Content Marketing Strategy Checklist for the Thrifty Marketer

A small business’ biggest challenge is creating a marketing strategy that doesn’t drain its resources. This checklist will help you to create a thrifty content marketing framework

Every piece of wasted content costs you money. In fact, most companies waste a quarter of their content marketing budgets on poor content.

This often comes down to a poor content marketing strategy. You don’t understand how to use content effectively, so it doesn’t serve your business.

We’re here to help with this content marketing strategy checklist to maximize its effect.

Item #1 – Conduct an Audit

You must understand where your current content fails before you can make improvements. An audit also lets you figure out what works.

Start with your website. Find the pages that generate the most traffic, and think about what they do differently to unsuccessful pages. Use analytics software to check bounce rates. Pages with high bounce rates aren’t drawing people deeper into your site, so they see less of your content.

After that, take an axe to the inefficient content. Get rid of any that is no longer relevant to your business. Think about what pieces you can consolidate into a single piece of content. You’re looking to engage visitors, rather than bombard them with irrelevant content.

With the website audited, move onto your other forms of content. YouTube videos and traditional marketing literature make up your content marketing strategy, too. Compare the successful against the failed pieces to find where you’re going wrong.

Item #2 – Create Brand Guidelines

Every person who speaks for your brand must deliver a consistent message. Without guidelines, you’ll create inconsistencies your visitors will notice.

How do brand guidelines help? They inform your content creators about your desired tone and style. You can outline the required language patterns, and ensure your brand’s personality shines through. Use your guidelines to create a framework for your content creators. Define color schemes, and how to present your content. Your creators can then focus on making the content, rather than on making it look good.

Your audit shows you the content that resonates with your market. Use this information to see what works, then build your brand guidelines around that content.

Item #3 – Create an Outline and Repurpose Content

Now we’re digging into the content marketing strategy. Create an outline whenever you launch a new campaign. This tells the team about the campaign’s expectations, and schedules the launch of each piece of content. Share on X

Use your outline to map out your content repurposing strategy. Old content isn’t necessarily useless. It may have just become less relevant over time. An outline defines how you may reuse this content. For example, you could turn a written piece into an infographic or a video.

You spend less on content creation because you’re using what you already have. Better yet, the outline defines how you’ll use your new content to maximum effect.

Item #4 – Get Rid of Silos

This point comes back to the issue of individual voices. As your organization generates more content, its message becomes muddled. Instead of working collaboratively, each department retreats into what it knows best.

Let’s say you have several products. Each has its own content strategy, but you also need to convey a consistent brand message. You can’t do that if your product departments silo away.

You can help in this process. Bring more voices into the conversation. Have different department heads and creators share their opinions. You’ll unify your departments, which creates a more consistent brand message. Furthermore, you eliminate any resentment which may build because departments feel they don’t have a voice.

Item #5 – Analyze the Results

What’s the biggest mistake most small businesses make with their content marketing strategy?

They flood the market with content, and don’t keep tabs on how it performs.

Your initial audit only shows you how your current content fares. It doesn’t account for your future content.

Analyze content based on how it contributes to the bottom line. If you’re not making money from it, adjust your strategy. Google Analytics helps you to track bounce rates and how long visitors spend on your website. You can use several analytics packages to check for conversions against spend.

Conclusion

The items on this checklist involve looking inwards to find content marketing inefficiencies. These issues cost your business money. Fixing them involves a time contribution, more so than a financial one.

Follow this checklist to create a more consistent message. Eliminate the chaos behind the scenes, and your content becomes more effective. When you have everybody on board, push forward with your content marketing strategy.