Discover what goes into a content strategy, why it鈥檚 important, and how to start building one for your business.
A content strategy is a roadmap guiding all of your content marketing efforts, from the individual pieces of content you create and publish, to how you design content for different stages of the buyer鈥檚 journey. Your content strategy can be included in a more comprehensive marketing strategy and should align with your business goals.
A content strategy creates the opportunity to:
Organise your library of existing content
Produce new content more efficiently
Attract target customers and engage them throughout all stages of the buyer鈥檚 journey
Educate and serve your audience more effectively
Become an authority in your niche
Spend your marketing budget more effectively
Coordinate your paid advertising and organic content
The following instructions offer a step-by-step guide to help you to develop your content strategy.
Your content strategy is most effective when it鈥檚 based on clear, specific, measurable outcome-oriented goals to guide your team. You can use SMART to help you communicate these goals to your team鈥擲pecific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely.
Here are some examples to draw from:
Generate 50 per cent more qualified leads in 90 days.
Double the number of social media followers in 60 days.
Get 100 new email subscribers in 30 days.
A content marketing persona is similar to a buyer persona in that it鈥檚 a fictional representation of a target customer that you can use to guide your content creation process. Developing personas can make it easier to reflect on target customers鈥 needs and how the specifics of your content can meet those needs.
Here, you鈥檒l review (or begin) your market research and any buyer personas you鈥檝e created, and add details that address how your target customers consume content. Here are some questions to get you started:
What are the demographics and psychographics of your target customers?
How do target customers search for information, including internet searches or scrolling social media?
What hashtags, search terms, and keywords do they use to narrow their searches?
What sources of information do they trust?
Which marketing channels do your target customers use the most, including social media, email, and offline channels?
What types of content do they engage with the most? How do they engage?
What actions do they take when engaging with content?
What鈥檚 their preferred method of communication?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving your website and its content to increase its visibility. SEO includes the strategic development and structuring of content, use of search queries (or keywords), adjustments to your site鈥檚 source code, and more for the purpose of ensuring that your site ranks high in a search engine result page (SERP).
Explore the following tactics to optimise your website, create effective content, and generate more organic traffic:
Consider using SEO tools such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Moz to gather data such as search engine results pages (SERPs), keywords, and high-performing headlines across the web.
Discover and analyse high-volume keywords that your target audience would use to find products like yours and that you鈥檒l build content around. For example, if you have an online maths tutoring business, relevant keywords might include 鈥渙nline maths tutors鈥 or 鈥渙nline maths tutoring.鈥 If you sell graphic T-shirts, relevant keywords might include 鈥済raphic t-shirts鈥 or 鈥渨omen's graphic t-shirts.鈥
Discover searchers鈥 intent for each keyword. Are they searching for information in general, to learn more about a brand, to find a specific website, or to make a purchase? When you know searcher intent, you can design content to satisfy that intent and therefore establish your content (and brand) as authoritative, trustworthy, and relevant.
Review search engine result page details. What kinds of content do top-ranking articles produce? What do these content creators do well? What opportunities exist to produce better content?
Evaluating your competitors鈥 content can help reveal industry standards and opportunities to create fresh content that fills gaps and serves customers.
Where do competitors publish content, including websites, landing pages, social media platforms, and email newsletters?
How do followers and subscribers engage with this content?
What topic areas do competitors cover?
What type of content do you see, including articles, social media posts, videos, ebooks, reports, and short-form content?
What pain points does this content solve?
What topics and customer pain points can you cover that your competitors don鈥檛?
What fresh approaches can you take to generating content that exceeds industry standards?
Along with examining competitors鈥 content and identifying gaps you can fill, review your own library of published, drafted, or planned content for opportunities to improve. Explore the following:
What are your highest- and lowest-performing content pieces across platforms?
What new pieces of content can you develop from high-performing content?
How does your audience engage with content on each of your marketing channels?
Of your drafted or planned content, which pieces could you prioritise, delay, or eliminate entirely based on your goals?
In this step, your goal is to create content that will guide customers through each stage of the buyer鈥檚 journey. Important questions to consider include:
What do customers need at each stage?
What are the touchpoints at each stage?
What kind of content will best serve customers at each touchpoint?
How will each content piece help you achieve your content goals?
The example below offers a guide for laying out your content-focused customer journey:聽
Buyer鈥檚 journey stages | Touchpoints | Content |
---|---|---|
Awareness | Social media posts; blog articles in SERPs | Common challenges target audience faces and ways to address them; common pre-purchase concerns; infographics, videos, quizzes |
Consideration | Social media; landing pages optimised for email capture (lead magnets); email | Lead magnets; welcome packs; emails that educate subscribers |
Purchase decision | Email; sales and product pages; social media; in-app checkout; digital and social media ads | Emails with promotions, deals, and offers; sales copy that includes benefits of products, testimonials, and how to purchase |
Retention | Email; social media pages; private social media groups; mobile apps; community forums; events | How to get the most out of product experience; upsells to other products and subscriptions; invitations to events |
Loyalty | Social media pages and private groups; email; customer support desk; mobile app; community forums; events | Invitations to request new features; invitations to join affiliate, brand ambassador, referral programmes; loyalty rewards offers; customer shout-outs; promotion of customer-generated content |
In order to meet your goals and make your customer journey a success, you鈥檒l need to generate content on a regular basis. A streamlined process can make it easier over time to come up with ideas and build content that serves target customers at all touchpoints.
Here鈥檚 an example of a content creation process you could adopt:
Track topics that are trending amongst your target customers.
Discover relevant, high-volume keywords using your SEO tool.
Brainstorm content topics, with the customer鈥檚 journey in mind.
Determine the types of content you鈥檒l generate for each topic, including blog articles, eBooks, videos, podcasts, polls, quizzes, email campaigns, and more.
Fill in a content calendar for each week, month, or quarter.
Draft, review, and edit content.
Publish and distribute content across channels.
Once your content is published and your audience begins engaging with it, you鈥檒l need to have a plan in place for measuring how well the content performs. Most websites, social media platforms, and email systems report metrics like the number of views or clicks a piece of content gets and how many people are subscribing or following over a span of time. You can also set up a content management system (CMS) such as , or to streamline your efforts across all platforms.
Determine the metrics you鈥檒l be monitoring on each platform or CMS.
Decide how often you鈥檒l take insights from these metrics, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
Once you see how your content is performing, this will provide you with a basis for adjusting individual pieces or content or the strategy as a whole.
Remember: Creating a content strategy can improve your marketing efforts so that you serve and educate your audience effectively, lead them through all stages of the buyer鈥檚 journey, and become an authority in your niche.
Keep these best practices in mind:
Make sure all members of your team have a copy of the strategy and are trained on how to implement it in their respective roles.
Update the strategy periodically to account for new products, customer segmentation, efforts to brand or rebrand your business, and other areas of business growth.
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