DO you know that defining content strategy is very important for a successful marketing and for enabling brand reach, research says that brands with best content strategies attract more visitors and execute more sales and generate more ROI when compared to brands who don’t emphasize on creating content strategies and developing google friendly content.
A content strategy is a plan that you use in your brand stories, marketing collaterals, website and so on to achieve your business goals. A successful content strategy will attract your target audience and keep them engaged even after purchase.
To develop an effective content strategy, your team need to spend good time analysing the market trends and consumer behavioural patterns, try to get answers for the following questions before drafting the content strategy.
Who is going to read your content?
Identify your target audience and understand their interests. There exists more than one type of customer for every business, accordingly, your content strategy should be able to cater to more than one type of users.
Using a variety of content types and channels will help you deliver content that’s tailored to each persona.
Understand the nuances and what problem you are going to solve?
Study the market trends and where the future is heading to, in your content you have to clearly educate the user as to what value your products or services are adding to their ensemble, if you fail to explain this clearly you will lose the engagement and reach.
A sound content strategy supports people on both sides:
Those who are still figuring out what their main challenges are, and those who are already using similar products/services to overcome these challenges.
What makes you unique? List down your value proposition?
Your competitors may likely have same set of products/services as you, this is where you should draw and difference to convey your assets and highlight the importance of your products/services.
Your content should prove that it is worth buying from you than your competitors
What type of content are you going to focus on?
Don’t waste your time generating heaps of content that won’t reach your audience. Understand where your audience are and their communicational channels, accordingly strategy your content formats, whether it’s a podcast or series of videos in YouTube or targeting them on Facebook or Instagram.
Once you identify the best formats, workout on your budget and resources.
Strategize the content channels to reach your target audience?
Creating content is one side of the coin and then publishing them in the right channels is another side of the coin. You should figure out Free and Paid listings to publish your content and frame a distribution strategy, ensure that you are picking up wide spectrum of channels in social media like Blog affiliations, social media channels, Podcasts, directly reaching people through email
Just as you can create content in different formats, you’ll also have various channels you can publish to, from your website to social media.
You should pick the content channels based on your audience age, location and preferences.
How you are going to manage your content and track them?
Creating a content and publishing them on right channels is not enough, when the content becomes overwhelming, it becomes hard to manage and keep track of your content if you don’t have proper management practices.
How many topics are your creating on month basis?
Have you created enough topic clusters?
Where are, you going to publish them?
How was the engagement and reach for already published content?
Based on previous results, what changes are you making in your content strategy?
You need to appoint a dedicated resource to keep track of the flow, engagement, analysis and to monitor the results and to quickly reshape the strategy if it is not working out well.
you can run some checks to understand your top performing an poor performing content and also on which digital channels you are reaping more traffic and during which times of the day
Whatever stage you’re in, a content audit will help you determine what resonates best with your audience, identify gaps in your topic clusters, and brainstorm fresh content ideas.
Given below are the list of content marketing formats you can create for your target audience:
- Case Studies
- Ebooks
- New Letters
- Blog Posts
- Social Media Creatives
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Templates
