When creating or updating your business strategy, especially the one that includes digital marketing activities, the essential part of it must be related to the content you produce. This way, you will be able to engage your customers and keep them on track through the whole process of communication. However, to conduct these processes successfully, it is necessary to prepare an accurate, goal-orientated content marketing strategy.
What is a content strategy? How can you prepare one? Let us dive into these questions and find the answers.
Content strategy – basics
A content strategy is created primarily to improve your digital activities and make your website more visible. It helps to execute your company goals and meet your customers’ expectations. Naturally, it will take time until you create a perfect content strategy. However, this document will enable you to use your content in a more structured and efficient way, thanks to achieving your business goals in a controlled, desired manner.
There is no doubt that if you conduct digital activities, a good content strategy is a necessity. How can you create one?
Developing a content strategy step by step
Creating any kind of strategy might be a painstaking process; nevertheless, it is definitely worth an effort. There is no one specific type of content strategy. It does, however, contain some unified elements which are mostly similar in all of the projects. Typically, you need a strategy document and a content plan; the former works as a descriptive guide throughout the whole process, while the latter is frequently a matrix, for example, an Excel file. There are also some additional steps and factors always worth considering while you are developing your content strategy. Let us have a look at some of them.
GOALS
The central point of any strategy is the goal; by setting it, you will be able to adjust further steps of your plan and control executing them. Of course, your content strategy plan may have more than one goal; however, it would be better if the content for every individual goal was prepared in a slightly different way. Do you want to increase the visibility of your website? Would you like to improve the user experience? Or maybe you wish to be more active on social media? For each of these goals, the content should be tailored properly.
AUDIENCE
Who are you going to talk to? Again, because your audience may vary, you should prepare content which will be attractive to each group or customer. Think about users and clients who visit your website most frequently (or use your services). Moreover, try to divide your content based on the UX; clients who have just started working with you will have different expectations compared to those who have been using your services for some time already.
SEO
Analysing your content based on popular keywords will help your website become more visible. It is one of the most frequent steps taken in the content strategy; after all, this is what you want to achieve by publishing SEO-friendly texts. Pay attention to the popularity of particular words, perform SEO analysis, and try to use the tools that can help you in this process. Most importantly, focus on uniqueness; all of these elements will make your content rank high on Google.
At the end of creating your content strategy, choose the CMS (content management system) and the type of content which will be most valuable and helpful in achieving your goals. These two issues are usually chosen individually, depending on the desired result. While all of the factors mentioned may vary depending on your business, the most important thing about content strategy is transparency and intuition. Be ready to change, alter and modify your content strategy plan to get the best results.
Do you want to know more about building a content strategy? Have a look at this article: Developing a content strategy – first steps.
