If you are like most businesses you need a solid content strategy to fuel your inbound marketing. However, it is a struggle for busy professionals to come up with great content ideas and turn it into a professional product. Here are tips and tools that will be helpful you in pulling together a content strategy:

1. Start with a goal – Have a clear view of what you want your content marketing to achieve. For instance, do you wish to build a community around your service or product, generate traffic for your website, establish thought leadership & develop your brand, create quality leads, or something else? Your content strategy will vary greatly depending on your goal. If you are looking to establish thought leadership, your content should be informative and engaging and the output should be in the form of ebooks, newsletters, infographics etc.
2. Listen to your customers! Successful content creators will tell you that the best content created around questions your consumers ask and the feedback they provide. Take commonly asked question and turn your answers into a blog topic.
3. Build an organized content repository – Next time you find an article or post that you find engaging or useful, “clip” it using tools such as Evernote Web Clipper or Pocket. Make sure that your repository is organized so that you can find and view it later. This repository will be very useful when you are brainstorming content topics.
4. The 40-40-20 Rule – Not all content that you use in your inbound marketing needs to be self-created. A “40-40-20 rule” is a good place to start your social strategy where about 40% of all content should be self-created, 40% is curated from third party sources, and 20% is user generated or contributed. Just make sure the content is top quality and is engaging and/or informative.
5. Do content mapping – For content creation activities, take into account your user persona(s) and purchase lifecycle stages to map out your content. Have a different content output in mind to target users in different purchase cycles. Include informative material and visually attractive infographics if you want to spread awareness among targeted buyers with displayed interest in your area of expertise.  Once prospectives are in the “Consideration” phase, target them with specific content on your value proposition, such as, price & feature comparison infographics. If they in the “Decision” phase, lead them to a landing page with automated quote generation capabilities and follow up with customized emails.
6. Content Type – Be cautious in the type of content you share on social channels. Make sure it’s not all self-promotion! Another good rule of thumb in social content strategy is the one-third rule – one-third is self-promotion, one-third is informative, and one-third should be general, fun shares and posts.
7. Be Consistent– This one is obvious. The more consistent you are, the more results you will see. Whether it is building your brand, achieving visibility by targeting influencers, or getting quality leads, you will see best results if you are socially active.
8. Use Social Management Tools – There are many useful social content management, curation, marketing, and analytical tools that can make help you streamline the content creation and dissemination process. From comprehensive social marketing management and analytic tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite to specific B2B marketing tools, such as eGrabber to content curation tools like Swayy and Compfight, there is a plethora of tools that can make social marketing effective and precise. 
9. Develop Metrics – Assign metrics to track your goal conversions. If you are looking to build thought leadership and manage your online reputation, make sure you use social tracking and monitoring tools like SocialMention, Mention, and Radian6 to track social mentions of your brand and respond to concerns and opportunities.
10. Validate – Set up A/B tests for all content marketing strategies. Track and analyze your campaign and make sure you track at least these basic metrics (and do it for each social channel so that you know which channel is most effective for you):

• • • Reach & Engagement – Be sure to track your audience growth rate as well as whether they are engaged with your content.
    • Channel Reports – How many visits is each channel generating? What is the return visit rate? What is the bounce rate?
    • Conversions – Set up conversion metrics and track how many conversions is each channel generating.
    • Influence – How influential are you on social media? Track it with the help of social social tracking and mention tools.
    • Response Rate – Ho many interactions are you having with your prospects and leads? How many mentions of your company are you responding to?

What are you favorite tricks and tips for content generation & marketing? Feel free to comment below or drop us a line at snigdha@webtage.com