verbal identity

Your content should not only be unique, it should also sound genuine and reflect your personality as a brand. To define it, ask yourself questions such as who are going to be the voices of the content or if you are going to speak as a company; also what tone you are going to use. Do you want to sound formal or a little more casual?

Of course, this will depend both on your product or service and the characteristics of your target. However, you should always express yourself and sound the same so that your audience defines, in their minds, the brand personality you want.

  1. Be very clear about what you contribute and why, and for whom

The research phase will help you to see how you can differentiate yourself from your competition and to define the overall message you will give with your publications. This must provide a differential value that explains why your audience should start following you and consuming your content.

Your buyer or buyers will have to be well defined from the beginning in order to be able to speak to them, in their language, using their jargon and in an understandable and entertaining way. And of course, talking to them about topics that interest them.

  1. Define the channels and formats of your content

There is life beyond blog articles and there are several channels in which you can create and distribute your content. You already know that to decide where to be you have to know your buyer and know where he moves, and depending on that you can consider creating content in formats such as:

  • Ebooks
  • Infographics
  • Illustrations
  • Videos
  • Memes
  • GIFs
  • Webinars
  • Podcast
  • Case studies
  • Reports
  • Guides
  • Checklists
  • Testimonials
  • E-mails

The possibilities are almost endless. Just be aware of the time and resources you have.

  1. Thoroughly optimize your content for SEO

Creating content for search engine optimization is a must for any type of company, even more so for a startup. Creating relevant and well-positioned content helps you attract links naturally and consolidates your referrer status.

Remember that users use search engines to find solutions to their problems, and that it is almost always the first step before consulting other channels. On the other hand, and if you have the resources, keep Youtube in mind: it is already the 2nd largest search engine in the world!

Both on Google and Youtube you should apply the SEO guidelines set by each of the platforms, especially and very important the EEAT or create content based on your experience.

  1. Take care of the usability or the UX of your website so that the user enters and stays

We often focus on SEO optimization or attractive design but we forget about the usability of the site. It is an element that completely conditions the user’s stay on the page and if it is not well worked, it causes a high bounce rate or exits on the page.

Apply these tips to ensure a good experience on your page:

  • The fewer pop-ups the better: banners, buttons or pop-ups that make navigation difficult or distracting (they are interruptions).
  • The less time it takes to load the page the better: dispense with plugins, widgets, images and heavy fonts, which slow down and are not essential.
  • Responsive web design is a must: design your website to look and respond well on mobile, tablet and all types of screens.
  • Liven up the reading of the contents with visual elements: alternate the text with images, videos, diagrams, infographics… And make the text legible by using short paragraphs and bold type.
  1. The work continues after publishing: measure the positioning and profitability of your content

Do you remember the KPIS table above? Once you have published one or more contents, you should measure them after a few days and on a weekly basis to monitor their evolution. Depending on the channel you are working with, you will be interested in interactions, SEO positioning and conversions (if you create inbound content, take the leads generated as a reference).

The measurement task can be done with Google Search Console and Google Analytics, but you can avoid consulting them one by one and locate the data you are interested in using Keytrends. On the one hand, you will be able to see all the data on the positioning of the content URL by URL, and on the other hand analyze the traffic and ROI indicators (that which is so lazy to calculate, yes!).

9. In conclusion: don’t skip phases of your content marketing strategy.

Finally, we return to the warning from the beginning: do not create content without a strategy if you want to achieve results and a high profitability of your content. At the beginning you will have to invest a lot of time in defining the objectives and the basis of your strategy, but once you are clear about who you are targeting, what buying process they are in and what you are going to talk about, everything goes smoothly.

In addition, you have tools like Keytrends to facilitate the whole process of research, creation, management and measurement of content, so that you have everything under control in one place. You just need to have a clear checklist of steps to follow when creating new content.

And with this I say goodbye, me and the whole Keytrends team. With a cheat sheet that will help you to create content with strategy. Keep it, share this guide with your team and tell us how it went.

Estrategia de marketing de contenidos eng

To get to know Keytrends the best thing to do is to see it live by registering or, even better, scheduling a demonstration with us so that we can show you how you could use it in your day-to-day life and ask us all the questions you need.


Sources of information

Agr., M. L. I., & Agr., M. L. I. (2019, 9 octubre). 7 Estrategias de Marketing de Contenido para Startup Agtech y Foodtech. Marketing Agropecuario. Blog de Bialar. AgroMarketing Digital. https://www.bialarblog.com/marketing-de-contenido-para-startup/

Benito, A. (2021, 18 enero). Estrategia de marketing de contenidos para startups. Content Marketing | Coobis. https://coobis.com/es/cooblog/marketing-de-contenidos-para-startups/

Carrillo, M. (2017, 10 agosto). Estrategias de marketing para startups y posibles acciones a realizar. Semrush Blog. https://es.semrush.com/blog/estrategias-marketing-startups/

Chávez-Valverde, MT., González-Naranjo, SC., Jiménez-López, MA., Barrientos-Ramírez, DA. Content marketing: estrategia de captación de clientes para empresas. Estudios empresariales. 2017 Jan;26(45):169-198

Crafting Effective Startup Content Marketing Strategy (2021). (2021, 16 septiembre). The Official Cloudways Blog. https://www.cloudways.com/blog/content-marketing-strategy-for-startups/

Escobar, A. (2021, 22 septiembre). Estrategia de Contenido para Startups: ¿Qué Tener en Cuenta? Blog de Marketing. https://www.genwords.com/blog/estrategia-de-contenido/

Soloaga, C. D. (2021, 20 marzo). Marketing de contenidos para startups, cómo iniciarse paso a paso. Social Media Pymes. https://www.socialmediapymes.com/marketing-de-contenidos-para-startups/

Sumrak, J. (2023, 1 febrero). The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy for Startups. Foundr. https://foundr.com/articles/marketing/content-marketing-strategy

Zelada Cárdenas R, Sánchez Castillo FJ. Marketing de contenidos para empresas: estrategia digital para el marketing de contenidos 2.0 [Content marketing for companies: Digital strategy for content marketing 2.0]. Rev Española Negociación Comercial [Spanish Negotiation Journal]. 2018;8(2):54‐60

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