One big challenge facing marketers is developing a successful content marketing strategy for their blogs and content downloads on their Joomla website. However, having a solid content marketing strategy is key to ensure that you're driving the right kinds of people to your site and nurturing them down the funnel.

In today's blog you will learn how to develop a killer content marketing strategy for your Joomla site in order to maximize your contents impact.

In order to have a crystal clear vision of what types of content to create and how to create a content strategy, you will first need to take a step back and make sure that you have clearly defined your buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a fictional character profile of an ideal client. Different personas are created by bucketing customers by common characteristics (including problems, job titles, industries, etc) they share.

For example: You're a clothing manufacture who sells both to wholesale boutiques and to the general public directly. You would have at least two personas, one who is a wholesaler and one who is a retailer. You could have additional personas depending on if there are groups within each of these such as mothers and daughters.

Once you've broken your personas apart, you will then want to develop a complete profile (often done as a powerpoint) that tells a complete story of who this persona is, what their problems are, what their goals are and even include what they like to do outside of work. It should feel like you're describing a real person and you should even give them a name and picture.

Once you have clearly defined your persona profile, then you will then be able to move onto content. Generally speaking, content is divided up into two main types of categories; Blogging and Premium Content. Blogs will be your short daily educational content and premium content will be your larger, more in depth content like an ebook, webinar or white paper (to name a few).

Creating a Blogging Strategy

Once you have your personas (at least an initial version) done, it will then be time to have an all-team meeting with everyone at your organization.

You will present them with the personas and get any additional feedback you can from them. This will be especially important to work with your sales and customer service team since they are at the front lines, talking to customers every day. It will be very important to get a final second draft of the personas done within this team meeting.

Now it's time to start cranking out blog ideas. Take 1-2 hours and give your whole team time to dig back into email, ticket systems and their brains to come up with as many questions/feedback they have received from leads and current customers.

It shouldn't be hard for each team member to come up with 10 questions each. Again, your sales team will be a wealth of knowledge on this topic because they hear all of the customer's concerns, questions and objections.

Once you have a strong list, take a look at them and try to star the most important questions so you can focus on writing blogs about those first.

Your Premium Content Strategy

The second piece to this is to then to create your premium content downloads. Again, these are typically ebooks, webinars, podcasts, white papers, etc. The media type you choose will entirely depend on your audience and the type of media they enjoy consuming.

To create the strategy, it will be broken up first by persona and then the stage of the buying process they are currently in when they would be consuming these books.

Top Funnel

Here they are trying to identify if they in fact have some sort of problem in which they need a solution. They are simply informational gathering and have no intent to buy anything. They want to see what options are out there and what those options help solve.

Middle Funnel

At this point, the lead knows that they have a problem that they need a solution for and are searching for what solution would work best. They also are looking to narrow down their choice of where to get that solution from.

Bottom Funnel

This is the point where they are ready to talk or engage the business itself. They may have narrowed down their choices to your business and a competitor (or two). Typically this is where a free demo, consultation or trial offer works well for them to really experience what your business is all about.

So you will want to plan and map out a content download that will fit each persona in each one of these stages of the funnel. Yes this ends up to be a great deal of downloads, however, this is what is required to ensure that you're speaking directly to the needs and concerns of that person at the right time they are ready to hear about it.

You can always start small and simply have one bottom funnel offer (a free consultation) that you extend to all your personas. Then have 1-2 middle funnel offers that are more generalize towards a few different personas. It will be important, however, to have a separate top funnel offer (and 3-4 for each would be ideal) for each persona.

Keep in mind, this is simply a starting point to get your content strategy under way. You will want to continuously revisit it and keep the topics up to date. I would suggest organizing content management tools and schedules to stay on top of it. There are some complex systems out there, but it could be as easy as created a Google Calendar for your editorial content and an excel spreadsheet for backlog content ideas.

Developing a targeted content marketing strategy takes a great deal of time and energy and often takes a period of time to test, measure and refine based on actual results. However, keep in mind that all the content your create for your website is an investment in your visitors, customers and ultimately your business.

If your have any questions, feel free to post in the comments below. I'd love to chat