Content marketing helps brands relay their value to their target audience.

It is unsurprising that 80% of marketers have a content marketing strategy. A strategy guides them to create quality content for their target audience, which will get them more leads that convert.

However, only 31% of marketers accept that their strategies are successful.

So, in this article, we shed some light on four important content strategy focus areas for 2022 to boost the ROI of your content marketing efforts.

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1. Create content for your existing customers

Most businesses look at content as a means to gain new customers. These companies do not leverage the power of quality content for their existing customers.

As 82% of businesses agree that customer retention is cheaper than acquisition, and a 5% increase in retention boosts profit by 25-95%, it is worth investing in content for your existing customers.

How to create content for existing customers

• Learn more about them: What challenges do they face at work? What are their responsibilities? What other tools do they use? Are there any other problems that you can solve?

• Ask what they need: Requesting your existing customers to share their needs and wants is an easy way to get solid ideas for your content strategy. You can create surveys and feedback form templates and incentivize them for an increased volume of responses.
  
  You can use tools like Google Forms to ask your customers about what they need.
  
• Tracking their behavior: Keep an eye on how your customers interact with your SaaS product and website. You can get insights into what they like and dislike. You can rely on that information to scale up content production for certain topics and boost your customer retention and satisfaction.
  
  To track your customer’s behavior on your website, you can use Google Analytics.

After you learn more about your customers, you have to orient your content strategy so that you produce pieces that retain them.

Types of content that can increase customer retention

• Exclusive industry analysis and research: Every business wants to know what is happening in their industry so that they can plan their roadmap effectively. Your existing customers are no different.
  
  This is where business analytics comes in handy. You can track your business data easily and use it to grow your business.
  
  Statistical surveys, subjective questionnaires, polls, reports, predictions, etc., add value to your customers. By making these pieces exclusive to your customers, you are giving them an extra reason to stay.
  
• Personalized product and support advice: Certain features of your product are used a lot by certain customers. Find out how you can help them extract more out of your app and send them those actionable tips.
  
  This will help your customers get the value faster, increasing their satisfaction levels.
  
• Knowledge base to enable self-service: More and more SaaS customers prefer to learn a new tool all by themselves. You can use Document360 to create and manage knowledge base articles.
  
  However, equipping your customers to explore your SaaS product independently doesn’t mean that you lower the quality of conventional customer service. If your valued users are stuck anywhere, you have to assist them immediately and remove the roadblocks.
  
  Small and medium-sized teams with limited budgets can scale up their customer support capabilities through customer service software. As such software can be easily integrated with other tools, adding it to your existing tech stack is quite straightforward.

While building a content strategy, you also have to make sure that it reaches your target audience, which means you must…

2. Keep content distribution in mind

As the internet is more widely available, content is created at a faster rate and in huge quantities. Ahrefs revealed that their content explorer tool discovers 1.8 million new pages every 24 hours in a report.

In that report, they shared that over 90% of content on the internet gets zero traffic.

Although you cannot control the amount of content produced by your competitors in your niche, you can control one thing that improves your chances of being in the other 10%.

Distribution.

Content is king, but content distribution is queen. While charting out a new content strategy, it will serve you well if you think about how you plan to get them read. In other words, your content strategy is incomplete without a content distribution pipeline.

Choosing the best content distribution channels

Your audience doesn’t hang out everywhere. Sharing your messages blindly on the internet will waste your resources, which is costly, especially if you are a small team with a limited budget.

Hence, choosing the right distribution channel is crucial. Here is how you can find the distribution channel that will help you get your content to your target audience.

• Ask your existing customers how they found you. You can use this information to scale up your efforts on those channels directly.

• Search for your keywords on every social media. Through this, you can find groups and communities where people talk about the problem you are solving. Jump into the conversation with value. Try social media monitoring tools for tracking keywords or hashtags.
  
• Study your target audience’s demographics. For instance, their age group and industry generally define which social media they are more likely to use.

Content distribution tactics you can implement now

If you forgot to think about distribution for your present content strategy, you can start employing the following tactics to get your pieces read.

• Post consistently: Your blog, social media accounts, community accounts, etc. You need to be active there to get more visibility.
  
• Share visual content: If you have images, infographics, short videos, etc., you can share them to engage with your audience.
  
• Interact with your audience: Comment on their posts, reply to their comments, etc. That will paint you ‘accessible’ and friendly.
• Work with influencers: Leverage their credibility and reach a diverse group of audience in a very short amount of time.

3. Measure your impact accurately

What gets measured, gets managed.

If you are trying out multiple things (as you should) but not measuring the impact of your efforts, you won’t know which one is working. Due to that, you will be investing in things that have low ROI while not scaling up the ones that have higher potential.

Not measuring your marketing efforts means you are flying blind. You won’t have a clue where you got your last customer and where you can find more of those. It will be difficult for you to actually create a tailored content strategy for you. Leveraging User-Generated Content (UGC) can also help you track your marketing success. When customers share their experiences through reviews, social media posts, or testimonials, you gain valuable insights into what resonates with your audience.

Your content strategy should be adaptive based on the quality and quantity of leads you get from your content pieces.

How to measure the impact of your content strategy

Track the following metrics:

• Views/visits per piece
• Click-throughs (provided you have added a CTA for each piece of content)
• Leads generated
• Conversions

Each of the metrics above depends on the quality and quantity of the metric before it and how relevant the content is to the audience it is shared with. In the case of “views/visits per piece”, it depends on the quality and quantity of content, your niche, and your distribution method.

If any of the metrics are not where you want them to be, think about how you can improve on the previous one. In the end, it all depends on your understanding of your target market and the kind of content you create for it.

You will need only one tool to measure all the above metrics, Google Analytics. To ensure marketing success, accurate measurement of impact is essential. Google Analytics KPIs play a pivotal role in analyzing views, leads, and conversions and guiding content strategies based on audience insights.

4. Analyze your competitors and the market

You can learn a lot from your competitors that will directly improve your content strategy. There is always something that you don’t know but your competitor does, which makes their business different from yours.

By closely keeping an eye on your competitors, you can get content ideas, find new niches, and discover new tactics to reach your target audience.

How to analyze your competitors’ content strategy

• Subscribe to their blog and follow them on social media.
• Use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or SpyFu to learn about the keywords they rank for, their backlink profile, etc.
• Use competitor analysis templates to adopt a disciplined approach to analyzing your competitors’ content strategy.

That’s a Wrap

We hope that you have taken away a lot of useful points that will help you build a better content strategy. To sum it all up, focus on your existing customers, double down on distribution, track your content’s impact accurately, and learn from your competitors to get winning content ideas.