A content strategy takes your business goals, and then uses content as a primary means to achieve those goals. This can be by defining how you’re going to use content to meet your business (or project) goals and satisfy your users’ needs, guiding decisions about content throughout its lifecycle, from discovery to deletion and setting benchmarks against which to measure the success of your content.
Some people may assume a content strategy isn’t entirely necessary. However, producing high-quality content to meet business needs can help companies build trust and ultimately succeed.
When you develop a content strategy, some questions may arise. Below are the answers to some of those questions.
Who is Reading?
One of the first questions you may want to explore is, who is your target audience? Also, how many audiences are you trying to cater for? It is your content strategy so you can cater to as many audience types as you see fit.
When thinking about these audiences, think about the platform in which you can engage most with them, using a variety of content with a variety of channels will help you reach out to as many people as possible.
Are YOU Unique?
There will be several competitors on the market trying to produce the same product as yours, to get people interested you need to prove why you are better– or at least different, and why they should hear from you.
Clients won’t want to buy from you if they don’t believe you are even worth listening to. Even if it is the slightest thing, make yourself unique!
Is That Competition?
Always follow your competitors, check out what is working for them and what isn’t working. Do you see a gap in which you can fill? Is there something you think they are doing that you could do differently?
You need to be able to pull in an audience better than your competitors, so by checking up on them regularly, you can change what you think needs to be different and in turn, receive more interest. There are tools such as Alexa which you can use to see competitor data, like where their website traffic comes from, backlink profile, audience interests, and more.
What Exactly are we Doing?
This sounds like common sense but is often overlooked. Once you have looked at the competition you can figure out exactly what you want to achieve and who you want to speak out to. So now it’s time to figure out what is the best format for conveying your message.
This may include blog posts, videos, infographics, white papers, case studies, podcasts, images or an email newsletter. You don’t need to create loads of different content to start, try one or two platforms first to see what works.
After, figure out who is creating content, how much to spend on each content piece and what tools to use going forward. Having a simple plan in place will always help.
Is it Working?
To keep track of how effective your efforts are, you must have a way to track results and measure your return on investment. This may be page views, time on page, social media engagement, number of new customers, newsletter signups or more.
What matters most to you will depend on your own set goals. Keeping track of this will tell you what is working most effectively and what needs changing. Learn more on how to keep track of ROI.
So, as you can see, creating a great content strategy isn’t rocket science, but it can be quite challenging and at times, frustrating, to say the least.
Expect to run into blocks and go through lots of trial and error. Once you have figured it all out though, all you’ll have to do is repeat your ways to see the kind of audience growth you’ve wanted!
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