It is always beneficial to go over your content marketing strategy to ensure that it is current, unique, and captivating for your potential customers – no matter when or how they plan on making a purchase.
If you’re finding it difficult to plan for the year ahead, or if you’re simply looking for new ideas to include in your plan, then this article is for you.
What is content strategy? Content strategy is the planning, development, and management of content—written, visual, or otherwise—in order to achieve specific business or marketing goals. Why your business needs a content marketing plan: Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. The steps you need to take to create your strategy: 1. Define your goals. 2. Do your research. 3. Know your audience. 4. Determine what kind of content you need. 5. Create a content calendar. 6. Promote your content. 7. Analyze your results. In this post, we’ll explore what content strategy is, why your business needs a content marketing plan, and what steps you need to take to create your strategy. Plus, we’ll look at some examples of effective content marketing strategies for inspiration. Content strategy is the planning, development, and management of content—written, visual, or otherwise—in order to achieve specific business or marketing goals. Content marketing is
What is content strategy?
A content strategy is a plan in which you use content (audio, visual, and/or written) to achieve your business goals. A successful content strategy will attract your target audience at every stage of the funnel and keep them engaged even after a purchase.
If your goal is to increase brand awareness for your business, then you might want to focus on a content strategy that is based around SEO. This would increase your visibility on the search engine results pages, which would in turn lead to more traffic being driven to your products or services.
New business owners might think that a content strategy is not necessary at the beginning, but it can be very useful in the future. Producing high-quality content can help build trust with new audiences.
A content strategy can come in handy long after someone has become a customer. A content strategy is a foundation for your inbound marketing that attracts and delights customers. It can be used for sales enablement and customer satisfaction long after someone has become a customer.
It is important to develop a content strategy as 70% of marketers are investing in content marketing. This will help you compete in your industry.
What are your goals for your content? What are the needs and wants of your audience? What kind of content will help you achieve your goals? What are the goals you hope to achieve by creating content? What does your audience need or want to see? What kind of content will best help you reach your goals?
1. What problem will you be solving for your audience(s)?
Your product or service should ideally solve a problem that your audience has. In addition, your content should educate your audience about this problem so that they can begin to identify and address it.
A sound content strategy can help those who are still trying to figure out what their main challenges are, as well as those who are already using your product to overcome these challenges.
Your content helps to promote the solutions you offer and makes it easier for you to build trust with your potential customers.
2. What makes you unique?
Your potential customers need to know what makes your product better or at least different from your competitors.
Perhaps your main asset is that your company has been established for many years. Or maybe you have a unique brand voice that makes you stand out from your competitors.
You need to show why you are worth listening to in order to convince people to buy from you. Once you know what your selling points are, make sure to include them in all your content.
3. What content formats will you focus on?
To determine which formats to focus on, you need to identify where your audience is located.
Before you start a podcast or YouTube channel, find out where your audience is most active.
If you don’t plan your content strategy, you could end up making content that won’t be seen by your target audience or that won’t hold their attention.
Once you identify the best formats for your content, start creating a budget to assess what resources you can allocate to executing this strategy.
4. What channels will you publish on?
There are many different channels that you can publish your content on, ranging from your website to social media.
The type of content you produce will be determined by where your audience resides. If they prefer longer videos, then YouTube would be the best platform. On the other hand, if you have a younger audience that prefers quick content, then using TikTok or Instagram would be more beneficial.
We will discuss social media content strategy in more detail later in this article.
6. How will you manage content creation and publication?
Figuring out how you’ll create and publish all your content can be time-consuming.
Before you execute, it’s important to establish:
- Who’s creating what.
- Where it’s being published.
- When it’s going live.
As the head of a small team, you may be the only decision-maker. However, as your company grows, you will likely need to work with multiple content teams to establish an efficient process.
The content strategy for today is to manage the content from a topic standpoint. This will help to avoid clutter and as explained in the video above, this will allow you to easily visualize your company’s message and become an authority in your market over time.
How to Create a Content Strategy Framework
1. Set a mission, goals, and KPIs
A few years ago, athenahealth launched athenaInsight, a data-driven news publication, as a serious investment in content marketing. According to executive director of content and communications John Fox, the marketing team adjusted the brand’s point of view as they prepared for the launch.
Fox says that in the past, they have focused on what is wrong with healthcare and what needs to be fixed. But now, they are trying to be more positive and provide solutions instead of just pointing out the problems.
Your mission should make it easier for your team to talk about your brand’s products organically. The goals and metrics will follow.
