#75: How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Welcome to Just Go Grind, a show that focuses on helping you launch and grow a business and navigate the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. I'm Justin Gordon, your host, and in this episode, I'm gonna be talking about how to create a content marketing strategy, something that's incredibly important for your business. So I wanted to devote an episode to this concept. As always, the show notes are at justgogrind.com/podcast. You can support the show by leaving a rating and review over on Apple Podcasts. And please do subscribe to the show as well. You can also follow us on Instagram, justgrind.com as well, all different blogs and everything on there. Without further ado, let's dive into this episode with more of me talking about how to create a content marketing strategy. Having a content marketing strategy for your business or brand is absolutely essential to your success, whether you have an established company, a startup, or really just wanna leverage a personal brand to gain new career opportunities. I think a personal brand and especially for anyone in the business world is so valuable now and a content strategy can also help for that. But developing the right content for you can help you get more customers, more clients, and really just position you for success. If you look at startups like Dollar Shave Club and Blue Apron, people like Tim Ferriss, Oprah, Gary Vaynerchuk, Richard Branson, The Rock, Kylie Jenner, even large companies like Coca-Cola, They all use content marketing to grow their business. And there's of course, you know, all different kinds of content, which I'm going to discuss in a bit. And I used content to grow Jisco Fitness, which was my first company, and generated a few hundred thousand views of that content while also getting coaching clients and really building my personal brand, which I've been able to leverage for more opportunities over the years, including helping me get into an MBA program at USC and even get a partial scholarship there as well. And with the Drisco Grind podcast, I leveraged content marketing to get thousands of visitors to the site and thousands of podcast downloads as well in the first year, all because of this content marketing strategy. So it's clear that content marketing works. I've experienced it firsthand. And if you have a well-crafted strategy, you too can make more money, build your brand, and impact more lives. So what exactly does a successful content marketing strategy include? Now, there's going to be a few different factors here, and while you really don't have to perfect all of them, you won't necessarily even use all of them, to be honest. There are factors you want to take into account when crafting your content marketing strategy. First, having a clear target audience and being clear about the problems that they have. So who are those people you're targeting with your content? The more clear you can get on this target audience, the easier it is for you to create the right content that really speaks to them. And how can you figure this out? By doing your homework, of course. You have to research all these different companies in your niche, read survey data, and talk to people and figure out who these potential customer demographics are, who these potential customers are. And that's really the starting point. And once you have the general idea of who your customer is, Then you can gain valuable insights by actually, like I said, having way more conversations with them and figuring out what problems they have. Now, before starting Just Go Grind, I actually had conversations with, I think, 15 to 20 different people in my target audience, and from these conversations, I listed out different problems they had and kind of how I could help craft my own content marketing strategy to solve those problems. Next thing is why your company is uniquely suited to solve those problems. You want to think about your company, looking at your company and say, why is it that you're able to solve these problems of your potential customers better than someone else's? Now, we all have different talents and experiences and strengths that can help others, and when crafting your content marketing strategy, you need to figure out which ones you can leverage to stand out from your competitors. A simple way you can figure this out is to simply ask. Ask your current customers why they chose you. Ask your friends and family what your strengths are. Ask your colleagues even, like, what do you do better than others? People will know this or they'll have an idea, and this will help you create the appropriate content marketing strategy that not only solves problems of your target audience, but does so and leverages what you actually do best. Anyways, your goal with this, your goal is really to— you're going to invest a lot of time in this content marketing strategy and it's going to benefit you to know why you're creating all of this content in the first place. Because there's an infinite amount of content you can create on all different types of topics. So you need to understand why you're going to be creating this content in the first place and asking yourself this question every single time: what do I want to receive from the content I create? Do you want to sell more products? Do you want to get new clients? Do you want more email subscribers? Do you want to build your company's brand and leverage it for future business opportunities? I mean, do you want to grow your personal brand and land a dream job? What do you want? That's what you're thinking of this content marketing strategy. What do you want from this? Knowing what you're trying to get from your content makes it easier to create the right content. Any content marketing strategy that doesn't have a goal is more of a hope than a strategy. Of course, there's different metrics you're going to look at when monitoring this content marketing strategy as you move forward with this, but which ones will you actually monitor? You have a few different options for this, and you want to make sure your progress, obviously, and all your effort is not wasted. So some things you're going to consider are the website visitors, video views, podcast