“Content is not just a marketing tool. It's a way to build relationships with your audience and establish yourself as an expert.” - Marcus Sheridan

Organizations with a well-planned content marketing strategy generate three times as many leads as traditional marketing strategies and cost 62% less in execution. A well-thought content marketing strategy helps cut the digital noise and deliver experiences that are beyond customers’ expectations.

Sources: Brightedge, Ahrefs, Hubspot, Avionos

Certainly, it is not an easy task to define the content that will engage customers at every step of their journey. However, to execute this strategy effectively, digital businesses can leverage platforms like Optimizely to manage content creation, distribution, and measurement, and ensure that it aligns seamlessly with broader brand objectives and resonates with the customer journey.

Optimizely is a leading Digital Experience Platform (DXP) recognized by the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the fourth year in a row, thanks to their ability to execute and completeness of vision. It offers Optimizely Orchestrate- a content marketing platform that helps businesses manage the entire content lifecycle- from planning to data driven optimization, across channels. It provides a single place to create, edit, and publish content, as well as track its performance and measure impact. All of this boosts productivity and efficiency by empowering marketers, editors, and system administrators to focus on curating contextual digital experiences that make customers feel belonged.

As a distinguished Optimizely Bronze Partner with expertise in customer experience optimization across various industries, we have an in-depth understanding of what truly resonates with customers, and how to do it effectively and precisely.

In this blog, we're sharing a step-by-step guide, powered by Optimizely Orchestrate tools, to help create and implement a robust content marketing strategy. Let's get started!

How to build and execute an effective content marketing strategy with Optimizely Orchestrate

Step 1: Define what you want to achieve with your strategy

A content marketing strategy, when built and executed with a clear sense of purpose and direction, enables teams to concentrate their efforts on specific outcome-driven content. So, start by understanding what the brand aims to achieve from a bird-eye view, for example:

• Expanding the market share


• Improve customer service


• Boosting brand awareness


• Enhancing customer loyalty


• Increasing revenue, etc.

Depending on the goal, break it into specific content related KPIs like website traffic, conversion rates, social media engagement, and establish a baseline by analyzing current performance to get a starting point for measuring progress. Businesses can streamline this with Optimizely templates and frameworks for defining objectives that follow the SMART criteria i.e., Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals.

Lastly, ensure that the necessary budget, team, and tools are in-place to execute the strategy seamlessly.

Step 2: Understand your target audience to identify content opportunities

Sharing content without being uncertain about who's on the other end, their feelings, and their desires is like trying to shoot in the dark. To avoid this and curate a content marketing strategy that drives action, begin with a comprehensive understanding of the needs and desires of your target audience. Use Optimizely's data platform, analytics tools and content recommendations feature, driven by AI-generated insights to gather the following customer data and create accurate buyer personas for personalized digital experiences:

• Demographics: Age, gender, location, occupation, income, and education.


• Psychographics: Lifestyle, values, beliefs, interests, pain points, and aspirations.


• Behavior: Online habits, research methods, preferred channels, and purchase influencers.


• Challenges and Goals: Problems and aspirations the audience faces in different buying stages.


• Communication Preferences: Preferred channels and devices.

Step 3: Design your content roadmap

Depending on different audience segment's needs, follow a structured and efficient approach to create, manage, and deploy content assets for a consistent and well-paced content release. Optimizely offers following tools and capabilities to make this smoother:

• With Optimizely's campaign planning tools, businesses can map out their campaign strategies in detail, including defining objectives, target audiences, and KPIs.


• Optimizely's collaborative features help teams collaborate and synchronize timelines and objectives, to minimize potential conflicts, and optimize overall efficiency.


• By implementing a well-defined content calendar, businesses can orchestrate a consistent flow across the digital platforms, enhancing brand visibility and reliability.

Learn why Optimizely CMS is the ultimate solution for content management.

Step 4: Create and share relevant content seamlessly

The core of any content marketing strategy ultimately depends on the quality and relevance of the content along with how timely and consistently it is reaching the right audience. While understanding and planning content according to different segments will ensure content relevancy, the key challenge lies in ensuring that the generated content maintains high quality, produced efficiently and distributed consistently. Optimizely Orchestrate helps with these in the following ways:

• Simplified content creation: Optimizely provides a rich text editor with a collection of templates and layouts, to reduce the production efforts while ensuring professional content. It also offers AI-generated text and images for quick generation and provides SEO suggestions to boost content visibility and attract more traffic.


• Multi-channel Distribution: Optimizely Orchestrate's ‘Publish Once’ feature, combined with its hybrid CMS capability, helps businesses seamlessly distribute content across different applications and channels like website, social media, etc. This helps brands scale their content strategy while maintaining consistency.

To create content efficiently, learn the 3R strategy used by leading businesses.

Step 5: Streamline the content workflow

Content workflow optimization isn't just about doing things faster, it's about doing them smarter and more effectively to maximize the value and impact of content efforts. Optimizely makes it possible with the following capabilities:

• Digital asset management to store all the assets in one centralized repository for convenient and streamlined access to the assets, making them readily available for utilization as needed.


• Content orchestration to allow businesses to accelerate content creation and deployment by building upon or repurposing content that already exists within their workflow. This capability is particularly valuable in responding to dynamic market and social media trends.

Learn how to streamline content workflow with Optimizely CMS.

Step 6: Deliver AI-driven personalized content

Consumers expect personalization in each interaction with businesses and brands for convenience and customized experiences it offers. In fact,80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience.

Optimizely helps businesses personalize at scale with AI-generated insights and recommendations. It does this by analyzing the customer data and behavior to identify patterns and trends. This information is then used to create personalized experiences that are more likely to be relevant and engaging to the customers like:

• Website content like product recommendations, blog posts, or landing pages


• Promotional emails, abandoned cart emails, or welcome emails


• Push notifications about new products, sales, or events


• In-app messages about new features, offers, or challenges


• Tailored ads, content recommendations, or messaging on social media

Read this blog to unlock the benefits of personalization with Optimizely.

Step 7: Fine-tune the strategy with experimentation and data insights

To continuously improve and refine the strategy, it is essential to test different content formats, styles, and topics and optimize it on the basis of insights that customers share while interacting with your brand across multiple touchpoints. Optimizely Orchestrate allows easy 3rd party integrations like Google Analytics, CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, CDPs, and other data source via APIs to unify all the data in one place. It also provides a reporting dashboard that makes the data easier to understand and interpret by visualizing it and gathering insights like:

• Popular web pages and conversion drivers


• Effective email campaigns and top-performing emails


• Social media engagement and website traffic generators


• Potential churn risks and repeat purchase opportunities

When considered, it leads to contextual personalization and strategy adjustment for increased satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Conclusion

As we have seen in the blog, a successful content marketing strategy is much more than just the creation of words, images, and ideas. It is about the curation of experiences designed to capture the audience's attention and build connections. It aims to provide audience with that "Aha moment" – a moment of clarity or realization that motivates them to take the next step in their customer journey, whether that's making a purchase, subscribing to your newsletter, or engaging with the brand in some way. To achieve this, you need efficient tools and workflows tailored to execute the strategy effectively.

Optimizely Orchestrate helps accomplish each stage of content marketing strategy to streamline the operations and enhance ROI of marketing efforts. It empowers businesses to navigate the dynamic digital landscape with advanced technology with data-driven insights to understand the audience better, create more informed and efficient content that drives engagement and conversions, and evolves with market trends.

If you're curious about how Optimizely can seamlessly integrate into your content workflow to meet your unique business requirements and objectives, schedule a 1:1, no-obligation consultation today with Altudo's digital experts.