We at Ignite Visibility have a content marketing and SEO strategy that we only reserve for clients. This article walks through some general points, but we save the good stuff for our clients.
What is a Content Strategy?
Today’s customers aren’t easily wooed by the inauthentic, in-your-face marketing tactics of generations past. When it comes to their brand experiences, they crave transparency, responsiveness, and relatability.
A content strategy helps facilitate the process of creating meaningful content that attracts your company’s target audience. It involves the management of media assets that you build and own, including written, visual, and everything in between.
Think of this strategy as a blueprint used by marketers to identify their business and customer needs, accompanied by a detailed plan for how content will be used to address them.
- At its core, a successful content marketing strategy should answer these questions:
- Who is creating the content?
- Who is your target audience?
- What goals are you trying to achieve for your business?
- How will your content help you accomplish these goals?
- As it pertains to your industry, what are the main pain points of your audience?
- What message will your company convey through content?
- How often will you revise the content, and on which social platforms?
Content Strategy by the Numbers
The marketing world is ever-changing, which means trends and technology rarely stay stagnant. That’s why it’s imperative that your business stays up to speed with all the latest developments in the industry. A great way to keep up with these changes is to take a look at marketing statistics. Let’s allow the numbers to speak for themselves:
Why is Creating a Content Strategy Important?
Content creators are under a ton of pressure to come up with effective marketing strategies that engage users and convert them into customers. But this is just one of many incentives. Here are the main advantages of implementing a clear-cut content marketing strategy:
Bridges the gap between company and consumer
The best content strategies aim to create and strengthen the connection between a brand and its consumers. Since emotions play an important role in the customer’s decision process, valuable, consistent content that caters to their needs can lead to more awareness and recognition, which can help you draw in more leads. Plus, when a customer trusts your content, they are far more likely to become loyal to your brand and share your content on social media.
Enhances team efficiency
One of the most important aspects of building a strategy is setting expectations for each member of the content marketing team. When the workload is broken down into individual roles, you can easily identify how much content needs to be produced, on which channels it should be published, and when. A well-functioning team knows how and when to schedule work and doesn’t have to start from scratch on every piece of content they create, allowing them to churn out more marketing content faster.
Boots SEO rankings
Above all else, content needs to be properly structured, readable, and informative, catering to both newcomers and professionals alike. Creating quality, purpose-driven content tailored to your intended audience increases traffic to your site, which improves your site’s credibility and relevance. If your content delivers real value to readers, you can give yourself a boost in search engine rankings, which helps drive even more traffic and, eventually, generates more leads.
Improves ROI
Creating high-performing content requires a hefty investment of time, energy, and money. When your content is ineffective, your ROI inevitably suffers. A good content strategy improves your results and, as an added bonus, helps you efficiently allocate marketing resources. Because you can anticipate your content needs ahead of time, you can pinpoint new ways to tweak your production process, work with what you’ve got, and enlist the help of reinforcements if you need to.
Leads to more accurate goal setting
Your content is only as successful as your capacity to measure it. A content marketing strategy is key to helping you establish your content’s KPIs and other related metrics so you can track, measure, and gauge whether your content is effective. You’ll get a clear idea of what’s driving results and what’s not, so you can redirect your efforts and maximize results. Since you can’t always predict what will work, this process requires a fair amount of experimenting, testing, modifying, and refining.
How to Create a Successful Content Strategy
How you craft a content marketing strategy varies from one organization to the next. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there are a few core tactics that will help put you on the right path.
What’s the goal you’re trying to achieve with your content? Is the purpose to drive brand awareness, convert leads to users, re-engage customers, boost search ranking results, or something else entirely? Map out your goals early on so that you can plan ahead and establish what’s best for your strategy.
- Research your target audience
To launch a successful plan, you need to clearly define your target audience, also known as your buyer persona. To do so, you can start collecting demographic data on your website visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers. When you’ve compiled that information, you’ll have a better understanding of what kind of content will be the most relevant to your audience and how it will help them.
- Assess your current status
Most businesses already have plenty of content out there, including blog posts, emails, videos, and social media content. In order to figure out whether that content is helping you achieve your goals, you need to do some content auditing. Take inventory of your content, assess their usefulness, and then take a look at how your competitors are discussing the same topics.
- Identify the top content channels
As you work through this process, you’ll start to get a better sense of where your audience spends the majority of their time online, and where your business already has a successful online presence. For the channels where your content doesn’t seem to resonate with your audience, consider what you can do to boost your numbers. Instead of doing everything at once, focus on what’s performing well first and then go from there.
Now that you’ve established what type of content you’re going to create, who your audience is, and through which social channels you’re planning to share it, the next step is to allocate resources. Make sure you know who is in charge of producing content, what digital tools are needed, and what the editorial calendar will look like.
- Create and distribute content
After the prep work comes the actual creation process. Remember that great content doesn’t just read well. It’s keyword-rich, original, and adds value to your audience.
The last part of your content strategy involves measuring the results of your marketing efforts. You need to find out what your audience likes and doesn’t like. Distributing content without analyzing your user feedback is akin to cooking a seven-course meal for no one. You want to be more proactive, than reactive.
Wrapping Up
We can’t reiterate the importance of content strategy enough.
Without it, you won’t be able to know what type of content you have already, what types of content you need, and which is the most effective at achieving the best possible outcomes. It not only makes your life easier by streamlining every aspect of your content marketing efforts, but you end up with a ton of usable content.
From laying the foundation of your marketing plan to adding more resources to help manage your content, setting up a strategy won’t be a hassle if you follow the above-mentioned steps and refine along the way.
Happy strategizing!
