10 No Nonsense Steps to Creating a Content Strategy
These days everyone’s a publisher – everyone who has a social media account, website or WhatsApp are all producing content intended for the consumption of others. On a personal level it’s often to entertain, organise, inform, complain or dare I say it, ‘show off’. At a business level it’s to raise awareness, evidence work, demonstrate expertise, build interest and generate incoming leads.
What is content?
Content drives every exchange you have with a potential customer: product descriptions, photos, blog posts, videos, case studies, market reports, surveys, memes, social gifs. Arguably anything and everything you see and view online can be classed as content. Someone has had to create, post and promote the material on every page of the internet.
There is a lot of content out there - much of it is untargeted, badly written, pointless, dull and unpromoted. Good content is a resource heavy commitment – so you want to be sure that every piece you create has a purpose, speaks to a specific audience, is useful and of interest and can be found by your intended. Fail any of these tests, then you’re in danger of wasting your time.
To get you on track here’s a 10-point checklist to creating your own content strategy:
1. Why are you making content in the first place?
What are your marketing goals and what is the purpose of your content – it may be to demonstrate your expertise to open up a new sector, become a thought-leader within your industry, become a customer resource, generate a steady supply of incoming leads for sales. When planning our individual content pieces – keep referring back to ensure all of your content is working towards one of your marketing goals.
2. Who are your audiences?
Who are you talking to? Don’t just think industry, think individual. How old are they? What style of content do they like to consume? When are they most likely to read your content? You need to communicate with each individual in a style and way that they are most likely to consume. So, if you know your audience are most likely to be on their mobile devices when commuting home by train – they may find it easier to listen to a podcast or watch a video.
3. What are their challenges?
What is it that you offer that will change their lives? Again, consider your audience on an individual basis. Not everyone will recognise the same challenges at the same time – so identify the challenges facing each audience segment and how you can help them.
4. Where do they go for information?
Find out where your audience is already going for information, you can get a more comprehensive view of the content marketplace. It can help to stop you from repeating what’s already out there and give you some new ideas and inspiration. Unless you have a really wide reach, you can probably use your own intuition to map out your audience’s influencers. But if you’d like a more data-driven approach, you may want to use tools like FollowerWonk and BuzzSumo.
5. Create your audience personas
You should now have a good understanding for what your different audience types look like, what they respond to, the challenges they are facing, how you can help and where they are going online to get their information. It’s now time to create your difference audience persona’s. You can’t communicate with everyone on an individual basis, so you need to group them into likeminded segments so you can manage an effective content strategy. I find it easier to bring them to life by giving them names that reflect their characteristics such as ‘Back-Office Bob’ or ‘Finance Frank’.
6. What is the competition doing?
You need to understand what other companies are competing for the attention and business of your audience personas’? These are your direct competitors. What are they doing – and what can you do to make more your content more impactful? One way of doing this is searching on your keywords and phrases and finding out which PPC advertisers appear. You can then dig a little deeper and find out what they are producing. Or can use a tool such as SEMRush to find out which websites are ranking for the same keywords in search engines as you.
7. What content do you have and is it fit for purpose?
Complete and audit of all the content on your website. As well as listing out all of your content pages with purpose and subject matter, find out which pages are performing best and worst. As well as being able to tidy up your site and rid yourself of the worst performers it will also enable you to find out which subjects, content style and format are working best.
Tools that will help you evaluating content performance include:
Google Analytics measures traffic and conversions
Buzzsumo measures content reach via major social media networks
Moz and Ahrefs will tell you which content is pulling in backlinks
Google Webmaster Tools, Moz, and SEMRush will tell you which pages are ranking for search terms
Buffer for Business is good for measuring social media channels
Sort your effective and prospective content marketing assets by theme. What categories or topics are really resonating with your readers? What personas are favouring those topics?
8. How much content can you produce?
The next question is mainly about the resource available within your company. It’s all very well planning an ambitious programme of content – but if you don’t have the people to deliver it’s never going to be successful. It’s important to be realistic.
Start by listing out the kind of work this will involve, namely, the types of content that need to be crafted and how much time or budget you need to apply for each. This might include long-form, SEO-driven blog posts, interviews, market reports, infographics, case studies, explainer videos.
9. Make an editorial content calendar
Based on the resource available to you, create an editorial calendar and share it with your team. We’ve used Google calendar or try Trello board which gives you a calendar view and the ability to attached completed content for approval and download.
10. Make a promotional workflow
Make sure you promote your content. If you don’t tell anyone, no one can find it. Google will eventually start to work its SEO magic and pick up good content to serve up via its search engine, but this won’t happen overnight. It’s up to you to get the ball rolling by shouting from the roof tops. A few ideas to ensure your content links are shared:
Email co-workers to let them know about it, ask them to share
Share it to corporate social accounts
Share with relevant contacts from your opted-in email database
Email influencers to let them know about it and ask them to link to the piece on your site (backlinks)
Write guest posts linking back to that post
Publish at bloggers watering holes such as Quora and Medium
Advertise and boost content such as market reports and ebooks on social media
Use email footers / and CTRs on website to market reports and ebooks
Incorporate into marketing automation lead nurture workflows
