6 steps to a simple and effective content strategy

In an increasingly crowded digital environment, more content is competing for audiences’ attention than ever before. According to Demand metrics91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing as a part of their overall strategies.

Many marketers create a lot of content, and for good reason. By aspiration marketingcontent marketing can increase customer lifetime value by up to 70%. When everyone seems to be playing the game, how do you make your content stand out?

Ultraselectivity is the key. And as at all times, it starts with the audience. You want to deeply understand who you serve and then tailor your results to meet their distinct needs. Learn some basic but essential suggestions on how to create content that builds trust and affinity with your market.

The risk of making content without a strategy

Have you ever come across branded content that seemed out of step with its voice, like a fashion company blogging about the best food in Manhattan or a literary publisher focused on pet care?

This can occur when your brand lacks a content strategy that determines the topics and formats that best serve your audience. Although just about all marketers claim to use content marketing, only 40% have a written strategy. Without a plan to focus your content on your customers, you risk wasting your organization’s resources (and your audience’s time) on low-quality content that will not achieve success.

Moreover, without a long-term plan, you furthermore mght run the risk of making generalized content that does not address your audience’s specific questions or concerns, leaving readers disinterested and confused. A robust content strategy is a lens through which you’ll be able to quickly and consistently assess whether a content idea is value implementing. Over time, these strategic content decisions create a coherent brand narrative.

Simple steps to developing an effective content strategy

Strategy may be intimidating, but the steps to developing strategic content are quite simple. The idea is to be clear about the end result you are aiming for and start from there:

1. Define your goals. What do you hope to achieve with your brand content? Perhaps it’s about entering recent markets or answering common questions about your product or category. Identifying your brand’s specific goals is the first step in clarifying what to write about.
2. Research your goal group. The best content responds to real and pressing needs of the audience. Appeal to your organization’s goal personas to explain customer interests, blind spots, and purchasing habits. Then share these insights with your content team so they’ll craft the most relevant and impactful content possible.
3. Audit of existing content. You probably already have a collection of existing content. Learn from it. What works and what doesn’t? Rely on the most effective content to make future content decisions.
4. Choose the right content formats. Once you’ve got chosen your topics and audience, determine which media most closely fits your content, whether that is articles, social media posts, videos, etc. It’s a classic “form follows function” concept: greater ideas may require a comprehensive guide or e-book , while an infographic may be the perfect way to summarize recent research findings.
5. Create a content calendar. Content calendars can enable you organize your strategy by identifying when and where to publish content. Include topics, keywords, content formats, publication dates, and distribution channels from the starting, and then update them over time as you discover recent opportunities.
6. Apply a recent web address. New web addresses contain memorable keywords after the dot – e.g. .pro, .fitness and .world. They signal what you offer to your audience before they visit your website, setting appropriate expectations and strengthening brand recall. These powerful domains may be used to redirect to your current website or build a completely recent, branded digital experience. You may even use recent web addresses to create landing pages for specific topics and campaigns, which you’ll be able to then use to publish related content.

Key questions that may enable you create content

To help determine whether your current content results and ideas are aligned with your content strategy, consider answering the following questions before you begin creating content:

• Who is your goal group?
• At what stage are they on the purchasing path?
• What is your topic and goal?
• Where will you publish your content?
• What formats will you employ?

It’s not rocket science – but it’s amazing how often brands publish content without considering about these basic questions. Don’t be one of them!

A superb strategy makes your content effective

The best strategies build on a knowledge base, starting with understanding your customers and their needs. You also need to define your goals to know where your marketing strategy will take you.

With this data, you may develop a strategy that may effectively convey your brand’s narrative and build a deep bond with your audience.