downloads. Email subscribers, sales, form submissions. Now, early on, you might only look at a few things, like the website visitors, or views, and downloads. But as your content marketing strategy continues to evolve, you'll look more towards the number of sales generated, clients landed from your content. Now, your target audience. Once you figure this out, you want to figure out what exactly the type of content is best for them. So, what type of content is best for your target audience? And a content marketing strategy wouldn't be complete without having a clear understanding of what the best content is for your target audience and where this can be distributed. You know, in an ideal world, you know, you'd create every type of content imaginable. You'd have articles and videos and images and podcasts and infographics and distribute that content on every platform that exists. Now, while this is certainly something to strive for eventually over time, We don't all have the ability to pay content teams like Gary Vaynerchuk, for instance, to produce content on that level. Gary Vaynerchuk is the king of content, producing more than 100 pieces of content per day, running his $100+ million agency, VaynerMedia, and even he says he's not producing enough content. Knowing that your time and resources are limited, it matters even more what content you decide to produce and where you decide to distribute this content. Now, let's start with how to choose the content formats that are best for you. When it comes to your content marketing strategy, you have 4 main options for the format you can choose. You have these articles or blog posts, images, videos, and podcasts. How you choose which format to use really just depends on what you'll be able to create consistently and which format really resonates with your audiences. If you're great on video, create videos, for instance. One person who really does this well is Marie Forleo. And early on, she chose to do video. She chose this as her platform because she knew she's very charismatic and she absolutely crushes it in her business, helping people create a business and a life they love. I'm pretty sure it's like a $10 million plus business a year revenue. It's grown up, it's blown up completely. And if you're a better writer though, write articles. Yeah. Of course, one of the best in this regard is entrepreneur, angel investor, author, you know, mega podcast host. He initially grew his audience really through writing articles on his blog. Many of them went viral, which is very helpful. And he's known for his podcast now, but that was his starting point, was really the blog. And there's a lot of different examples of podcasters. You can look at Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, so many different ones that have blown up because of podcasting. Of course, you could choose to create content, like I mentioned, in all formats. If so, there are efficient ways to kind of get the most from your efforts. So if you film a video, you can use the audio from the video on your podcast, and you can then write articles from the topics discussed in the video. Again, Gary Vee, Gary Vaynerchuk, the social media marketing OG, talks about this strategy in a SlideShare he did. I thought it was really helpful, and I've used this repeatedly. In my own content marketing. Now, if you don't think you're great at one of the formats, you can always choose to learn and improve yourself or just simply hire someone else to create content for your business. And that's something that has worked for many different businesses over time. I did a lot of the video content for Clark Toys initially and where I used to work, and there's just so many different options for creating content or having someone else create content for you as well. Looking towards now the channels where you're actually going to publish this content. So you've decided on the content formats that's best for you, but what happens next? Now you choose where to distribute the content. And this comes— when it comes to articles you write, you could publish them in a few different spots. So you obviously have your own website, which is a great spot to publish your content because you can rank in search and it's something you own. But you can also publish on other people's websites as guest posts. Then you can publish directly on social media platforms like LinkedIn, or you can even use content publishing platforms like Medium or even the question site Quora, which is Q-U-O-R-A. With a podcast, you can publish episodes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or SoundCloud or Stitcher or Anchor, so many different platforms. And then when it comes to videos, there's many different options as well. All of your typical social media platforms as well as obviously the big giant, which is YouTube. But then, yeah, like I said, you have Instagram TV, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, everywhere you can publish videos. Now it can seem overwhelming. There's so many different options, so you might want to just consider a few of them. Of course, you're always keeping in mind where your target audience actually spends their time, and the demographic using Facebook versus Snapchat, for instance, is much different. It's a totally different scene. Early on, you may try a variety of platforms with a variety of content just to see what sticks, and that's totally okay. And with Just Go Grind, my content strategy, it's evolved over time, but I basically have weekly podcasts. Right now, I'm doing 2 a week. Videos, I've done in the past, it's not really a huge part of my content strategy right now, but I'm writing blog posts now every week, long form, so I can rank better in search results. And then republishing these as well on different platforms and then having a newsletter every Friday called the Weekly Grind. People can sign up for that, justgogrind.com/newsletter, another part of my strategy. Now, where do you get killer content ideas that are gonna actually resonate with your audience? There's no limit to the amount of content you can produce, but putting out content as part of your content marketing strategy, it requires you to come up with ideas for content consistently, like all the time. And there's a