If you’re a new business owner or entrepreneur, there’s probably a question on your mind. What is a content strategy in marketing?
An effective content strategy can work wonders for your business. In a world where customers expect high-quality content delivered consistently, building a solid strategy is essential. It helps to boost your overall SEO, generate new leads and establish your business as a thought leader in its industry.
An effective strategy will also help your company increase your share of voice (SOV) and brand awareness. Best of all, there are plenty of cost-effective ways to do this successfully, as SEO offers the lowest cost per lead of any marketing channel. So here’s how to create a perfect content strategy to boost your business and connect with your target audience.
Research your target audience
Before you begin, it’s important to conduct target audience research and build a clearer understanding of the customers that you want your business to reach. This research will help you create your buyer persona, a detailed description of a fictional person who represents your target audience.
Your buyer persona will have a name, demographic indicators, interests and specific behavioural patterns. These attributes will help you understand their desires, buying patterns and the pain points that your business can address.
This way, you can tailor your marketing towards this specific person, as if you’re speaking to them directly. It brings greater consistency to your messaging and the direction of your brand.
Audit your existing content
The first impulse you might feel in devising your strategy is to leap in and begin creating content. It’s an exciting prospect, but first, you should conduct a content audit. This means analysing your previous published content to identify what has worked and where you need to improve.
There are several steps to a content audit, starting with defining your goals and metrics for successful content. You should then take an inventory of the content you currently have, crunch the data, and draw up a new plan that incorporates the necessary adjustments to your content strategy. A content audit can also help you root out a vast amount of valuable content that can be reused and recycled into different formats, or blogs that can be updated with edits to reflect current trends. You should always be open to the possibility of content recycling and renewal as a time and money-saving tool, and an audit is a great way to open the door for this.
The foundation for SEO is keyword research. This involves determining the keywords you need to target in your content to attract interested users and increase your visibility online.
Effective keyword research will help you understand what people are searching for, how many people are searching for it and how they want their content to be delivered. You can meet their demands by creating content that matches customer activity.
You might be surprised by what your keyword research will unearth. Keep an eye out for long-tail keywords, which often have lower search volumes, but attract an audience that is closer to buying or taking other meaningful action with your brand.
Set clear goals
Establishing clear goals helps you measure success. From the beginning, it’s important to know what the success of your content strategy looks like, so you can track key performance indicators (KPIs). This will be an important part of the long-term view of your strategy as you continue to review and refine the plan as time passes. You can refine your goals and KPIs later, too, if you feel a need to change direction.
The goals you set should depend on your desired marketing outcomes. You might aim to increase your brand awareness, in which case you need to consider KPIs such as article views, social media shares and active audience engagement, like comments and other interactions.
If your aim is to generate leads, then KPIs like click-through rate or cost-per-lead will be important. You should use a clear call to action to help you drive leads even further.
If you’re further down the sales pipeline and want to convert those promising leads into customers, there are different KPIs to consider. You should track your conversion rate to identify the most effective content, or the length of the sales cycle to see how long it takes you to convert a lead.
Tell stories
Brands can take a great stride forward in building a loyal base of customers by forming emotional connections. Storytelling is the best way to form these connections, appealing to empathy and helping your brand retain the trust and loyalty of your customers.
Storytelling makes for more compelling and engaging content than dry facts or appeals to logic. Often, your brand’s target persona will represent the story’s protagonist, a person who is looking for a product or service to address a problem that they’re experiencing and improve their life. The solution then is tied to what your business can offer, building a satisfying storytelling arc.
An emotionally engaging story also serves to create positive, lasting associations for your brand more than statistics and facts ever could. It’s possible to target specific demographic groups with appeals to their emotion and create the perfect audience for your brand.
Create a content calendar
If you want to organise your content and keep track of scheduling, a content calendar is a must.
A calendar can also help you manage different types of content, especially evergreen content. This is content that remains relevant over a long period, like how-to guides and case studies.
You can also consider repurposing content when you repackage one form of content into a new format, like converting an especially popular blog post into a video that you know will stand a higher chance of getting views. Recycled content will be a great asset when building your content calendar. If you have the goal of publishing daily, it’s a difficult challenge to create entirely new content every time to maintain that pace. Setting it all up beforehand minimises the hassle.
Repurposing content will help you develop a wider view of how you apply your content. You could publish a blog on Monday, share it on social media on Tuesday, and recap it in a podcast on Wednesday. You can see which formats and approaches bring the most success, and a content calendar is the easiest way to track this.
Publish consistently
What to include in a content strategy is only half of the answer. When to publish content is equally significant. Consistent content creation is an important part of establishing your business. How often you publish depends on what you want to achieve.
For greater brand awareness, it’s advisable to publish diverse content that provides valuable information, even if you only do so once per week. For driving organic traffic, you should publish as much optimised content as possible.
Generally, the more content you have, the more opportunities there are to apply keywords. In turn, your website will become higher ranked in search engines and, in doing so, improve visibility.
Posting three times a week or more is paramount to show that your brand is active and engaged with customers. This is where your content calendar comes in useful. As mentioned, evergreen content performs best over the long term, steadily gaining views over time.
Shorter blog posts are less effective than you might think. They’re quicker to read and easier to digest, but it’s proven that long-form articles retain a stronger position in rankings.
Use earned, paid and own media
Every strong content strategy has to consider promotion. It doesn’t matter how good your content is if no one can or wants to engage with it. A distributed content strategy will make the difference in ensuring your content makes it out there into the world, ready to be shared and grow your organisation’s visibility. There are different choices of several different content distribution platforms to choose from.
Own media
This includes your brand’s social media presence on various platforms, email lists of customers and non-customers, blogs and your website. Content developed across these channels will be platform-specific and should be easily shareable. Infographics are particularly effective.
Paid media
You can promote your content through paid promotional opportunities to improve visibility. This might include targeted pay-per-click (PPC) ads on social media platforms, sponsored social media posts, video ads or promoted tweets that can also target specific demographics.
Earned media
It’s the most difficult form of media to harness, but earned media arguably has the most significant payoff. Other bloggers and influencers shine a light on your content and drive traffic, incorporating sharing from personal social media accounts and PR pieces in traditional publications or industry media.
Monitor and refine
The KPIs you have set for your content strategy can be applied to help you measure your success over time and gradually identify areas for improvement. No worthwhile content strategy ever sits still. It’s an ongoing process of monitoring and refining what you have, and deciding what works most effectively.
You can isolate several metrics to track your strategy’s success over time. These include traffic sources, showing how users arrive at your content, so you know which platforms to focus on.
Impressions are important too, for measuring how many people your content has reached. The click-through rate (CTR) goes one better, informing you how many users interact with your business in some way after an impression is made.
Gaining insight into backlinks will help you identify who has shared your content and where. If people find the content useful and relevant, they will want to share it with their own audiences. The more people view it, the more effective your content has proven.
Bounce rate is a reliable metric for website traffic. A high bounce rate indicates that people are motivated to leave your website not long after arriving. This may indicate that you are offering a poor user experience without a compelling reason to stay.
A sharper competitive edge
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 73 per cent of B2B marketers and 70 per cent of B2C marketers use content marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. Furthermore, 91 per cent of marketing professionals surveyed by Semrush achieved success with their content marketing strategies in 2021.
If you want to establish a persuasive online presence that generates leads and places your business as a thought leader, then a consistent and effective content strategy gives you a competitive edge.
At Contese Agency, our expertise in content strategy services can give your business the boost you’re looking for. We are content strategy experts, and we can help you build a creative marketing strategy to help you stay one step ahead of the competition.
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