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One of the most important parts of your marketing strategy is your content strategy, which tells you who, what, where, when, and how you plan to connect with your audience. It’s a lot more than just a how to Create Content Strategy. It includes buyer personas, journey maps, editorial calendars, audits, and content governance.
A well-executed strategy gives your business a culture of being content. It gives a way to measure the return on investment (ROI) of content marketing, hold people accountable, and make sure that business results are always the same.
Because of this, you can make bigger investments that engage more customers and give your business more value. But it takes time and money to create great content. So, whether you hire someone to write blog posts or make videos in-house, you need a well-thought-out plan to get the results you want.
Steps to Create Your Content Strategy
Define Your Goals for Your Content Strategy
Great content is made with a specific goal in mind, and that goal needs to be made clear. Ask yourself if you’re making content to raise awareness of your brand, get leads, convert users, bring back old customers, improve your search ranking, or something else. Once you know exactly what you want to achieve, you can decide if a content strategy is the best way to get there.
Research Your Audience for Your Content Strategy
This can be done by turning on Google Demographics and Interests for the sites your prospects visit and Google Analytics for the content they look at. You can also use your users’ demographics to figure out which social media platforms they will be on.
In the long run, it can also be helpful to know what content works best and where. Facebook is making it harder and harder for small business owners to reach more people without paying for ads. Video content, on the other hand, seems to do well on the platform. Video content “generates 1200% more shares than text and image-based content put together,” according to a study.
Focus on Your Niche for Your Content Strategy
It’s a sad fact that the Internet is full of content that shouldn’t even exist. A lot of content is either plagiarized from other sites, simply re-posted, or offers no real added value. Most people don’t see 99 percent of this useless content because it doesn’t appear at the top of SERPs. To avoid your content getting lost in this crowd, you should create content that stands out, is unique, has its own voice, and most importantly, adds real value to readers.
Measure Your Results for Your Content Strategy
Measuring the results of your content marketing efforts is one of the most important aspects of developing an effective content strategy. Producing content without analyzing user feedback is like making a muted phone call. You need to know what your audience liked and didn’t like, and why.
- Consumption Metrics
- Social Sharing Metrics
- Lead Metrics
- Sales Metrics
Listen to Your Customers to Improve Your Content Strategy
While data analytics can be an extremely useful tool, it only gives you black and white numbers on a spectrum that includes many subtleties. Unlock the rest of the spectrum by really listening to your customers. Your customers need to know they are being heard on social media. So ask them for feedback and suggestions, and engage with them regularly.
Talk to other employees, too, to get a better understanding of your customers’ needs. Sales teams and support staff who talk to your customers regularly can better assess how customers perceive your business.
Amplify Your Content Strategy
The first part of the equation is having a good content strategy and making content that is targeted. The last part is a summary of what has been said. To get more people to see your content, find out where your audience hangs out online. Then, post on those channels to reach them.
In the end, you’ll need to think strategically to figure out all the tools you have at your disposal and really use the power of your employees, customers, and influencers to spread your content.
FAQ
What are the 3 C’s of content strategy?
Brands and publishers must work together to evolve the content marketing landscape. Successful content marketing programs hinge on the 3 Cs – content, context, and communication.
What does a content strategy include?
Content strategy focuses on the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content. Content not only includes the words on the page but also the images and multimedia that are used.
What is the core of content strategy?
A core content strategy statement is a concise statement (we usually try to keep it to fewer than 30 words) that typically summarizes choices about why a company (or team) produces content, for whom, and how it manifests (the “what”).