The following blog post was written by Maggy Stewart, Graphic Designer & Marketing Coordinator at RMS.

A new year means a new opportunity to rejuvenate your content marketing strategy. At its most basic, content marketing is an outline that answers the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of your brand’s mission and content. Meant to guide your approach and priorities, content marketing is a tool to navigate the path toward your business goals. With an extremely high value to your brand, here’s three ways to craft a strong content marketing strategy.

1. Create your mission statement.

The most crucial step in developing a successful content strategy is to cultivate and share your mission statement, letting it become your content guide and involving it in everything you do. If someone is viewing or reading your content, what value are you providing to them? You should be helping customers discover a solution to a problem, making them more successful with the use of your product or service. Taking this into account, your mission should support your brand overall, and your content’s mission statement should align with your brand’s mission.

2. Define your content.

This is a big one. You’ll want to figure out the topics you plan to share with those who are interested. These should be specific enough to relate seamlessly to your brand but broad enough to generate massive amounts of content. Following this, decipher how you’ll relate to your audience, what formats you’ll use to package your messages (social media, websites, infographics, blogs [like this one]). Market research is a great identifier for figuring out where your colleagues and competitors distribute content and where and how your customers get their information.

3. Design & evaluate.

Once you’ve assessed the prior steps to define the why, how, where and to whom, you’re ready to begin designing your content. Figure out the overall tone you plan to have with your audience, and how you plan to incorporate the look and feel of your designs to embody both your corporate tone and message. Your content marketing strategy is a living document, subject to change as you gather data and insights from your audience. Monitor your audience’s behavior through analytics and research, survey them when necessary, and let your strategy evolve as your customers’ behaviors do.

RMS is a full-service market research and consulting firm located near Syracuse, New York. If you are interested in learning more about our research capabilities, please contact Sandy Baker, our Senior Director of Business Development and Corporate Strategy at SandyB@RMSresults.com or by calling 866.567.5422.