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Content Strategy
In this article, we will learn about what is content strategy, why you need a content strategy, and a step-by-step approach to creating your own content strategy.
If you are new to marketing, the term “Content Strategy” could be a little confusing in the beginning.
Why do you need a strategy for content?
Can’t you just create and upload it?
What exactly do you have to include in a strategy like that?
Is it necessary to plan your content beforehand?
Do you need to have a lot of experience to do that?
We will discuss everything. Stay with me.
What is a Content Strategy?
In simple terms, content strategy is using content to achieve your business goals.
A content strategy includes planning, creation, distribution, and maintenance of content to meet your business goals. It could be lead generation, brand awareness, building trust, improving conversion, etc.
You need to figure out where you need to distribute the content(social media, website) and in what form (articles, videos, podcasts, etc.).
Why do we need a content strategy?
The main aim of having a content strategy is clarity and specificity.
A content strategy helps you set priorities and work on them.
If the content you create is about everything and for everyone, it ends up not being useful to anyone at all.
Let’s say your goal is to generate more leads for your business. The content you create should be about educating your audience and spreading the word about your product or service.
If your goal is to improve conversion, you may want to change the type and frequency of the content you are sharing. You have to create in-depth content for that purpose.
You should not confuse your audience about what action you are trying to incite with your content.
Now let’s take a look at how you can create a content strategy for your own business.
A step-by-step approach to creating your own content strategy:
1. Define your target audience:
Before you plan any of your content and platforms, this is the first thing you should do.
Conduct full-blown research on your target audience.
Demographics like gender, age, education, and income level will help you understand your customer’s a little closer.
Using buyer persona in marketing strategies made websites 2–5 times more effective and improved user experience. (Source: HubSpot)
Find out where they spend most of their time online. You can reach out to them in those places.
Find out their interests, problems they are facing related to your niche, and things they are complaining about.
It sounds simple to create a buyer’s persona but it takes work. A lot of it.
Here is how you can start.
If you have a product you want to sell, go to E-Commerce sites that are selling similar products. Go to the review section. There you can find things those buyers liked about the product, and things they didn’t like.
Go to forums, niche groups, and every single place where you can find data about them.
The more you know about your target audience, the better you can craft your message.
2. Map out your buyer’s journey:
The next step is to find out how exactly a person who doesn’t know about your product or service turns into a customer.
It’s called a buyer’s journey. A sales funnel will help you in this case.
A simple buyer’s journey looks something like this:
First, the person finds out about your business through a blog, a social media post, or a video.
Then he/she joins your email list or visits your site.
Your lead finds out more about whether your product can solve their problems or not. They read reviews and look at the ratings.
They compare your product with your competitors.
If everything goes right, they may decide to buy.
A staggering 95% of customers read reviews before making a buying decision. (Source: Powerreviews.com)
There is a process that runs in the background before someone hits that “BUY NOW” button.
And in every step of your sales funnel, you need to have different types of content. There is no one size fits all formula when it comes to creating goal-driven content.
3. Define what goal you want to achieve through your content:
Have a crystal clear idea of the goal you want to fulfill with the help of your content.
Your goal could be generating more leads, more conversions, more email subscribers, spreading brand awareness, encouraging referrals, increase sales with offers.
For each goal you decide, find out what type of content works best for that goal.
Some people don’t even know they have a problem until they come across your product or service. Your content’s goal is to make them aware of that fact.
Some people are clear about what they need in a product or service. If your product or service matches that description, you don’t need a lot of convincing to sell it to them.
4. Choose your platform and content type:
You need to be aware of what platform promotes what type of content.
You also need to find out what type of people are dominant on that platform.
For example, Twitter is a place for intellects. People share their thoughts and opinions on this platform.
Different platforms have different gender demographics. Twitter is used more by men while Instagram has more female users.
As of January 2022, around 56.4% of Twitter users were male while the remaining 43.6% of their users were female. ( Source: Statista )
Instagram is a visual platform. To dominate this platform you need to create visually appealing content. People don’t come here to find information, they come here for entertainment.
If we look at the income demographics of Instagram in the US, 60% of internet users with an annual income of 100,000 U.S dollars or above used this platform. This number was higher than people in other income groups. Source: Statista
If you choose YouTube, you need to create informative, actionable content.
The main type of content on this platform will be video.
Deciding what type of content to create and which platform to use is crucial if you want your marketing efforts to be fruitful.
Meet your audience where they already are.
5. Run a content audit (analyze):
When you publish enough content, you will have a rough idea of what type of content is gaining traction and what’s not.
Analyze which medium is contributing the largest percentage of your audience.
Also, find out which are the weakest content topics that don’t get any traction. You don’t have to waste your time on those topics.
Double down on the type of content and medium that works.
Find out the popular topics in your niche. Do you already have content on those topics? If not, include those topics in your content creation strategy.
Once you share some information, that doesn’t mean your work ends there. You have to keep updating the information with the latest facts.
If the content you shared in the past is now outdated, that’s a sign that you are not maintaining it properly.
Now let’s look at the mediums and content types that you can include.
Mediums you could use to share content:
Written content:
Website Blogs
Guest Blogs
Email Newsletters
Medium
Twitter
Reddit
LinkedIn
Facebook Groups
Quora
Visual Content:
Instagram
Snapchat
Pinterest
StumbleUpon
Imgur
SlideShare
Video Content:
YouTube
TikTok
Instagram Reels
Facebook Watch
Twitch
Audio Content:
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Pocket Casts
Stitcher
Types of content you could create:
Written Content:
Articles
E-Books
Case Studies
White Papers
Guides
Visual Content:
Images
Infographics
Memes
Videos
GIFs
Types of video content:
Vlogs
How-To Guides
Demonstrations
Webinars
Interactive Content:
Polls
Quizzes
Contests
Games
Concluding thoughts:
Not having a content strategy doesn’t mean you are doing anything wrong with your marketing efforts.
You could still create awareness about your brand and make sales without a content strategy.
The question is, can you improve your marketing efforts with a content strategy? Absolutely!
A content strategy provides you with clarity and makes your approach to content goal oriented.
You don’t just randomly post things, you create content to fulfill a purpose. It helps you focus on what type of content you need to create right now and what types of content can wait.
After all, the main purpose of creating content is to grow your business. Then why waste time on things that don’t contribute to that purpose?
Create a content strategy for your brand and use it to achieve your business goals.
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