How do you execute a conversion-focused content marketing strategy? Here’s the process I’ve used to create successful strategies in the past.

The strategy plan takes a few days, maybe a week. You want to begin with an audit where you look at current analytics (how users come to the site, how on-site behavior changes based on traffic source, where users leave, etc.).

In many cases, you’ll be able to take a few “instant win” ideas and implement them into your strategy. (Like, “hey, we’re not doing email marketing consistently,” etc.)

This leaves you with a list of what’s working, what’s not, and how you can improve your audience relationship while building up client brand authority. You should also try to map out the current user journey and assign a dollar value per user per step.

So “We’re spending $2,546 per month on FB ads which drive 10,000 people to our site, costing $0.254 per visitor. Approximately 2% of that traffic signs up for our email list, which we retarget with more FB ads at $300/mo. and 2% of THAT traffic becomes a customer at $1.50 per.”

The next step is determining measurable goals. What do you want to achieve? More money in the door, obviously. But what are the steps you take to get money, get paid?

This is where you set goals.

So in the example above, maybe a goal is to increase email signups to 10% and improve retargeting so it converts at 10% instead of 2%. That would result in 800 additional email signups per month and 80 total customers per month. The cost per customer would go from $636 for 4 customers/mo to 100 customers at $25.46/mo.

(As I’m writing this hypothetical, I’m realizing it sounds high. But go with me for now.)

Now that you know what your measurable goal for success is, you need to make a gameplan to get there. What measurable objectives will you set that help you achieve your goal?

In this case, you need better on-page incentives to sign up for the email list. So developing a better lead magnet could be an objective.

And your email list/retargeting ads need to improve, too. So another objective could be testing a new retargeting campaign.

The time frame for this stage is however long it takes you to get statistically significant results. This might be a few weeks, or a few months. I generally see solid improvements in a strategy by the 3 month mark (unless there’s a lot of up-front content development work).

Breaking down your strategy into goals and objectives, then figuring out how much time each objective takes is the key to making realistic promises to your client.

In the end, you have a clear, actionable, MEASURABLE strategy to methodically identify the best source of traffic and turn that into paying customers.

(Originally written as a rambly Facebook post.)