Since athenahealth’s initial goal was to build an audience, the team was focused on growth metrics like unique visitors. But they also operated with a long-term view of business metrics, so their plan also accounted for pageviews per visit and visits per reader, which are data points tied to loyalty.
Fox stated that it is essential to have a clear message for what you are marketing and to ensure that everything is aligned behind that message.
2. Conduct persona research
Your plan will be more successful if you have a clear understanding of who your content’s target audience is.
It is important to know your target audience when you are starting out in marketing. This will allow you to create content that is more relevant and valuable to them, and that they are more likely to convert on.
If you have been marketing for a while, you may want to change your target audience. Would you like to target a new group of people or just expand your current target market? It is important to revisit your target audience by doing market research every year, in order to grow your audience.
3. Run a content audit
Some brands start by creating blog posts. To try different formats, they do a content audit to see which content performs best and which doesn’t perform well. They use this information to decide which direction to go next.
If you have been running your business for a while, you should go over your content marketing strategy and check how it has performed in the past year.
What goals can you set for yourself and your team that align with the rest of your organization for the upcoming year?
A content audit will help you figure out what is most popular with your audience, what topics you are missing, and new content ideas.
4. Conduct a gap analysis
Now that brands are operating more like publishers, they are also competing against them. For example, a company like Marriott is not only competing against other hotel chains for consumer attention, but also with companies like Travel + Leisure and National Geographic. In order for your company to offer a unique experience and increase brand awareness, it is important to know what competition you are up against.
You should only spend money on creating new content if it is something that your audience wants and is not something that they are already getting. You should focus on creating content that fills the gaps in what is already available.
Fox believes that a lot of content that is labeled as “thought leadership” is not actually fresh or novel, and will not be successful. If you have something that makes you unique or special, invest more in that.
A gap analysis is a way to compare how well your company is doing in comparison to your competitors. This can be done by looking at things like content, performance, and subjects covered. Once you have all this information, it is helpful to visualize it so you can more easily see where your company has the most opportunity to improve.
Rather than just looking at your brand’s past, it’s important to understand the wider context in order to be successful in the future.
5. Develop a distribution strategy
One of the biggest misconceptions about content marketing is that good stories can just be thrown up on a blog without any thought or strategy behind them and people will automatically flock to read them.
It is just as important to plan and think ahead for content distribution as it is for content creation. Knowing where your audience goes online is part of this analysis. If your target readers work in finance, they may be frequenting LinkedIn. For those of us in media and marketing, Twitter is a popular stop. Retail companies might want to explore Instagram. Facebook has a wide reach and is probably a good platform for most companies.
To attract an audience and start interacting with them, distribute your content on social media. In the beginning, stick with organic distribution instead of jumping straight into paid distribution.
Content strategist Felicity Blance warned against using overly specific content or distribution tactics too early in the customer journey, as it could lead to poor results or wasted funds.
The number of posts per day on each social media platform gradually increased as follows: when we started The Content Strategist, we would post once a day on Facebook and LinkedIn, and three or four times on Twitter. We currently post twice a day on LinkedIn, three times on Facebook, and seven times on Twitter. You can always make changes over time, so monitor how many clicks your stories get before you start posting dozens of times per day.
6. Create a content calendar
This last step closes the distance between strategy and creation. To make sure your output agrees with your strategy, schedule the essential content you’ll make over the initial two or three months in a schedule that your whole group can see.
Lieb argues that once the general strategy for content marketing has been decided upon, it’s time to get more specific about how that strategy will be carried out. This means creating a content calendar and other similar “tactical, fundamental” elements that will ensure the success of the overall strategy.
The first stories on the calendar should be well researched, with topics, formats, keywords, etc. that will capture attention and build loyalty. Mediocre content won’t help SEO, so it’s better to focus on big topics and addressing any pain points your readers will have.
Magnarelli said that when she first arrived at Monster, she knew very little about content marketing. The company used to produce a lot of news content, but eventually realized that this was not what their audience wanted. The company’s priority is to serve their audience, so they do what works best for them.
Finally, always be truthful about your team’s capabilities. It can be tempting to over-promise how much content you will produce from the start. For example, AthenaInsight has been live for more than two years and the content team produces 3-4 high quality pieces per week instead of creating multiple stories every day. A similar approach can be taken with TCS. The saying “quality over quantity” is cliché, but when it comes to building a content calendar, it is always easier to increase production over time if things are going well than to have to explain to your boss that you have to slow down because your strategy is not effective.
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