What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy is referred to the management of pretty much tangible media that you create and own.

Whether it is in – written, visual or downloadable, you name it.

It is the piece of your marketing plan that continuously demonstrates who you are and the expertise that you bring to your industry.

You might have heard how content creation plays a significant role in the growth of the business.

However, as you will see throughout this post, it needs more than this.

It needs to have a well-planned purpose.

What Do Content Marketing Strategies Do?

First of all, let’s outline what content strategist actually does.

So, there won’t any confusion about it.

A content marketing strategist is a person that responsible for planning, developing delivering and finally promoting relevant content based on the user needs and business goals.

However, the exact role of content marketing strategist might vary from company to company.

Some duties of content marketing strategists still remain consistent across every role.

Typically, a content marketing strategist does the following:

• Develops the content strategy.
• Determine what kind of content to use, based on the target audience.
• Promotes the content.
• Set tone, style and voice for the content.
• Developing and improving the brand of the content development process.
• Measures and analyses the key content marketing metrics.

Key Considerations in Developing a Content Marketing Strategy

Before you develop the content strategy, there are several key things to consider:

1. Define your target audience

Who is the target audience for this content?

For how many audiences you are creating the content?

And of course, you might have more than one type of customer.

Thus, your content strategy should be able to cater to more than one type of reader or viewer that suit to their needs.

You could use various types of content and channels to deliver different content to each type of audience you have in mind and engage everyone your company does business with.

2. Educational and problem-solving content

Ideally, you should know what are the problems faced by your audience, and help them to solve with your products or services.

By the same token, your content should be educational for the audience to learn about it.

Educate your audience through the content as they will begin to identify and address it.

A sound content strategy should support the people on both sides of your product.

The content should support the people who are still figuring out what their main challenges.

And for those who already are using your product to overcome these challenges.

Reinforce the solutions that you are offering in the content and makes your audiences more qualified users of your products.

3. What Makes You Special and Unique

Obviously, there are possibilities that your competitors are likely to have similar products as yours.

Thus, you need to differentiate your products about your products with your competitors.

In another word, you potential need customers need to know what makes yours better, or at least, different.

Here you go; this is where the content comes in!

To prove why you are worth buying for, you need to ascertain why you are worth listening to in the first place.

4. Content Formats

What kind of content format you will focus on?

Whether is it an infographic?

Perhaps, it could be videos or blog posts?

As you need to identify the topics that you want to take the position on, you will need to define which formats are best to express that position.

5. Identify Which Channels to Publish

Just as you can create content in different formats, you also need to have different channels that you could publish to.

The channels are including owned properties, such as your website and blog, or maybe social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Why You Need The Best Content Marketing Strategy Framework?

Absolutely, content marketing can help your business to prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads.

Let’s take a moment and think about it.

Just imagine that you could create just one blog post that can get a steady amount of organic traffic.

Then, an embedded link to an eBook or free tool will help you to continue generating leads for you as time goes on.

The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will provide you with the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue.

For example, you could generate revenue through social media advertising, sponsored content and distributed content.

This will help you to educate your target prospects and generate more awareness for your brand.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Now, let’s dive in more detail to learn the specifics of how to create a well-planned content marketing strategy.

1. Define Your Goal.

Defining and Understand your original goal is important in setting the roadmap to a successful content marketing strategy.

What is your aim for developing a content marketing plan in future?

Why do you want to develop content and create a content marketing plan?

These are questions that you should be questioning about your content marketing strategy plan.

Know your goals before you begin planning.

And then you will have an easier time in determining what the best for your strategy is.

2. Conduct Persona Research.

To develop a successful content marketing plan, you need to clearly define the target audience of your content.

In another word, know your buyer persona.

This is especially crucial for those who just starting out or still new to the marketing.

By knowing your target audience, you could produce more relevant and more valuable content that they want to read and convert on.

You have to know that your target may have changed.

Do you want to target a brand new group of people or expand your current target market?

Or do you want to keep the same target audience?

Thus, you have to revisit your audience parameters.

You ought to conduct market research each year as it is a vital factor in growing your audience.

3. Run a Content Audit

Almost all the people will start out with the blog posts.

But, if you want to venture out and try creating other content pieces, you need to consider which ones you want to make.

For instance, if you are doing the weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an eBook that distils all your blog posts into one ultimate guide would be a great way to offer information in a different format.

If you are an experienced marketer, you need to review your content marketing efforts and results from the previous years.

Figuring out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals to reach.

4. Choose a Content Management System.

Have a system in place where you could be managing your content easily.

Some of the few vital parts of content management are including content creation, content publication and content analytics.

The WordPress website hosted on WO Engine will be the example for the content management system that you could use for your business.

 5. Brainstorm the Ideas

Now, it is the time for you to brainstorming some ideas for your next content project.

Here are some tools to get the wheels turning.

HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator

You could save your time and energy in thinking on how to generate some attractive topic with HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator.

All you need to do is enter general topics or keywords that you want to write about.

And this content idea generator will do all the work for you.

BuzzSumo

With BuzzSumo, you can discover a ton of popular content and content ideas.

This company offers numerous market research tools, which using social media’s shares to determine whether the piece of content is popular and well-liked.

In addition, this information also can help you to see which content ideas would do well if you were to create content something similar to them.

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