When you have an eCommerce store, making your potential customers visit your store and purchase products is what matters the most. Content marketing is vital in increasing traffic to a website. Investing in content marketing helps in improving your ability to engage buyer personas, connect with your audience, convert more leads and make better brand awareness. However, doing it the right is what needs to be taken care of when you choose this marketing method.

The content marketing scenario has undergone various changes in the past few years. Content formats such as infographics, videos, and podcasts have become an important part of content marketing. With a good content marketing plan, you can use content marketing campaigns successfully.

Let’s check some important strategies to include in the content marketing campaigns this year.

• Perform a content audit

To create an actionable content marketing plan, you need to do an audit of your present performance. Doing so will help you to understand things that work and the ones that don’t work. The more you understand the present performance and reasons behind the performance, no matter good or bad, the better will be your next content marketing plan. High-ranking keywords, top-performing content, low-performing content, and frequency of content publishing are some important details to check while doing the audit.

• Do a proper audience research

Knowing exactly who to target with your content is another essential aspect of any content marketing strategy. Information such as type of content your target audience like, content style, channels to promote content, and so on are important for a content marketing plan. You can get such information by carrying extensive research on your target audience. You can even create a profile of the individual types you want to convert to your customers using your content.

• Have marketing goals

Without any marketing goals, the effort you put will not provide a positive result. Most businesses use content marketing to achieve goals such as brand awareness, customer acquisition, lead acquisition, lead nurturing, and sales. Set goals based on the stage of the sales funnel. When you set the goals, you should determine the content type you need to create, where to promote, how to promote, and other important aspects of the content marketing plan.

• Create gated content

Basically, gated content is a piece of content with high-value that requires the website visitors to provide their details in order to gain access to the content. It’s one of the most effective techniques to qualify visitors to leads without making one-to-one interaction. Downloadable checklists, templates, tools and cheat sheets, case studies, guides, content upgrades, and whitepapers are some of the examples of gated content. You can share downloadable content by adding them as CTA below your blog posts, run social media campaigns, create a lead magnet, and so on.

• Use more interactive content

Interactive content is great to engage customers through their active participation. People prefer visual content due to its information retention capability. You can create an interactive infographic regarding the most common queries or run a contest for those who know your offerings already.

• Generate a content calendar

Consistency is one of the determining factors for the success of a content marketing plan. Though it may take time to provide results, you should make sure that you should remain consistent while delivering great content.

You can plan your content publishing frequency by creating a content calendar. It also helps you to get an overview of the activities related to content marketing. This will help the members of the content marketing team to follow the progress of the content easily.

Content format, promotion channels, publishing date, the team member responsible for the content, stage of the sales funnel and due dates for content’s first draft are some of the details you can include in a content calendar.

• Create a plan for content promotion

Another important aspect of content marketing is content promotion. So, along with creating a plan for content creation, you should also create a plan for content promotion. You should choose the platforms that will be best for your business to promote your content. Social media channels, forums, emails, advertising through social media ads and Google ads, and search engines are some of the platforms that you can use for promoting your content.