Content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing, but costs about 62% less. With those statistics, adopting a content strategy for your marketing efforts seems like a no-brainer. Actually executing that may prove more difficult.

Sometimes knowing where to start can be the hardest part. Follow the steps below, and you’ll learn how to jumpstart your content strategy and turn strangers into cheerleaders for your brand.

Make it a priority

If you want to see the results of content marketing, you need to make it a priority, not an afterthought. Companies who have prioritized blogging in their marketing strategies are 13 times more likely to see positive ROI. It can be tempting to put more time & money toward a shiny new website and paid advertising, but the time you spend investing in your content now will continue to pay off later. Create a content calendar with topics, takeaways, and targeted publish dates to help keep you on track.

Get to know your audience

Who are you trying to reach? Do some persona research to get to know your audience. Conduct persona interviews with your own customers or others in the field. Find out who they are, what they do, what motivates them, how they spend their time, and how they see themselves. Still struggling to get your personas just right? Learn how to develop stronger buyer personas.  

Know what’s happening in the field

It’s not enough to know about your company and its products or services—you need to know the industry. What are the latest trends? Who is pioneering new research or taking risks? How are people responding?

Stay educated and relevant in your field. Share that information with your audience through social media or email newsletters. Knowing your field—not just your business—lends more authority to your brand and helps build your network.

Talk to your sales team

Who should know your customers better than anyone? The people who are building relationships with contacts and guiding them through the sales funnel. Ask them questions about your customers. What are their pain points? What makes them convert to a customer? What are their common objections or obstacles? What are the top 10-20 questions salespeople get from customers? When you align your content with this insight from your sales team, you can speak more directly to your targeted customer persona and attract the right visitors and leads.

Organize content to fit the buyer’s journey 

Great content loses its effectiveness if it doesn’t resonate with the audience. Having the right content for the your audience in their specific stage of the buyer’s journey will increase the conversion rate. Develop content for each stage in the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, decision. When mapping out your content strategy, choose one blog post and one content offer for each stage of the buyer’s journey for each persona. Identify keywords to use throughout your content.

Tailor to prospects

Offering content for each persona and each stage in the buyer’s journey is a great boost to your content creation. Take that one step further by tailoring your content to the lead. This is a great opportunity for your sales team to get involved. They’ve done their research and they’re connecting with your leads on a deeper level than cold call. Content should get more directed as a lead goes further into the funnel.

Optimize your hard work

You’ve put a lot of hard work into your content, don’t let it go to waste. Use social media to share your content with your audience. Add social sharing icons to your content so others can share it too. 71% of internet users are more likely to purchase from a brand they are following on a social networking site.

Identify ways to repurpose your content. Try breaking up an ebook into a series of blog posts or emails. Write a blog post that’s relevant to a content offer. Host a webinar with content from a Slideshare presentation.

Track performance

It’s important to measure what works and what doesn’t with your content. Tracking analytics will give you insight on what your audience likes and when. There’s no use spending time on a social networking channel that isn’t yielding visits to your site—or maybe you just need to adjust your strategy for that channel. Know when your audience is online, what type of content they digest, and how they interact with your brand. These discoveries will help you improve your content strategy in a way that generates more leads and improves ROI.

Developing a content strategy is necessary for any business to grow. Ready to turn strangers into brand promoters?