Content strategy is a hot phrase right now, is it really all that it’s cracked up to be?
The answer is, YES.
Creating a content strategy will help you do a few things:
- Connect with your ideal audience
- Increase organic SEO
- Position yourself as the expert in your industry
So, how do you create a strategy based around your content?
Audience
Establish who you are speaking to. Before you do anything with content, you have to understand who will be reading your content.
Create three fictitious buyer personas and get very detailed with who they are. Even down to the nail polish they wear or the restaurants they frequent! We’re not kidding. How many kids do they have? What jobs do they hold?
For more information on how to identify your ideal audience, check out our blog about buyer personas {link to buyer personas blog}.
What, Why and How
What is your service or product that you’re offering, why are you offering it or why do your clients need it and how are you going to make this information valuable/appealing to your audience?
Content Maps
Content maps are an interesting but very effective way to visually see the purpose of your content.
- By Topic/Theme
Start by creating a central topic/theme that is the center of your business. Then create sub-topics or themes from that main topic. Of those sub-topics or themes, list out blog ideas that you can create based off of those sub-topics and themes. From each of those blog ideas, you’ll list out social media post ideas that will point back to your blogs or simply serve the purpose for social media posts.
- By Customer Stage
An additional way to create a content map is by mapping out each customer stage in their buyer journey. Within each stage, you’ll list out each topic or category of content that would fall in those stages.
Content Calendars
Once you have established what your content will be and for who, you’ll need to determine when you will distribute this content and where you plan to do it.
Creating a content calendar for the year in a spreadsheet is an easy and cost effective way to plan out your content per month. Make sure each month has a common theme that will be consistent across all of your marketing platforms, then listing out blog titles, social media posts, emails, videos and any other content you plan to distribute.
This is helpful to look back on and know what content was written in which month from prior years to see how that content performed and if you should repeat and tweak that content or scrap it.
Content calendars are also a great way to help you repurpose content so you don’t have to recreate the wheel every time you go to produce content!
Document the strategy
Documenting your strategy means you need to write it down. It should live within your Marketing Plan {link to marketing plan blog}, with a section dedicated to your content strategy.
This will make your marketing plan a bit longer, but having everything in one place is very helpful for your team to reference back to easily.
According to the Content Strategy Institute, those with a documented content marketing strategy:
- Are far more likely to consider themselves effective at content marketing
- Feel significantly less challenged with every aspect of content marketing
- Generally consider themselves more effective in their use of all content marketing tactics and social media channels
At The Social Brand, we love creating content and marketing strategies for our clients. But, if you’d rather get a jump start to create your own marketing plan, we’ve got you covered.
