A more effective content strategy builds a better relationship with your target audience. It aids in building one’s authority in a competitive market by showcasing your skills and professionalism. You instill confidence in your audience toward the achievement of goals each time you share high-value, quality content.
In this post, we will discuss how to improve content strategy and what it is. This is critical to your success, in the first place, and I will give you some actionable tips to either start creating or improve your content.
Understanding Content Strategy
A content strategy is a plan that is designed to state what the organization wants to communicate to its audience and through which channels to fulfill business objectives. It guides all your content marketing efforts coherently and strategically, developing an effective mixture of your overall marketing plan. The approach should be such that it results in a strategy that has the potential to draw customers and also engage them at every stage of their journey.
A good content strategy should be such that it enables you not only to get effective management of existing content but also produce new, meaningful, relevant content; and track its performance for continuous improvement so that the same may help in your success.
Why Is Content Strategy Crucial?
Every piece of content you create tells part of your brand’s bigger story—one of interest, values, and placing yourself in a particular light in the world. What assures that every time you hit publish, you will have a consistent and compelling narrative added to it, is having a well-thought content strategy at the core.
It won’t just make your audience much more understood and served but also show you as an authority in your specific niche—why your business is important and why it differs from others.
How to create a content strategy
In this section, we have broken down the process of planning a content strategy into seven steps:
- Define your goals.
- Research the target audience.
- Do a content audit.
- Decide on your content types.
- Plan the content.
- Build the process for creating content.
- Measure the content success.
Measure the success of your content. Let’s go a little deeper into the steps.
Table of Contents
1. Define Your Goals
If you are able to set the goals and measure their performance in a clear way it will be possible to do the content strategy that works. What do you want the content to do?
For now, let’s just look at the “what” because the “how” will come later. I found the SMART technique useful for establishing objectives. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example:
- Include 50% more qualified leads in 90 days.
- Raise the number of followers on your social network by a factor of 2 in 60 days.
- Grow your email subscriber list by 100 new mailing addresses in 30 days.
2. Research the Target Audience
Who would you want your business to communicate with? Mention the ones who have shown interest; more likely than not, most of them belong to a specific group of the same kind, which would guide your content development.
The buyer persona is a composite of your ideal customer’s characteristics that you can use to place yourself in their shoes, thus crafting their needs together with the content you produce. Consider these criteria, keeping in mind what you want the persona you’re envisioning to represent:
Are you aware of your target demographic, but you don’t know anything about the psychographics yet? Who are they, what do they like, what do they care about, and what do they need?
Where does your product or service fit into their lives? That being said, examine how your audience goes about consuming the data and involving with content, additionally, their most preferred communication method. It is going to allow you to get some helpful prompts for creating a tailor-made content strategy for your audience.
3. Do a Content Audit
Before you begin to plan any new content, it’s important to first take a step back and look at what you have. First, look at the types of content you have published up until now. Consider how every piece has done in terms of engagement, reach, or contribution to your business goals.
It is equally important to understand how content may have missed the mark or perhaps moved you further away from your objectives. A complete content audit can help you identify the trends of what your audience gravitates toward. This process will not only highlight what’s working but also partly shed some light on how improvement can be done.
With this information at your disposal, you will be better placed in effectively planning future content towards the pursuit of your goals and engaging your target audience.
Conducting a Competitive Analysis
Beyond auditing your own content, you can learn so much more about your target audience by analyzing the competition. Doing research on the competitive landscape defines not only what’s average in an industry but lays bare opportunities for different—and better—content to serve your audience.
In your competitive analysis, track how other businesses—particularly those catering to the very same target audience—execute their content. Consider what types of content they are creating, where they are publishing it, how their audience is engaging with this content, and the topics they are covering.
Research the competition and, based on that information, come up with how you can use those successful strategies in your plan. This content strategy will help you in developing the content that does not just match but goes over what is offered by the competitors.
4. Decide on Your Content Types
Think about what content you can realistically create that your audience would enjoy, and that would enable you to meet your goals. It’s also important to try to match your content to different stages of the customer journey. Some common types of content include:
- Blog Posts
- Social Media Posts
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Email Newsletters
- Case Studies
- White Papers
- Templates
- Ebooks
Once you have already decided on the type of content, consider how you will get the most out of it by adjusting the form based on the channels where it’s going to be published. For example, if you are making blog posts, use SEO to insert your content into Google search. If you are using social media, consider the hashtags that run with the type of data your audience follows or trend topics that they care about. This is a good content strategy which you can follow to reach your target customers.
Optimizing content on each of these platforms is sure to reach the intended audience and make a real impact.
5. Plan the Content
With this underpinning, you’ll be in a position to plan your content strategy. Add to the work you’ve done on picking the subjects you’ll cover across your various content types. Consider prominently topics where your expertise will leverage your audiences’ interests, values, or needs. Consider also broadening those that you’ve done well with in the past, or that your competitors seem to be making work.
Think about strategies for sharing your content on different platforms, being aware that different audiences may seek different communication approaches. The repurposing of the same content across different channels would allow increased reach yet maintain the same message and still remain within budget.
You may want to remain organized with a content or editorial calendar. This will be a planning tool to help implement your strategy, which seeks to ensure that your content is on time, relevant, and very well distributed across all communication channels.
6. Build the Process for Creating Content
Now, with a plan ready, you know what type of content you need to create. Think about who you’ll want on your team to execute the goals. You may need a content strategist for audience research, someone who’ll appear on camera, or expert writers of several kinds.
Think too about the tools you might need to develop and publish the content. You may need a content management system, social listening tools, or editing software.
You’ll be creating content regularly, so a efficient process is important. This will make it easier to come up with new ideas and create content time and again that resonates with your audience and fuels your goals.
7. Measure the Content Success
Once you share your content and your audience begins to engage, you’ll want a strategy in place to measure its success. Many platforms, from websites to social media and email systems, provide metrics for views, clicks, and follower growth.
Focus on the metrics that matter most to your content goals, and decide how you will track them over time. Watch the performance, using data to drive adjustments to individual pieces or a better content strategy overall.
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