Content is the glue that holds everything together in your digital marketing strategy. Your business will find it difficult to compete in the online world without it.
Content is at the centre of everything you do in marketing. Slightly controversial perhaps but it’s true. Content powers your marketing machines, albeit in different ways. Building a content strategy takes patience, planning and resources, not to mention a lot of trial and error.
As with any type of marketing, it’s only through posting and testing that you’ll figure out what audiences respond to the most. There isn’t a content rulebook that says ‘post this and it will guarantee results’.
There are so many variables that determine how a piece of content will perform – audience, sentiment, brand awareness, or even people’s moods when they see a piece of content.
If however, you invest the time and resources into content strategy and you post, test, listen and respond the right way, in time you will build a strategy that works for you.
Content is one of the best ways for you to show how unique you are, differentiate your business from all the others out there, to share your story and connect with people on an emotional level.
For every piece of content that you create you should have two things in mind at all times, who you are writing the content for (your customer avatar) and what you want it to do (your goals). The process of developing a content strategy would include:
- Identifying the type of content – long form written content, short form written content, videos, audio etc.
- Creating a content calendar to outline when you will post
- Developing themes for your content
- Understanding what content works by reviewing the market and your competitors
- Applying The Skyscraper Technique to model success
- Using stories to connect with your audience
- Monitoring what works and what doesn’t and adapting your strategy
- Implementing content frameworks – tried and tested systems that attract the right type of engagement from the right type of people.
Coming up with a consistent stream of quality content that fills up your calendar from week to week that continues to prove popular and engaging is a huge challenge for busy business owners.
The content creation process can be segmented into 10 steps.
Step 1 Research and Content Audit
Content creation starts with evaluating what’s out there and auditing how effective it is. If you’re a start up you won’t have a lot of content, if any so this process will assume that you are starting from scratch. To be effective in content creation, you will need two things, an understanding of your buyer persona and an idea of your personal brand.
Step 2 Audience and Readers
Who will be reading your content? Or who would you like to read your content? The people who consume your content can be readers who come across your brand for the first time, or the content could be developed for existing customers to assist with products or services such as how to guides or frequently asked questions. It’s perfectly acceptable to mix up your content for the different audiences that you serve, just make sure you have one audience in mind and a purpose for each post that you create.
Step 3 Identify Problems and Solutions
Great content is built on outcomes – it solves a problem. Ideally that product or service that you offer should solve a problem in the marketplace. Content will educate audiences on the problem and the various solutions that exist to solve it. Your content strategy should serve a dual purpose, assisting individuals who are still exploring problems and recognising what problems they have and secondly people who are already using your product or service to address these problems.
Step 4 What Makes Your Brand Unique
There are lots of businesses out there offering the same or similar products and services that you do. How can you differentiate your business? How are you unique?
Step 5 Content Types
Content comes in many different forms. There are long form blog posts through to video content, images, interactive content, User Generated Content, the list goes on. Having a varied mix of content types can keep your audience engaged. There are hundreds of different content types, and choosing the right ones will depend on the needs and preferences of your audience.
Step 6 Brainstorm Ideas
Ideas can be found everywhere for content. Think about what topics, questions and issues that your audience would find beneficial. How can you use your content to connect on a deeper level with your audience? How can you use information to establish trust and build credibility?
When it comes to content creation, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can take inspiration from many sources to create new angles or perspectives. AI is also a great idea generating tool you can use.
Enter a prompt such as: “I write about (topic). Please create 50 content ideas to solve (problem).”
As an example, we would use the prompt – “I write about marketing. Please create 50 content ideas to help people who want to make more sales.”
Now, not all 50 ideas AI creates will be good, it will take time to sift through and find the best. You can also combine ideas depending on what results the tool gives you.
Being different and a little creative with your content can really drive results. Incorporate your own perspective, experiences and stories into your content and you can create a powerful content system.
Step 7 Resources and Planning
If you want to bring someone on board to assist with the content creation process, who will they be and what resources do you have available? Will you bring on board a VA to assist with content creation, a copywriter to create compelling captions or a videographer to edit your videos? All of this requires resource management. Also think about how you are going to plan your content. Some people like to batch their content so they spend a period of time creating their content for the months ahead. Then you can schedule it and the only task that you have to do is keep up with engagement and monitor comments and messages.
Step 8 Content Calendar
How can you vary your content calendar across all the various platforms. Will you create themes that will run through your posts on a weekly or monthly basis? How often will you post and where will you post. All of these things should be mapped out in a clear and easy to follow content calendar.
Step 9 Keyword Research and Hashtags
Keywords and search terms are essential for optimising your content for search. With any keyword or hashtag that you choose, think about user intent. If someone is searching for what you do, what keywords and phrases would they enter into Google or search bars on social platforms?
Step 10 Audit and Review
What metrics are tied to your content strategy? How will you measure success of blog posts, social media content and free downloads? What will success look like?
Once you start to develop a bank of content, conduct an audit to review what’s working and what isn’t working so well. With a content audit you will be able to see what topics are driving engagement, starting conversations and which topics receive little to no engagement. Are there specific words or phrases that seem to spark conversations or get people sharing or interacting with your content?
Top Tips for Creating a Content Strategy
- Publish content that will position you as an expert in your industry.
- Search hashtags relating to your business and browse through the top posts to find popular content. Find a piece of content that would be a good fit for your audience and make it better than what’s already been published.
- Before creating any content focus on the outcome – what do you want it to do? Think about your goals and metrics.
- Be consistent. Map out what is feasible based on your time and resources and consistently deliver.
- Create infographics that present statistical information in a visual way
- Show rather than tell
- Create custom graphics and avoid stock photos
- Repurpose content from your blog and condense it down into smaller snippets suitable for social media. A blog post becomes a tweet, a thread, a LinkedIn carousel and an instagram video for example.
Content Themes
You can also build your content strategy around themes or content types. These all work well:
- Lists – Top tips, things to avoid, ways to
- Q&A – Popular questions in your industry
- Myth busting – Common myths in your industry
- Case Studies – Working with clients
- Guest Posts – Collaborate with another business that complements yours
- Behind the scenes
- Content to build connections – share your life outside work, family, friends, pets, hobbies and interests
- Show samples of your work and the process that went into creating it
- User Generated Content (UGC)
A content strategy can seem overwhelming and a lot of work. But, it can deliver consistent results for many years to come. If you need some help with crafting a content strategy please reach out to our team who can create a step by step action plan of everything you need to do to succeed with your online content. Click here to contact us.