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Whether it’s a team of highly trained marketing specialists or just one person, all of the heaving lifting, any kind of brand can increase its awareness and build long-term relationships with clients. However, the ones that stand out usually have a specific plan.
And that’s precisely what we’re going to talk about today.
In business and life in general, having a detailed plan will help you overcome most speed busts along the way. The same principles apply to developing a content strategy as well.
Simply put, having a great content strategy is one of the better-known secrets to improving your positioning on Google. If executed effectively, it’s also one of the essential components of your marketing strategy.
However, it typically does require a lot of investment of your time and money to create a great content strategy. So whether you outsource blog posts or hire a specific company to develop the whole process for you, it’s crucial to create a well-organized plan that will achieve the desired results.
Your content strategy is a step-by-step process that drives results and provides useful data to help you make data-driven decisions.
In a nutshell, the perfect content strategy for your business is a mixture of finding what kind of content will help you connect with your target audience and build a long-lasting and profitable relationship. The content strategy should also focus on keeping everyone on the same page, producing high-quality content, engaging your audience, and measuring overall success.
To achieve this goal, we need to blend many components, of which the most important is setting a goal, researching your target audience, and mapping out how buyers will interact with your content.
Compiling a content strategy is subjective and usually varies from industry to industry and even individual situations. And just like we mentioned in the previous blog post, there isn’t a “one size fits all” solution that every business can implement and overnight 3x their income.
However, there are some core principles that you can follow to ensure a successfully and effectively built content strategy.
And whether you have started with creating your content strategy or applied an already-created strategy, it’s helpful to revisit it and make sure that it’s effective, innovative, engaging, and driving the desired results.
In this blog post, we will dive deep into all the pieces to help you understand of what a content strategy is and how to build the perfect one for your business.
Let’s jump into it.
The first and obvious question we need to answer before moving forward is to explain its content strategy. Simply put, a content strategy is developing, publishing, and promoting relevant content to your business and target audience.
Having such a strategy in place means prioritizing creating the type of content that drives results.
Additionally, your content strategy should also have in mind the social media channels, websites, newsletters, and any other platforms on which the content is published, having a content calendar/schedule, as well as a plan that breaks down how to create unique pieces of content.
A successful content strategy will attract your target audience and build a long-lasting relationship with them, even after the initial purchase.
As you may guess from the length of this blog post, the answer to the question is a resounding “YES!”. And there is a straightforward explanation for it.
Without an established content strategy, you are most likely creating content that doesn’t quite hit the mark, and it isn’t as effective as it should be since you are working based on intuition instead of it being data-driven. Even worse, after creating content without a strategy, the data presented isn’t quantitative and can be measured to produce long-term results.
We would also recommend watching this video as well to understand the importance of content on your website:
Additionally to that, there are other reasons why having a content strategy is essential:
Tying in with what we mentioned in this section, being able to do an overview of the content strategy will help you see any potential issues, remove any additional unnecessary parts, prioritize tasks, as well as measure results long-term based on reliable data.
A team runs efficiently when many factors are considered, one being communication. However, communication isn’t just a Slack text or email. Instead, the best way to communicate daily, weekly, and monthly tasks are by having a well-documented content strategy. With such a strategy, both internal and external staff will be able to produce the content, and everyone will be on top of their tasks and oversee the rest of the teams. It also gives your team the freedom to take ownership, give better ideas, and produce better work.
When dealing with many people and tasks, they all need to be responsible. A content strategy means everyone will be on top of the schedule and deadlines and measure effectiveness over time.
Probably one of the most significant benefits of having a content strategy is that you can plan and determine what resources you need to achieve your goal. With an estimated budget in place, people tend to unconsciously cut off any additional spending or have a way to justify that more budget is needed.
And all of that is data-driven.
The easiest way to explain the difference is to point out that content strategy is much more “higher-level” on the business activity list than a content marketing strategy. It’s an overall map or guideline to most business activities, including content marketing, and it’s a way to decide and highlight the content, the customer, desired results, etc.
Also, a well-thought-out content strategy should have a metric called “content success” in mind.
