Content strategy is a crucial component of your marketing arsenal as it indicates what, when, how, where, and who you plan to connect with in the long run. It doesn’t only revolve around content topics and formats, but it also includes journey maps, buyer personas, content governance, audits, and editorial calendars.
A well-planned content strategy can help drive more significant investments. It also provides a framework to maintain accountability, ensure ongoing predictable results, and measure content marketing return on investment.
However, like any other strategy, creating a killer content strategy takes time, effort, and money. So, whether you plan to develop in-house content or outsource your content marketing needs, you must learn how to establish a content strategy and work with professionals like Bullseye Strategy to get the results you desire.
Here are steps you can follow for a successful content strategy:
9 Steps to follow for a successful content strategy
Know Your Core Goals
One of the steps to creating a content strategy is determining the goals you want to reach through inbound marketing efforts and content. These must be high-level goals, which means they must be generalities or broad statements instead of focusing on the fine details.
Some of the goals you can consider may include the following:
Be A Thought Leader In Your Niche
Your company or branding goes beyond service or product. Remember, your content reflects your brand image. If you deliver quality content like a WordPress blog that brings value to your audience and embodies your brand’s mindset, you can quickly establish your business as a thought leader in the market.
Bring Exposure To Your Services And Products
When your target audience seeks your content to find a solution to their concerns, your services or products will gain more exposure, resulting in better conversion rates over time.
Drive More Traffic
Optimize your content for search engine results to drive more traffic to your website. This way, your audience will find you if they search for your company’s keywords, products, and services.
Once you establish your goals, content creation will be much easier. Moreover, you’ll know which direction to go in your content creation process.
Do Your Research
When you know your purpose or goals, the next thing you should do is to perform extensive research on your competitors and potential audience. Think of your content as a conversation. You have to know who you’re speaking with before you start interacting. Understanding your audience well can help you craft the different kinds of content they’ll like.
Aside from researching your audience, look into your competitors, too. It will give you better insights into what content you want to deliver.
Additionally, consider using competitor analysis tools to keep track of your audience’s engagement. Researching what works for your competitors may illustrate what your target audience prefers and what they’ll be expecting.
Conduct A Content Audit
Many brands typically start their content marketing efforts with blog posts. If you want to experiment or try other formats, you may perform a conduct audit to evaluate if you have:
- Underperforming pages
- Irrelevant content
- Customer interest content gaps
- Competitor content gaps
Depending on the audit’s results, use the insights to determine which direction to take with your future content. This can also help you figure out what you do differently and set new goals.
Regardless of the stage, performing a content audit should be your main priority. It will help you know what resonates best with your target audience and aid you when brainstorming fresh content ideas and determining gaps in your topic clusters.
Determine Your Content-Type
What content form does your audience crave? If you’re offering beauty products and your target audience is teenagers, you might want to opt for video content. This is because most teenagers prefer video tutorials over blocks of text. On the contrary, you may consider content in eBook formats to attract marketing experts or business professionals who often read case studies.
Other content you may want to create may include:
- Newsletters
- Infographics
- Webinars
- How-to guides
Create And Publish Content
When creating content like blog posts, it’s better to keep them short but concise. This is especially true if you want to publish them on various social media platforms.
Always perform keyword research during the content creation process. It will ensure that your content is fueled by keywords or search terms your audience will type on search bars to find your brand, boosting your search engine ranking.
Once you’ve created your content, you’ll need to decide when to publish it and which must be informed by your research. For example, you can publish once a week if you create podcasts. If you want to establish a more solid presence on social media sites, post content once a day. The key here is to ensure consistency with your publishing schedule.
Have A Distribution Strategy
When it comes to content marketing, you can’t just publish an article and expect your target audience to see it. For this reason, it’s crucial to keep proper distribution in mind when developing a content strategy.
Content distribution requires as much foresight and planning as content creation. For instance, if your target audience works in finance, they might be active on LinkedIn. For those in marketing and media, Twitter is the best platform. However, if you want to reach most audiences, you should consider distributing your content on Facebook and Instagram.
When distributing content on social media platforms, stick with organic distribution rather than paid distribution. Opting for hyper-focused content or more targeted distribution tactics might backfire and lead to poor results because the money goes to paid distribution for a target audience that isn’t there yet.
Test Your Content
There’s more to a content strategy than creating and publishing your content. Other variables may affect content performance, and the only way to know whether or not it’s working is by testing.
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a common way to test your content. It runs two versions of the content or an ad concurrently, with only one different element in each, such as an image, headline, call-to-action button, or copy. The performance of every version is analyzed and tracked to determine which performs better.
Optimize Content Regularly
Testing content is necessary to get the information for optimization that will boost campaign performance. Content optimization may mean rewriting content using relevant keywords, improving the design and layout, and trying new subject lines for email campaigns.
You may even optimize when to distribute your content every week. Once you do optimization regularly, it can help improve your content’s performance as you go along.
Repurpose Your Content
Creating killer content that drives results isn’t easy and may take more time and resources. So, if your content is working well, you might want to extend its exposure by repurposing it.
Content repurposing is an excellent part of your content strategy as it helps you refresh or update your content in ways that can get more traffic or exposure. It works like recycling content to increase customer engagement, conversions, and clicks.
Conclusion
Good content marketing doesn’t happen instantly. There’s more to crafting a trending video or writing the best blogs. Typically, you’ll need an effective content strategy to get results and achieve your goals in no time. To get started, keep in mind the steps discussed here when developing your content strategy, and never stop improving it until you create one that works for your business.