A content strategy serves as a blueprint for the content that a company can create in order to meet its business goals successfully. This blueprint also acts like a compass for a company online and helps the company stay true to its brand and messaging. It ensures that all the content a company creates is consistent with its overall brand identity and messaging. This helps build trust and credibility with the target audience and makes it easier for them to recognise and remember the company.
Overarchingly, a content strategy is a plan in which you use any content, including audio, visual, or written content to achieve the goals you have for your organisation’s growth. Successfully marketing content would thus include creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content via channels such as social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, apps, press releases, print publications, and more. (We’ve done a deep dive into Content Marketing on our blog too if you’re interested!)
Remember – The primary goal is to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty.
Why Do You Need a Content Strategy?
Without a content strategy, a company is just aimlessly creating content, hoping it will reach the right people. But with a content strategy, the company knows exactly who its target audience is, what type of content will resonate with them, and where and when to share it. As a bonus, effectively using a content strategy is also important as it helps businesses prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads.
How to Form a Content Strategy
There are overarchingly 3 steps to master when making a content strategy viz. Planning, Creating and Marketing.
Planning
Identify and define your business goals
The goal behind a strategy could be to bring brand awareness, attract customers, build brand loyalty, or educate customers. Determining this goal makes it easier to define what kind of content would suit the target audience. Here are a few questions to get you started:
- Do we need more quality leads?
- Do we want to expand our reach into new geographic markets? Or do we want to build market share in our local area?
- Is our reputation in need of a boost?
- Do we want to evolve our business and become known for a different set of services?
- Identify your Target Audience and Buyers’ Personas
Research your audience! Identifying your target audience allows you to understand the different motivations, goals, and behaviours of your target. This further has the potential to allow your marketing to make more of an impact and resonate better. Unfortunately, aside from mindreading, there is only one reliable way to get inside their heads: conducting research on your audience.
Content Audit
The most rudimentary form of content that brands use when they begin their content marketing journey is blog posts. If they intend to expand thereafter, it might be necessary to conduct an audit. By conducting a content audit and assessing your best and least performing content, a business is in a better position to know what kind of content would generate more traction. These audits also provide an opportunity to gather around and brainstorm should the need arise.
Pick Your Content Management System (CMS)
Carefully choosing a content management system to integrate with your workflow is important when you value features such as content creation, content publication, and content analytics. With this in mind, a CMS that you rely on must ideally help you create, manage and track the performance of your content in a financially feasible manner. WordPress, for example, is one of the most popular CMS.
What content format will you be focusing on?
Depending on the medium of communication that you choose, you could opt for anything from written content like blog posts to audio content such as podcasts. The decision when choosing a particular content format depends on your brand’s voice and the identity you intend to stick with.
Creating Content
Content creation is an art in and of itself. Once you carry out a basic recce of your target audience, the task of creating the content remains. When it comes to written content, content development should be guided by your target audience, knowledge of your competitors, and keyword research.
Once this is established, make sure to note
- Who’s creating what (if you’re part of a larger agency)
- Where it’s being published.
- When it’s going live.
Publishing and Managing Content
When putting together a content strategy, it is also important to go beyond the forms of content you will make and publish. You must devise methods to manage this content as well after it’s been put out.
Publishing content
Ask yourself a few questions before you publish the content. These will serve as your checklist to critique, tweak, and recalibrate your work accordingly.
- Is this content useful for my audience?
- Is it fit for the platform I’m publishing on?
- Can I accurately measure the impact of this content on my campaign?
- Is this content consistent in appearance and style with my brand?
- Is this content aligned with my business goals?
Managing content
Once content has been published, ideas that were thought to be evergreen might evolve to become less so. This means that pieces of content that you put out need to be edited contextually.
Conclusion
So, in a nutshell, a content strategy is essential for a company online because it guides the company to its target audience, helps it navigate the ever-changing digital landscape, and stays true to its brand and messaging. Without it, a company is just aimlessly sailing the digital seas, hoping to stumble upon treasure, but with it, the company can chart a course to success!