While on the other hand, content marketing can be described as connecting individual pieces of content for marketing purposes, and creating, organizing, and publishing them.
Therefore, content marketing sees content tactically, whereas content strategy treats content, of course, strategically.
Additionally, the overall content strategy defines additional aspects such as:
Simply put, without a well-thought-out plan, you could run the risk of writing ineffective and time/resource-consuming content that doesn’t resonate with the target audience.
Although we may not be able to create it for your business, we have created a step-by-step blueprint for creating the perfect content strategy.
A business, bus, post office, the internet, and anything else in life need and have a specific purpose. The same goes for a content strategy as well.
Before doing anything else, it’s essential to determine the company’s mission and goal. That is something you can let your target audience know about that by setting up a mission statement, where you highlight the company’s most important long-term goals and what you want to achieve with the content strategy.
The goal of creating content might be:
Once you have the goal, you can determine if a content strategy is the best way to achieve the business goals. In some cases, it might not be the best option.
For some of the points above, it might be better to set up a sales funnel; however, if the goal is to reach new clients and build long-lasting (and profitable) relationships, then high-quality content is the way to go.
Even in the example above, the content will be the determining factor for the goal, and it’s essential to place it appropriately.
Simply put, setting up a goal for the content strategy first is a perfect way to set the path for everything you are doing and ensure that everything is on track.
To create an effective content strategy, firstly, we need to know our target audience. We can generate a lot of valuable data by researching what the target audience is visiting, what kind of content they engage with most of all, and which social media platforms they use the most.
For that purpose specifically, we would recommend that you enable Google Demographics and Interests to get data on what kind of websites the target audience visits and interacts with, as well as Google Analytics for the content (and pages) that the target audience interacts with. Additionally, Google Analytics gives you a visual and data-driven report by calculating which social media platforms the target audience will be on.
These metrics will help you understand the fundamental principle of an effective strategy: What can of content works best and on which social media accounts to place it. It will help you make the content strategy niche-specific and increase the chances of it being effective.
As we mentioned in our previous blog post, some businesses create content that is way too broad, is copied from somewhere else or doesn’t provide any kind of value to the reader whatsoever. And that’s why most of the content doesn’t get read because it doesn’t appear near the top of the search results page.
To avoid that fate, as in most businesses, applying these general tips is to create unique and niche-specific content that will stand out and generate genuine value for the target audience.
Doing so will likely place you as a thought leader and expert in the field and build a long-lasting relationship with the readers. Additionally, make sure also to minimize duplicate content as much as possible. To learn more about that topic, we recommend watching this video:
Building a result-producing content strategy is an ongoing process. A process that we have to improve and adapt constantly. And measuring the results is one of the most critical aspects of that process.
Simply producing content without analyzing user feedback (what engages the target audience and doesn’t) is equivalent to doing target practice in the dark.
The most important metrics that you are going to need to measure results accurately are:
Apart from the initial phase is to gather data about when, where, and how readers engage with your content. You can acquire this information from Google Analytics under Behavior > Site Content > Content Drilldown. We recommend sorting the data by:
The amount of time a user spends on a specific page
How many clients do leave the website after entering
The total amount of views the specific webpage gets
By looking at this data, you can answer the most fundamental questions like which content users interact with the most, how it is compared to other content on the website, which content gets the most shares and comments, etc.
As mentioned above, it’s a great sign of effective content if it’s being shared by users, especially on social media.
That builds what is referred to in psychological terms as “social proof”, making it even more likely that you will reach and attract new customers. Also, social proof is an excellent indicator of giving potential clients the additional nudge they need to purchase from you.
This data will help answer questions like what is being shared, by whom, what kind of content gains the most traction, and what type of content brings the highest conversions.
You can find this data in Google Analytics through Acquisition > Social > Overview.
From the data, you will be able to see a few useful metrics, including:
The most important metric of any business is conversions. This metric will give you the total amount of conversions and divide depending on traffic source and social media platforms.
This is the online business equivalent to an alley-oop, as it registers how a user has contributed to a transformation. For Google Analytics to capture this, the visitor must visit the social media site at least once.