few places to look. There's content creation tools like Feedly or Pocket. There's BuzzSumo, Google Keyword Planner. HubSpot has a good blog idea generator. There's even Google Search or books, podcasts, audiobooks, Google Trends. There's ideas everywhere for content. The content creation tools allow you to really to follow the companies and people in your niche to get article ideas or video ideas or blog post ideas or podcast ideas, just kind of seeing what's out there. Now, BuzzSumo, like I mentioned, BuzzSumo is a great tool for finding the most shared articles on different topics, and you can use it to see how many shares across different platforms that the top articles are getting. Google Keyword Planner, the reason I like this one is it gives you historical data on the number of searches per month for different keywords and also predicts the future search numbers for keywords or terms. Now, HubSpot's Blog Ideas Generator is This is another nifty tool. You can enter a term and it'll give you ideas for content around that. And then on Google Search, you can enter in the topic you want to create content around and you can see which results are ranking best. At the bottom of the search results though, you can also see the related searches and this will give you even more ideas for creating content. Now, books, podcasts, and audiobooks, like I mentioned, are great places to get ideas for content as well. You can even look at either the outlines of these or the glossary. There's all different ways you can find content from these books and everything else. Now, Google Trends can help you as well find the right topics that are popular and which topics may become popular soon. Now, with all these ideas, it's important to find a way to store these. I use Evernote Web Clipper for different ideas from websites directly, and then I also like to use Trello. Trello is such a great tool and I'm a huge fan of using it to organize pretty much everything within my business. There's also different topic idea formats. So the content idea formats I'm going to go through in a second, but you have the choice of writing, creating videos, producing podcasts, making images. But you can make it even easier on yourself creating content by having a few content types for each. Now, some examples of this would be how-tos, book summaries, Q&As, FAQs, ultimate guides, templates, opinions, case studies, resources, lists, infographics, photos, pins, predictions, timelines. Yeah, there's a lot. There's just so many different options. You can try out a few different options and see what sticks, and then simply do more of what's working. Now, the key to create amazing content, it really starts with your audience. You always start with your audience, keep in mind what they want and what are their needs, and then always solving their problems in some capacity or entertaining them as well. There's a few different options for that. Also, you can focus on being authentic whenever possible. People don't want to buy from brands or companies that they perceive as fake. When it comes to writing articles, if your goal is to rank high in Google, typically longer articles are going to perform better. And there's been many different studies and research on this. And if you look at the articles that place the highest on Google, they tend to be like 2,000 words roughly. And that varies a lot, and some are way more than 2,000 words, but in general, around 2,000 words. There's a lot of great information from Backlinko, Brian Dean, I believe, from that site. I've looked to them repeatedly for more information on SEO and kind of keywords and all of that. The articles that I had rank on the first page of Google for Just Go Fitness, those were typically 2,000 to 3,000 words long and they are filled with valuable content, images, and even videos. And those articles, those blog posts, they've gotten thousands and thousands of visitors over the years to my site. And one of the top ones I have, it's called 11 Ways to Get Faster Results in the gym, searching for that, you'll easily find it and it ranks high on Google, and that was about 2,000 words. So to give you an exact example, that is one of them. Another article I did was How to Look Like Bradley Cooper in American Sniper. And that article, depending on the day, it's first page of Google and it's almost 5,000 words and it's very in-depth. And I found out really early on that those types of things got searched and so I made content around it. Which brings me really to the next aspect of creating great content. It includes visually appealing media in your content, particularly in your articles you create. So it's not just going to be words. And while this is certainly helpful for creating better content, there's always exceptions to that rule. Seth Godin is a prime example. Seth just writes a short daily blog. He's been doing this for years. You have to find what works for you. With podcasts, you can create better episodes by first having great studio quality. So, when it comes to podcasts, the audio's going to be everything. So, whether the studio setup you have, whether it be a bedroom, whether it just be a room that has decent enough acoustics, is really important. And then when it comes to podcasts as well, you're always asking follow-up questions to things your guests say during the interview, and finally, doing your homework so you can come up with insightful questions. Now, videos can be an incredibly powerful part of your content marketing strategy as well. And while anything can work with video, there's a few different components that really help a lot. Having an intro that grabs the audience's attention is key. Telling a story, this is something Quinton Alums, who I had on the podcast as well, he really uses telling stories to become a LinkedIn influencer. Creating exciting and inspiring videos. Casey Neistat's my favorite YouTuber. He's one of the OGs of vlogging and he is the master of it. You can look him up for some examples. Also including music. Adding your company URL or logo, educating your audience on something, ending with a call to action, asking questions, having great audio quality, again, even for your videos, using plenty of light, and then even incorporating humor, something Will