Trying to reach your audience without a content strategy is like trying to become the next American Idol by singing in the shower. Sure, there may not be a false note. The acoustics may be perfect. But you might as well keep your day job because you aren’t going to Hollywood any time soon.
If you want eyeballs on your content, you must build an efficient and thorough content strategy that gives your audience a story they want to experience—one that gives your content organic visibility through search engines like Google and, ultimately, converts the curious into marketing and sales leads.
In the early days of search engine optimization (SEO), shoddy content could be pushed to the top spots of a SERP by stuffing the right keywords haphazardly onto the page. Quality content and audience relevance be damned. But as technology and internet search methods evolve with the emergence of AI, quality and relevance have come to far outweigh other factors.
The good news is that this has forced businesses to up their marketing game and produce content that’s more:
- Relevant
- Timely
- Consistent
- Human
In other words, content strategy isn’t just a friendly suggestion, it’s a requirement for success as a content marketer.
Content Workshop has built its ethos on strategizing the right moves every time, to ensure audiences find, engage with, and find useful the content they’re seeking. These tips can help you start the journey to content strategy perfection.
Even Simon will be impressed.
Where to Start Your Content Strategy
“Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
If you’ve read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, you may recall this whimsical line. Characters in Carroll’s novel often speak in riddles or rely on clever wordplay. Yet, in the right light, there’s plenty of truth in these words as well.
The perfect content strategy requires knowing not only when to start (now)—but also how to start. Well-intentioned content, even when eloquently written, can easily miss the mark if you don’t yet know what you’re aiming for.
Plan, plan, plan
The best businesses plan every element of their operations with meticulous obsession. They run financial projections years in advance. Every department of their workforce runs like clockwork according to an internal logic, which is the kind of cohesion that only comes with good planning. As unforeseen challenges or missteps inevitably arise, these businesses are prepared to quickly tackle them and minimize the risk of damage.
However, when your marketing team has multiple fires to put out and a stacked schedule of project tasks to work through, it’s easy to deprioritize building a robust content strategy. Ironically, the right plan is precisely the thing to make your work easier.
Fewer missteps means less backtracking to perform an autopsy on failed content, and a roadmap that helps you ensure you’re hitting all the right metrics throughout your content calendar.
Building a Content Calendar
Begin by targeting the types of content (such as blogs, videos, and podcasts) as well as the distribution channels (social media, email, website, paid ads, etc.) that you want to utilize.
Ask yourselves questions such as:
- Are there specific campaigns you want to run during the year?
- What keywords will you target with each piece of content, prioritized by highest search volume and lowest difficulty?
- Are there important annual dates for your industry to center content distribution around?
- What types of content are “evergreen” and provide value that isn’t time-specific?
Having a solid idea of the content workflow your team can reasonably handle can ensure you aren’t setting yourself up for failure with unreasonable timelines and crippling workloads. It’s good to have a working outline of each piece and a solid idea of how long each will take to complete, including planning, creating, editing, adding design elements, and distributing.
There’s no singular way to make a content calendar—it depends on your unique marketing needs and expectations. But a solid template can help springboard the process.
Need help getting started? Content Workshop has you covered.
Try our comprehensive content calendar and strategy template today.
How Marketing Personas Fit in Your Content Strategy
Your business likely already has a strong sense of who you’re trying to reach with your marketing and sales teams, and you can use this insight to develop different key marketing personas. These are profiles based on the attributes of people likely to buy, use, or benefit from your product. In other words, personas represent individuals whose pain points you’re seeking to address, and whose questions your content strives to answer.
How do you best meet your audience where they’re at in the buyer’s journey? It’s important to build content that’s useful to your ideal buyers whether they’re still gaining awareness of the problem they’re trying to solve or they’re closer to making a decision.
Building your message mapping around these considerations helps you make your content strategy more precise, effective, and consistent.
From Idea to Reality
There’s a lot of great content in your mind, but in order to reach your audience, that content needs to fit into the right plan.
Ideation
Ideation is how you take the keyword and audience research you’ve done and develop it into different types of content. What kinds of questions is your audience asking, and how is your business uniquely positioned to answer those questions? This is where you’ll pinpoint the most effective topics that will bring the most value to potential leads.
Asking the Experts
Subject matter experts can help flesh out ideas and give unique insight into specialized topics. They may be able to help guide you in developing a list of important subtopics and information to cover in a given piece of content, as well as to point you toward other useful sources. The clarity an expert can provide can be invaluable as you outline a new content project.
Competitor Research
What types of content are comparable brands in your area producing? How do they rank on the keywords you’re targeting? Which of their content is performing well, versus pieces that fail to compete? Target several direct and indirect competitors. You can use tools like SpyFu or Semrush to analyze key SEO metrics like organic search traffic, domain authority, and backlinks.
Telling Your Story with Content Workshop
Having trouble prioritizing your content strategy?
With the myriad of responsibilities your team faces day in and day out, it can be difficult to dedicate a consistent effort toward building an effective strategy and putting that plan into action.
Learn how Content Workshop’s team of professional content creators can help tell your story.