This is captured if the user arrives from a social media source and then completes our assigned goal within the same session.
This part is vital since with it you will get an accurate picture of the style of content you need to create to generate conversions. Just keep in mind that some industries and even niches in the same industry have different average social media sharing from users.
Most high-performing businesses run their operations based on one or multiple sales funnels. If you have an already established sales funnel, you need to remember which step of that funnel you are creating content. Although the target audience might be the same, the content needs to be tailor-made to fit each stage of the sales funnel.
Since content is king here, keep an eye on high and low-performing content. It will let you know which areas to improve to increase efficiency and conversions.
Again, you can use Google Analytics for this by going to Conversion > Goals > Goal URL. You can set up several business goals and track them over time to generate quality data.
Most businesses aim to generate as many conversions as possible and increase revenue and profits. That is why the content strategy should be created and improved with the end goal, which is revenue/profits.
That is why it’s vital to have a method of tracking revenue generated from the content strategy, which you can do via Google Analytics.
By going to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, we will be able to see a lot of useful data, one of them being Page Value. It will allow you to assign and monitor the value of each piece of content. There are always ways to improve content engagement.
When we work on something for so long, we become biased in one way or another. It’s just human nature. But that is why we use data to offer an objective picture.
While data is always key, and data analysis is essential for almost all business-related decisions, another crucial aspect is analyzing customer feedback.
That will ensure that the user knows they are being heard, further building your relationship with them and getting feedback from clients interacting with the business. So make sure to ask them for feedback and suggestions and interact with them as often as possible.
In addition to client feedback, staff feedback is often beneficial to compile since they interact with the business daily and with the clients. It can provide a pretty good picture of clients’ wants, needs, etc. Customer-oriented job positions have an advantage here since they can provide useful insight into how users interact with the business.
We would recommend using either a feedback form that you can send out on-mass via an email campaign provider or (perhaps even better for user engagement) a community forum where users and staff alike can interact, share, and expand on useful ideas that can help the business improve, and grow.
In both scenarios, make sure to reach out to the clients and respond to their feedback, to let them know that their opinion matters to you.
The truth is that most like to give feedback if it’s positive; they just don’t know that the opportunity is there.
Another thing to point out about the community forum is that it also acts as a way to build social proof for existing and potential clients that others love your brand so much that they are taking the time to help you improve.
Here is a great video to learn more about user-generated content:
Once the content strategy has been created, improved, and crash-tested, it’s time to take the next step and find a way for the content to reach as many of your potential clients as possible.
This last step contains determining the most frequent online places for your audience and then pushing your content on those channels.
Simple and advanced analysis of target audience behavior can show us which channels they frequently use and what time is the busiest. Then, a combination of the business, staff, clients, and influencer voices can help the brand reach as big of an audience as possible.
The content might need to be modified from platform to platform, but the message would stay the same. Once we have received results, we can analyze the data, see our weak points, improve and then repeat the process.
Humans are creatures of habit. While some from the target audience might convert in one go, others must be exposed to your brand message several times before making the decision. Of course, that would depend on the industry, product/service, target audience, etc., but there is also a touch of patience here.
The path to the business’s success is pathed with a good content strategy. That is why analyzing, planning, and executing such a strategy is one of the most important things you can do for your business.
In this day and age, when there is so much poor quality content, make sure to laser target your message for your target audience to receive it and understand it easily.
On this topic, we highly recommend watching the following video:
That is why one of the things that you should do is to effectively research the target audience, keywords, competition, past company data, and customer feedback. From all of these, we can get a lot of content ideas. As you get more experienced you will easily know which idea to keep and what to throw away, which takes a bit of time.
Make sure to review the strategy and improve from time to time, to keep everything on track.
Now, we know that all of this might look overwhelming from time to time. On top of that, another issue might be a lack of resources, time, patience, and energy to tackle such a huge plan as building the perfect content strategy for your business.
For that reason, we at SEO Jokers are happy to chat with you about how we can help you build and continuously improve on a content strategy that works for your business.
Find out more by clicking here.
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