Top 5 tips on how to create a content strategy
15 September 2022
Creating a content strategy is an important part of your marketing strategy. Here I explain why it’s important and provide my top 5 tips on on how to create a content strategy.
Why is it important to create a content strategy?
All businesses have annual targets and objectives to meet and have to put a strategy in place to ensure they’re achieved. By creating a content strategy and implementing a content plan you can:
- Develop and raise awareness of your brand
- Generate more leads
- Maintain your brand’s current visibility both online and offline
- Provide insight into what your customers want
- Detect patterns of your customers’ behaviour
- Provide an opportunity for you to make improvements
Creating a content strategy is therefore an extremely important part of your overall marketing strategy.
What are the top 5 tips on how to create a content strategy?
Creating a content strategy takes time as a lot of consideration and research has to be undertaken. But, as with most things in life, the more you put in, the more you get out.
These are the top 5 things you should do when creating a content strategy.
Tip 1: Set your goals
Your content needs to have purpose which is defined by clear goals. Therefore, the first thing you should do when creating a content strategy is set your objectives. Your objectives should be SMART meaning they’re “Specific”, “Measurable”, “Achievable”, “Relevant” and “Time Bound”.
Each objective should also have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These are the measures which determine whether you’re on track to achieve your goals. Here are some examples:
- Objective: Increase subscribers of monthly newsletter by 20% in 12 months / KPIs: Number of new subscribers | Engagement rate
- Objective: Generate 10% new leads from bi monthly news articles in 12 months / KPIs: Number of sessions | Number of new leads | Conversion rate
- Objective: Increase Instagram followers by 6% in 8 months / KPIs: Number of followers | Engagement rate
You should consider, when setting your SMART objectives and KPIs, what tools will be needed to measure success and ensure that you have those in place.
Tip 2: Define your customers
Knowing who your customers are is extremely important. Creating customer segments, or buying personas, is a way of understanding exactly who they are.
When you know who they are, you’ll understand their goals, preferences, challenges and behaviours. This will help you when creating your content plan as you’ll have a much better understanding of the type of content they’ll engage with and the ways in which they’re likely to consume it. Knowing this information can be the difference between failure and success and it’s therefore important that your customers are defined within your content strategy.
You can either invest in market research to determine your customer segments, use helpful tools which are available online or use your own analytics to help create them.
Tip 3: Determine your brand position
Now you know your customers, you need to know where you fit into the market. To do this, you should research who your competitors are and how they market their brand, their products and/or their services. You can then compare your brand to your competitors’ and determine how you can better reach your target audience.
As you’ve defined your customers, you’ll understand their needs. Think about how you’re able to fulfil those needs, how you’re able to solve their problem, what makes you unique and a better choice over your competitors.
Tip 4: Complete a SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is another important part of a content strategy. It’s a way for you to review your ‘Strengths’, ‘Weaknesses’, ‘Opportunities’ and ‘Threats’. While the terms strengths and weaknesses focus internally – reviewing what you’ve done in the past, opportunities and threats focus externally – looking to the future.
Strengths: When looking at your strengths, consider what’s worked previously. Take a look at your analytics at what type of content generated the most engagement, clicks, leads, etc. It may be that you saw an upward trend on a particular day in the week/time of day or on a particular social media channel.
Weaknesses: When looking at your weaknesses, consider what hasn’t quite worked in the past and what you could have done better. Was there anything you wish you’d done differently? It may be that you distributed your content on social media but believe it would have had more engagement as part of an email marketing campaign.
Opportunities: When looking externally at opportunities, you should research what’s going on in your market. Are there any market trends, industry changes and highly searched topics which are untapped, where you can provide valuable insight and demonstrate your expertise?
Threats: When looking externally at threats, research your competitors and what they’re doing. Consider any market, social and economic trends which may have a negative impact on your content.
Completing a SWOT analysis will help you form your content plan, using the strengths and opportunities, while mitigating the weaknesses and threats.
Tip 5: Consider your budget and resources
When creating a content strategy, you need to consider what budget and resources you have. This will help determine exactly what you can do within your content plan to meet your goals.
When reviewing your resources, you not only need to consider whether you have the right technology/software resources, but also the right skilled people within your business.
Consider each type of content and what resources it will need. Examples include:
Resources for blogs
- Market research
- SEO research
- Copywriting
- Proofreading/editing
- Legal checks
- Compliance checks
- Upload to CMS (include inbound and outbound links)
- SEO tools
Resources for graphics for social media
- Copywriting (for graphic)
- Graphic design
- Copywriting (for post)
- Hashtags and tags research
- Graphic design software
According to Statista Content & Design’s Content Marketing Trends Study 2022, 61% of consumer facing businesses would like to publish content more frequently, but 67% of those can’t publish more frequently due to time resources. Ensuring you have the resources in place can be the difference between failure and success of your content strategy. So, if you don’t have the resources you need, you should consider whether your budget will cover the cost of outsourced resources.
What comes next?
Once you’ve completed your content strategy you can start building your content plan. This will be much easier to do and much more effective, if you’ve spent time building the content strategy.
Let's talk
If you don’t have the resources or the time to create a content strategy and plan, or you’ve built a strategy and plan but need someone to create the content, simply contact us and one of our experts will be in touch to talk about how we can help.
All content in this article was correct at the time of publication.
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