Want your business to stand out in a crowded market? Then you need a content marketing strategy. Remember: attention is currency and digital content is the merchandise. By providing information and resources – like articles, infographics, and ebooks – businesses can effectively capture the attention of their target audience and lead them toward conversion.
Whether you’re a solopreneur establishing your niche, or an established business navigating evolving trends, a clear and actionable content marketing strategy will help you stand out and make an impact with current and prospective customers.
So how do you go about creating one? A fractional CMO can help with both ideation and implementation. A fractional CMO is a great way to supplement or audit existing marketing efforts, particularly for businesses with limited resources or that need access to marketing expertise. (Curious to learn more about what a fractional CMO does? Book a call with us or check out this blog post.)
Why Your Business Needs a Content Marketing Strategy
Why should your business have a content marketing strategy in place? There are a few strong reasons.
1. It Builds Trust and Authority
Consistent, high-quality digital content establishes you as a thought leader in your industry. Regularly sharing educational content also shows you can be trusted as a reliable source in your field. Gaining your audience’s understanding and trust is especially crucial for companies with long sales cycles, complex products or services, or cutting-edge offerings.
2. It Increases Visibility and Engagement
Digital content is a great way to break through the noise and stand out as a worthwhile recipient of your audience’s attention. Whether it’s boosting your SEO ranking or showing up on your target audience’s social media feeds, effective content marketing enhances your online visibility across multiple channels. The key is to connect with your audience’s pain points and offer solutions.
3. It Will Support and Sustain Long-Term Growth
A huge benefit of a strong content marketing program is that it creates evergreen assets that will continue to generate leads and build brand awareness over time. For example, a listicle created in 2014 that still shows up on the first page of Google search results in 2024 would be a worthwhile investment of time and effort. Rather than jumping on a microtrend for a quick spike in engagement (although this does have its place), evergreen content will remain relevant and valuable in the long term.
4. It Improves Efficiency
A good content marketing strategy streamlines the content creation process and maximizes your marketing team’s efficiency. How? It creates a single source of truth and a shared set of guidelines for creating content. In turn, consistent, on-brand content is more likely to engage your audience, helping you stand out and remain memorable, rather than a flurry of posts during a high-stakes time in your marketing cycle.
The Challenges of Building a Content Marketing Strategy
Like any other aspect of marketing, content marketing is a discipline unto itself, and can be challenging to get right – especially for business owners without a marketing background. A team might struggle to keep up with evolving trends, develop internal expertise, or stay on top of a high volume of deliverables. Without the right systems in place, getting content ‘right’ can feel like an impossible task.
Some common difficulties that small businesses face with content creation include:
- Limited time and resources: Creating effective and engaging content takes time – something many small business owners are short on. Without a dedicated team for content execution, they often struggle to deliver content consistently, resulting in a lower return on their efforts.
- Lack of expertise and ideas: New platforms, algorithms, and trends are constantly emerging. Struggling to keep up with these changes and generate fresh ideas can lead to ‘content fatigue,’ and posts and messaging can easily become repetitive or stale. And unfortunately, once content quality starts to drop, so does audience engagement.
- Inconsistent execution: Without a consistent content strategy, you miss the opportunity to establish a strong brand voice. Posting more regularly can increase your online presence, but a lack of planning can result in inconsistent messaging, which may confuse or alienate your audience.
- Lack of context: Without a clear understanding of why a content strategy matters for a business in the first place, many businesses end up wasting time producing content that doesn’t land.
These challenges aren’t insurmountable, however. Many small businesses have benefited from hiring a fractional CMO to help analyze and refine their content marketing strategy.
How a Fractional CMO Can Help Build Your Content Marketing Strategy
When building a content marketing strategy, a fractional CMO brings:
- Industry expertise (at a fraction of the cost): A fractional CMO can offer expert-level strategy without the need to hire a full-time CMO. They offer flexible, scalable support that is tailored to your business’s needs (and budget).
- Strategy, not just tactics: An effective content marketing strategy doesn’t rely on a trial-and-error approach. A fractional CMO considers your brand’s unique strengths and the context in which your business operates, ensuring each step is purposeful.
- Data-driven insights: Analytics data from social media platforms, email tools, and other channels, can help indicate which strategies are working and which need to be reevaluated.
By combining market knowledge and data-driven insights with a human touch, a fractional CMO ensures strategic adjustments remain aligned with your business’s overall vision and goals.
Executing a Content Strategy with a Fractional CMO’s Help
A great plan is only as great as its execution. In addition to helping with content strategy creation, a fractional CMO can manage how a content strategy is implemented by the team who will be executing on it. A fractional CMO can help by:
- Vetting and managing creatives: A fractional CMO can assist with finding and managing content creators, ensuring that your business produces high-quality content even if you don’t have the budget for in-house creatives.
- Advising on how to optimize content: It’s one thing to write engaging educational content, but you want to make sure your target audience finds it and sticks around to see what your business is all about. A blog post that is optimized for SEO will rank well on search engines, so you won’t lose out on clicks from a broader audience. Likewise, a podcast conceived with conversion in mind will funnel its listener base toward your product.
- Helping you leverage marketing automation and tools: A fractional CMO can recommend content management and automation tools to streamline content distribution and ensure you’re tracking engagement. User-friendly apps and tools can help simplify your processes and lift some of the administrative and analytics burden from your marketing team.
- Establishing overall best practices to ensure your content reaches the right audience in the right way.
The Long-Term Impact of a Successful Content Strategy
A successful content marketing strategy ensures your business is optimized for long-term success. For impact that lasts, a fractional CMO will help you focus on:
- Consistent branding and messaging: A fractional CMO’s job is to place the overall business vision front and centre in marketing and orient the content strategy towards it. This helps keep messaging and creative on-brand and relevant to key business outcomes.
- Maximizing ROI: By setting KPIs to monitor and focusing on content that is likely to engage (and re-engage) target audiences, a fractional CMO channels marketing resources toward content with the highest impact.
- Scalability: A fractional approach to marketing is inherently scalable, and a content marketing strategy delivered by a fractional CMO is no exception. This enables a business to expand its content production (and team) as it grows without risking a drop in quality or focus.
Overall, a fractional CMO will make sure that your content marketing strategy has an eye to short-term results, but also long-term goals, establishing a solid foundation for all future marketing efforts.
Conclusion
A well-crafted content marketing strategy is essential for a business to stand out and secure meaningful relationships with its customers. Quality content helps a business build trust and authority with its target audience, increase its online visibility and engagement, drive (and sustain) long-term growth, and improve the efficiency of its marketing efforts overall. Without a solid content marketing strategy, businesses might struggle to attract the right audience, leading to missed opportunities and inefficient use of time and resources.
A fractional CMO can provide the expertise and strategic direction required to develop and implement a successful content marketing strategy. Interested in building a strong content marketing strategy, or hoping to audit or reinforce your current efforts? A Crisp fractional CMO can help. Book a free consult with us for more information.
