You’ll be surprised but more than 60% of companies have no content plan. Create a content marketing strategy isn’t so easy as you can think. Content strategy is an advantage of any business.
What Is Content Strategy?
A content strategy is more than a simple plan for your posts.
Content strategy is a vector of development of your company, embodied in words. Key points, company values, associations that’d like to arouse among potential customers, the atmosphere that you’d like to give them – all this should be reflected in the content.
But to create an image of a company, you need a strategy that methodically promotes the idea of your business.
In this text, we’ll talk about this.
Reasonable content
Everything has its reason and especially when we talk about a content strategy. Remember about it, making a new post to your website or blog. Remember about it even when you’re in the process of creating new ideas for it.
Content can be written, visual, downloadable, etc. But sometimes the main point is not ‘what’ you post but ‘why’. It doesn’t mean you can’t post a logo of your company or an awesome picture without a strong reason but it means you should have your mission.
Do you have your mission?
The mission is the goal that you want to achieve. Such a goal may be the desire to achieve a certain perception of your company by potential customers. Also, your mission may be to give the brand a uniqueness, special style, etc.
Define your mission and methodically move towards it. This is where the content strategy will help you.
The importance of the mission
Your mission is to create an image but creating an image is also done for some purpose.
These objectives may include the following points:
- Target audience search;
- Attracting/engaging it;
- The benefits you’ll get to them and they’ll get to you.
Achieving it, you need to be very patient. A good content strategy always works not only with information but also with time. You can use statistics as a measure of your content strategy. But let’s look at other points that could measure the effectiveness of your content marketing plan:
- SEO success (more sales, more leads, more traffic);
- Improving or creating the perception of your company;
- Gaining authority or influence;
- Social media
Remember to get one extra lead isn’t your target, your target is to get really valuable content.
Now you know what a mission is. So. It’s about time to formulate your mission own and this will be the first step to achieving it.
Be more active on your social media. Try it. Make it a part of your content marketing strategy.
The most important steps to create your content strategy
These steps will help you imagine how a content strategy is created. This scheme can be used regardless of the specifics of your company. These steps are universal, but every entrepreneur should know about them to understand how they work on the development of his brand is going.
Let’s get started.
Create your best content marketing plan.
Step 1. Define your goal
You need to clearly define your goal. The more accurate it is, the better.
Use simple language. This is necessary so that as many people as possible understand your goals. This will help you and your team to achieve it in the short term.
Your goal is obvious to the team. But its description is the most important step on the road to achieving it. State your goal in a couple of simple sentences. If it still sounds clear, interesting and convincing, then the goal is good enough to get it.
But what to do next?
Step 2. Explore! Explore! Explore!
To make a good content strategy explore everything you can explore in this area. Your task is to collect as much information as possible. All the information about your niche is valuable, be sure, sooner or later it’ll come in handy.
If you want to get a good content marketing plan then you need to pay attention to your competitors. How did they achieve the same goals that you want to achieve? What tool did they use in the process? How did they make mistakes?
The analysis of someone else’s activity is someone else’s experience that you got as a gift.
Consult with specialists. Check out the statistics. Do your best to form a clear perception of the niche that you are going to occupy. And only then move on to the next item.
Step 3. How & Where
So, the goal is defined. Information collected. Conclusions are made. Based on it, you need to decide how your content strategy should look like.
To understand this, you need to determine what you’ll focus on photo, text, video, etc. It’s worth starting from this.
You also need to clearly understand how social networks differ, and what requirements each of them has.
Remember that in addition to content, it’s also important where it’s placed. Sometimes, this is even more than important.
Step 4. Your content management system
A content management system is a pretty important point of this list because it’ll help you a lot in this long way to achieving such a big goal.
Your content management system should include:
- content creation;
- content publication;
- content analytics.
Step 5. Brainstorm
Each new idea should be checked and especially when your target is to create a strong content marketing plan. That’s why it’d be great to discuss it with your team or even friend. Collect some feedback. Sometimes the sudden opinion of a stranger can bring you a lot of inspiration or even because of the basis of your content strategy.
Your target isn’t only to create content. You should make it unique. You should create a brand identity. Every website has its target audience and you should know how to communicate with it as well as possible. This is the reason why you should collect different opinions.
The importance of knowing your audience
With a purpose to make a good content strategy, you should know exactly who is your audience. That’s what you need to know about them:
- Gender;
- Age;
- Location;
- Education;
- Income.
Use this information wisely to make the best content marketing plan ever. Choose the right tone for your blog post.
Firstly, the tone of your post depends on the age of your target audience. You cannot use the same wording for teens and business people over 40 years old. Each age has its characteristic features. Learn them and learn how to use it, learn how to turn it into your advantage.
The level of education also affects the style that you use to create content. The gap from simple sentences too complicated thoughts is measured by higher education and the level of income. Keep this in mind when you building your content strategy.
What is your favorite topic to write about? This is a good question but there is one better. What is the favorite topic of your audience?
Choice of topics, time for posting, post style will be found only when you figured out your target audience. The more data you have, the easier you’ll engage your target audience.
Does it work?
Of course, you should check how effective is your content marketing strategy. Checking usefulness, you need to pay attention to these two points:
- Do users share your content?
- How about inbound links?
Statistics are important, necessary and useful. Thanks to statistics, you’ll understand what type of content your audience perceives best. This will help you shape your content strategy.
Naturally, you’ll need a lot of patience because such things take time. In any case, this is a completely natural process of getting feedback from your audience. Listen to this.
Statistics is your assistant, don’t try to fool your audience. Get ready for changes and the audience will change with you.
Attention! There are gaps!
Ask yourself how can your website be better than it is?
To get the best content strategy you need to find as many answers as possible. In this case, these answers are equal to points that help you to build a special improvement plan. But how does it work? Let’s look at this.
For example, from time to time you need to check the search queries that your target audience is asking. This way you’ll find topics that excite your potential customers but which you haven’t written about. Add it to your content marketing plan to make it better.
This works with keywords in the same way. Use them in your titles and texts. It’s important to use them organically. An example of good keyword usage is text in which the user hasn’t even noticed the keyword. Strive to write articles for people, not for the search engine.
Go! Fight! Win!
Completing these 5 steps, you shouldn’t stop. This is only the beginning of your bright path to online success. In this case, a content strategy isn’t your goal but it is a pleasant way to succeed.
Also, you should understand that even if you post a text online the feeling it brings to your users will live even offline. Everything you’ll write will get its own life outside the Internet.
Listen to your audience. Try always to be better. Create new features. These points are the key on the way to make a successful content marketing strategy. Use it and you’ll see how easy it is to engage a new audience when your content is really valuable to them. All you need is to respect them and create new content, not for yourself but your potential clients.
It’s about time to create the best content marketing plan ever.
