5 Steps To Create An Effective Content Strategy
The journey of active content marketing hinged on a successful content strategy.
Drafting a successful game plan for driving traffic, leads, engagement, awareness, and other success roadmaps can be tasking and require a lot of brainstorming, research engagement, marketing analysis, and more.
However, content strategy is a solid pillar that grants direction and approach for creating content that drives key business objectives.
This article will focus on steps to create an effective content strategy.
According to research by the content marketing institute, brands that have an effective content strategy have a higher marketing return of investment ( ROI).
According to statistics, 43% of all B2B content marketers have a content strategy and 60% of the most successful B2B content marketers begin with content strategy.
WHAT MAKES UP A CONTENT STRATEGY?
These questions are the major factors that every effective content strategy gears to tackle:
1) What do you attempt to achieve?
2) Who do you attempt to contact?
3) What types of content will you publish?
4) how will it benefit the brand?
5) The methods by which your content will be distinguished?
6) What methods will you use to promote and magnify your content?
7) What are the criteria for determining the success
The answers to these questions are pivotal in every content strategy.
WHAT WILL CONTENT MARKETING LOOK LIKE WITHOUT CONTENT STRATEGY ?
Imagine driving a car without steering. Except for Tesla cars, this will only lead to disaster. It won't only affect your car but may affect another road user who has steering and direction.
The same applies to the world of content marketing without a content strategy. This scenario will result in ineffective marketing efforts that will end badly. Without a well-defined strategy, you may waste a lot of time writing content that doesn’t get the audience impact nor the business results you want.
HOW TO CREATE AN EFFECTIVE CONTENT STRATEGY.
It is not enough to have a strategy but a strategy that works. See these 5 steps to having an amazing content strategy.
1) CONTENT IDENTIFICATION
Identify the purpose, needs, and questions that your content seeks to achieve and align them with your audience journey. Set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-constrained goals for each content.
4 goals of content marketing
1) Brand Awareness
2) Customers education
3) Drive traffic and leads
4) Sustain customers loyalty
However, other content marketing goals exist which are subjected to a brand and what it represents.
More so, identify who your audience is and draft a buyer's persona.
2) CONTENT EXAMINATION
Examine your previous contents to determine if can reuse, update or do a total content overhauling. This is also called content auditing.
An audit helps you to determine if you have:
• Competitor content gaps
• Customer interest content gaps
• Missing steps in the customer journey
• Irrelevant content
• Underperforming pages
This step will ensure that you are up to date with your brand's standards.
3)CONTENT PRODUCTION PLANNING
Here are a couple of things you are to do in this step:
1) Determine the genre, format, and narrative of your content.
2) Set out with your team and determine who will be the core focus of each content.
3) Conduct keywords researches using the best SEO techniques. You need traffic whether your primary goal is lead generation or increasing eCommerce sales. However, strong content alone will not bring thousands of people to your site. You should also optimize for keywords.
Because it directs you to the most valuable topics and keeps you organized, keyword research is the core of an SEO-focused content strategy. You’ll be able to cover themes completely without writing the same blog post five times if you conduct thorough keyword research. This translates to more traffic, engagement, and conversions.
4) Brainstorm Content ideas. Use the bank of keywords at your disposal. Fortunately, the great majority of web pages that have been indexed are horrible. So, take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to iterate and improve on what currently exists!
Iterative ideation is a fundamental component in creating exceptional content.
5) Choose an adequate content management system. You’ll need a powerful Content Management System if you expect to produce a large amount of content (CMS). Blog entries, audio, video, PDFs, and other types of material may all be created, organized, published, and stored using your CMS.
6) Draft out a content development process
7) Determine a content calendar
4) MAP OUT CHANNELS OF DISTRIBUTION
Determine the best channels to convey your content to your audience. Specify offline and online means of getting your message across to your target persona.
5) PERFORMANCE MEASURES
Look at the objectives and purpose of your content then straighten out adequate measures to the progress of your content concerning the set objective. Success in terms of your marketing aim should be defined by your content strategy KPIs. So, if conversion rates are important to you, include them. Don’t make the mistake of reporting on a slew of indicators that don’t align with your objectives.
Here are a few KPIs to consider:
Google rankings
Number of ranking keywords
Organic visibility percentage
Google organic market share
Traffic (organic, paid, or referral)
Engagement
Conversions
Qualified leads
Revenue
These processes may differ in sequential outlook but strike a similar cord across several brands.