Smith has done as he's blown up on Instagram and YouTube over the past year or 2 that he's been rocking that. Now, how do you create content and when do you actually create content? Now, getting in the flow of content creation can be tricky, especially if you haven't done it before. I find it helpful to block out time and set minimums. I've varied over the weeks, months, years of time. I like to either say a certain amount of time per day I'll write or have a certain number of words I'm targeting, whether it be 500 or 1,000 words or whether it be an hour or 2 or 3 or 4 even of writing. I would like to have something set. I also spend time daily on the podcast. There's different podcast production and goals related to releasing new episodes every week. When I say minimums, that's a real huge part of it. These goals change, like I said, but it's helpful to have targets to shoot for in the first place. I find it best to dedicate time every morning to content creation to ensure I'll do it, especially with at this current time being a full-time student in the MBA program at USC, especially when I have classes, there's just a lot less time. So you have to be really diligent about when you create content. If you're working a job and having a side hustle you're creating content for or just trying to build your personal brand, you're going to have to be very aware of this as well, whether it be at nighttime or in the morning, finding those times to create content is key. Now, how I create content, specifically articles or blog posts, really involves doing some keyword research, creating an outline, writing the rough draft, editing the basic kind of content, and then adding images, adding links, adding videos and examples. Many content marketing strategies will also include an editorial calendar listing exactly what you'll publish, when, and where. With a larger, more established company, I see the value in this, but I've tried and failed really many times to have an editorial calendar, and I go back and forth on this. At the basic most basic level, I do use Trello to kind of manage my content. I find it easier too to just kind of get in the habit of creating content daily or weekly and not worry necessarily as much about what it's going to be. But an editorial calendar can provide you a roadmap, which then can be useful to create the relevant content at various times during the year to take advantage of different cycles. And when it comes to promoting your content, What helps you get the most out of your content is, is really gonna be that content promotion. Now, if you're ranking in search, it's gonna be a matter of over, over time, hopefully ranking higher and higher in search results with, with, you know, producing amazing content in the first place. But you can promote your content all over social media platforms when you've actually created amazing content that's worth sharing and people will share it. So I've used this strategy before and one of the articles I wrote was 6 lessons learned from 6 months of podcasting. And this is a strategy also that Austin Belsack, another guest on the Justin Gordon Podcast, I think he's on guest number 21, he used to get 60,000 views on his article in 60 days. And when I used this strategy, I got people like Pat Flynn, for instance, who has 150,000+ followers, to retweet my article because I had actually mentioned him in that, which is a whole other part of your content strategy. Now, when it comes to creating content on platforms like Medium, you inherently have the chance at least to be featured in their newsletter, on their homepage, which could also catapult your traffic. It's not easy, but it is possible. And there are articles out there on increasing your chances of being featured on Medium, so I would check those out because I actually have not been featured yet on Medium, but I have not been devoting a ton of time to that. I also find that answering questions on Quora, again, Q-U-O-R-A, And then linking to your content can be another useful traffic source. And I've accumulated 40,000+ answer views on Quora with only like 50 or so answers, and it's grown over time. So, I forget, I haven't checked my stats in a while, but it's definitely changed. But I still get people coming to my sites from Quora every week, for sure every month. And with Quora, I'll specifically target questions on topics I have experience in and I've already written about or interviewed a guest about, and then it's kind of an easy link back to that. Now, how do you analyze your results and make adjustments? Remember how I said that initially, you'll create a bunch of content and you'll see what resonates with your audience? Well, every few weeks, every month, whatever interval you choose, you'll perform a content audit as part of your content marketing strategy. And we're really just evaluating the content you've created based on the goals and metrics you established for how you're going to measure success. And, you know, while I check my stats briefly every day, I do prefer a more in-depth audit of the content every few months just to kind of check in and see, like, am I creating the right stuff? Is this all valuable? So, the key takeaways. An effective content marketing strategy includes these components: a clear target audience and the problems they have, why your company or you are uniquely suited to solve those problems, what your goal is, what metrics you will monitor, and what type of content is best for your target audience. Now, it takes time, but you're investing in your brand, your business with every piece of content you put out there, especially if you create evergreen content, content that just doesn't go stale after a day or two, something that actually is more relevant in the long term, whether it be starting a blog or starting a podcast or many different things. If you can create evergreen content, it's something you can use over and over again, which is why I prefer it. Now, if you need any help developing your own content marketing strategy, feel free to reach out. As I mentioned before, the show notes are at justgogrind.com/podcast. Remember to subscribe to the show. You'll never miss another episode. And thank you so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye. Day.