This is a guest article written by Sophia Young who recently quit a non-writing job to tell stories and paint the world through her words. Sophia writes about business trends, sustainable marketing, travel and fashion.
Article Contents
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
If you have ever wondered how companies get their names on top of a Google search list, it’s because of content marketing.
A strong content strategy for SEO can play a significant role in expanding any business. Regularly churning out content for consumption is a crucial part of any content plan. But don’t just create content for content’s sake. Your content needs to have a purpose and hold relevance. There must be areas to focus on — content quality, target audience, and purpose.
Content strategy is when you create, publish, and manage content within your company. The scope goes beyond marketing and governs the handling of all content within your business. Developing an effective digital marketing strategy means creating a roadmap for you to follow regarding content creation, production, and distribution. When we talk about content, we mean articles, blog posts, videos, or vlogs — basically any form of media that you have that your customers can consume via watching or reading, or listening. The type of content you put out can significantly impact your marketing plan.
When it comes to marketing, your content strategy should focus on the quality of your content, audience engagement with your content, and if your content achieved its purpose (usually reaching more people and developing leads).
There are several steps involved when developing an effective content strategy:
Why are you creating content in the first place? Are you promoting a new product? Is it for brand awareness? Are you looking to establish trust between you and your audience? Or perhaps you want your content to help you increase your revenue? Or do you simply want to engage with your customers and keep them interested?
Whatever your goal is for creating content, you need to write it down and keep that in mind when building your strategy. Without the why, without your purpose in mind, your design will have no direction.
Who is your content for? Who is your target audience?
Know what type of content your audience would prefer and what they find relevant. What kind of storyline do they connect with? How long and context-heavy should your content be? Where should you upload or play your content for maximum benefit? Again, knowing your audience will help you make the best choice regarding content creation and publication.
Your goals need to be measurable to know if you have achieved your goals when developing your strategy. Most companies refer to these goals as SMART goals.
This means that you need to have a number by which you measure success. This is where your key performance indicators (KPIs) come in.
Are you looking to increase your revenue? By how much? Put a number to that goal. Are you looking to grow your subscribers or audience? Again, put a number to it. Is it site traffic you are looking for? How many visits will it take for you to say you have achieved your goal?
Your KPIs should have milestones you can check off to measure your campaign’s success. Your metrics will show you the effectiveness of your content marketing campaign.
What will you be creating? Will you be writing articles, creating posters, and shooting videos?
Content can come in many forms. Sometimes it is not feasible to create all forms of content. Instead, you must choose your content type based on your target audience and metrics. If you are just starting out, pick a couple of content types that resonate with your audience and test them out.
The type of content you choose also hinges on your available resources. You need to ensure that the help you have matches the needs of your planned content. That is to say, if you plan on creating videos for your campaign, you need a team that has the skills required to create a video.
Your content calendar is your schedule. When do you start creating content? What is your deadline for the first draft? How long should editing take? How many times do you release content in a month? Which platforms do you use to release them?
There are several tools online that can help you in creating your content calendar. Just make sure that you strictly adhere to the schedule you set. Otherwise, you will have an ineffective campaign.
This is the fun part — creating your content. All the previous steps have led you to choose the best content type for your target audience, a possible storyline or theme that would touch your audiences’ collective hearts, and a wicked team that knows a thing or two about content creation.
By this time, you should have already done the research you needed to create original, timely, impactful, and SEO-compliant content. Know your competition and find the trending discussions about your chosen content topic. Remember to stick to your content calendar schedule and try not to overshoot your budget.
Thanks to social media, promoting and distributing your content is easier now than before. Once your content has been created, reviewed, and polished until it is ready for release, you can now post your content to your chosen platform.
To maximise the resources at your fingertips:
It might be a good idea to tweak your content to match each platform you release them in.
After you have released your content, go back to your KPIs and check if you have reached your milestones or have ultimately achieved your goal. Gather feedback through surveys to uncover areas for improvement. You can then use the feedback you get to improve your next campaign.
Creating content is more involved than most people think. However, with a solid plan in place, you can increase your online presence, revenue, and customer base when done right.
