You probably know by now that content is the key to promoting your business. No matter what channel you’re going through to market your products or services, you need content to back it up before you can be successful. If you want to really supercharge your marketing efforts, then you need to have a plan. More specifically, you need a content strategy. Yippee!
What is a Content Strategy?
In simple terms, content strategy is your roadmap to using content to market your business. It’s a detailed plan for creating, distributing and measuring the effect of the marketing content you put out, making sure that your content appeals to prospective customers across all stages of the marketing funnel. While the ultimate goal of pretty much all marketing is to get more traffic and convert prospects into customers, a content strategy allows you to set and meet other goals as well – like spreading awareness, building up your brand authority or gaining the trust of your readers.
How to Create Your Own Content Strategy
- Define your goals. Great content doesn’t just magically appear, nor does it happen by itself. It’s created to do a specific thing. So, what is that specific thing? Are you looking to increase awareness of your brand? Attract past customers back to you? Win over those who are on the fence? Or maybe you just want to increase sales, as so many of us do! You need to know what your goals are before you make any content – otherwise you’re just creating content for content’s sake. If you’re not sure where to start, you could work your way through the sales funnel. At the top, you need to have content that builds awareness about you and the problem you address. In the middle, you need to teach people how to choose a solution, and finally at the bottom you need to explain why your product is the best solution.
- Research your audience. If you don’t know who you’re writing for, you will never be successful. That’s why research is so important. Understanding who your audience are, how they act, what they need, what their interests are and what kind of content they already engage with is the key to creating killer content. Even things like knowing their age range is useful, as this tells you which platforms you should be targeting. Remember – content isn’t just the writing – it’s also video, audio, and any other type of media you want! If you’re stuck, Google Analytics is a great starting point for data about your existing website visitors, and can give you details like age range, location and gender. Social media platforms can also create reports that provide insights into your follower’s demographics, so you have no excuse not to know who your audience is!
- Analyse your competitors. Everyone wants to beat the competition, which means you need to know them. Researching who your competition are and what their content is like can provide valuable insights, as well as a jumping-off point for your own content strategy. Start with your 4 biggest competitors and spend some time analysing their content. Note down what topics they cover, what formats they prefer, and how often they publish. Look at their engagement rates and read comments to see what their readers gel with. Don’t forget to look at things like voice and tone – it’s an important element in how their content works!
- Audit your existing content. Now it’s time to look at the content you already have. This is an important step in creating your plan, since it ensures you won’t be duplicating content, as well as allowing you to identify any gaps. You can also see where old content can be refreshed, updated or repackaged to be more relevant to your current audience. If you find content that’s old or not relevant any more, don’t be afraid to delete it – it could confuse readers and muddy your image. The easiest way to audit your content is to use a spreadsheet, noting down the type of content, title, date published, who the intended audience is and what stage of the buying funnel it’s for. Content includes web pages, blog posts, newsletters, documents, media and even social media posts. You need a full picture of what you’re already working with.
- Design your strategy. Now you know who you’re creating content for, where it will go and why, you just need to add in the ‘what’. Create a spreadsheet, map or whatever your preference is, and plan out the next 3-6 months, including what content types you need each month. Make sure that each piece aligns with your business goals and resonates with your audience. Include any seasonal events you want to talk about, as well as any big dates or events in your industry that you want to plan around. Matching your content plan to a calendar also helps you map out your timelines, so that you can figure out how long you need to create each piece.
- How will you create content? This isn’t the same as your content strategy. This is how you’re going to actually create the content you need. Are you going to create it yourself? Do you have all of the resources you need in house? Or do you need to outsource some, if not all of the content creation? Bear in mind that depending on the type of content you’re creating could mean anything from videographers and photographers to graphic designers and copywriters. If you’re going to do it in house, you will need to allocate time and resources to do this.
- Amplify your content. Once you’ve created your content, you need to do something with it. I can’t tell you the number of people who have tried telling me that ‘blogging doesn’t work’, and when I ask them if they told anyone their blog exists, they say no. How do you expect people to know about your content if you aren’t sharing it with them? There are a lot of different ways you can distribute your content so that it’s seen and shared by as many people as possible. Start with posting it in the places you know your audience spends time online. A few things you can do include posting visuals or links to content on social media, collaborating with influencers, sharing your content with relevant online communicates, and encouraging your employees to share your content too. Thinking strategically about how you’re going to distribute your content allows you to identify the resources you have and maximise the performance of any piece of content.
- Measure the results. That’s isn’t all though! You need to be measuring the results your content gets as well. Otherwise, what’s the point in doing it? You need to know how well your content is performing so that you can make changes, improve distribution or change tact. But the metrics around content can be a little fuzzy, so here are a few things you can pay attention to:
- Page views – these show if users found the page helpful.
- Time spent on the page – which shows if users are reading through the content from start to finish.
- Bounce rate – which shows whether your content aligns with the search intent of users.
- Downloads and shares – this determines whether people want to retain the content for the future.
Using this data, you can figure out which pieces of content are working well, and which need adjusting. This is how your content will keep getting better and better.
Now, I’ll be the first to say that I only do the copywriting bit of marketing. So wider content plans involving other media types are a bit outside my scope. But I spend a lot of my time creating content plans for client blogs, web pages and other written content. It isn’t rocket science, but it can be a bit of a challenge for people who haven’t done it before. So if you need a bit of a hand, I would be happy to help. All you have to do is drop me a line and book a meeting.