It’s common for content marketing gurus to make a subtle difference between “content marketing strategy” and “content strategy.”
Whatever you call it, a content strategy is the step-by-process plan by which you decide who your business will target and what process you will employ to do so.
The idea behind any strategy or plan is to aim at something to achieve. When you aim at nothing, that’s exactly what you will get.
Now, having decided to aim your content strategy at something worthwhile, you will need to think about your business, and its goals – and how you can use your content to accomplish your goals.
Also, your content strategy plan cannot be a non-specific exercise. There are at least 8 points that I would advise you to focus on to create a well-rounded content strategy plan. For each of these 8 points, specific smaller goals have then to be set, so your plan becomes a glide path against which to measure actual overall content performance.
This guide is part of a practical guides’ series related to “Content Marketing: The Practical Guide For Brand Owners.”
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Understanding the basics of content strategy is crucial for any organization that wants to create and distribute content effectively. A well-planned content strategy helps ensure that the content you create is relevant, valuable, and effective in achieving your business goals. So let’s understand the nuances of this topic …
Content strategy is the process of planning, creating, delivering, and managing content in a way that is aligned with an organization’s goals and objectives.
It involves developing a strategic approach to content that considers the needs and behaviors of the target audience, the available resources, and the channels through which the content will be distributed.
A good content strategy aims to provide value to the audience while also meeting the goals of the organization and typically involves audience research and analysis, content planning and development, content distribution and promotion, and performance measurement and optimization.
Organizations can create more effective, efficient, and valuable content for their target audience through a data-driven, strategic approach to content.
A content strategy is essential because it provides a roadmap for creating and delivering content aligned with an organization’s goals and objectives.
By taking a strategic approach to content, organizations can ensure that their content is engaging, relevant, and valuable for their target audience while supporting their broader business objectives, such as generating leads, increasing brand awareness, or driving conversions.
A content strategy also helps to ensure that content is delivered efficiently and effectively through the appropriate channels and that performance is measured and optimized over time to improve results continually.
Without a content strategy, organizations may struggle to create content that resonates with their target audience, wastes resources on ineffective content, and misses opportunities to achieve their business goals.
Experts have always emphasized that content strategy needs to be written down and documented. Success will elude you unless it’s brought down into a document, even if you have it all pat inside your head.
According to the Semrush State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report, 80% of those who believe their content marketing was very successful had a documented content marketing strategy.
Documenting a content strategy enables organizations to track progress and make data-driven decisions based on performance metrics. Organizations can refine and optimize their content marketing approach over time by measuring the success of different content types, channels, and tactics.
Also, documenting a content strategy provides a reference point for future planning and decision-making, enabling organizations to build on previous successes and avoid repeating past mistakes.
A well-executed content strategy can bring many benefits to a business’s ROI (Return on Investment):
Here are some top experts’ definitions of “content strategy” – notice their nuances.
"Your content strategy should focus on producing quality content, engaging with your audience, and measuring your successes and failures. Don’t simply churn out content for content’s sake. "
"Nine out of 10 businesses say that they use some form of content marketing. However, only 8% of companies say that they’re effective at it. Marketers who have a documented content strategy and follow it consistently are just plain better at getting results. "
To create any content strategy, you must first know how you are different and make that evident to your customers and competitors.
In the older days, marketers used to think of defining their “Unique Selling Proposition (USP)” as their competitive edge over other rivals in capturing the target audiences’ interest. We’re now in an age when our “attitude” is seen as our unique differential.
The Cambridge Dictionary says “attitude” is: “A feeling or opinion about something or someone, or a way of behaving caused by this.”
In other words, “attitude” differs from mere beliefs or values because you not only have a strong stance on something but are also consistently ready to act on it.
Great brands are seen to be doing just that.
If you thought Nike was the among the strongest attitude-based brands, with their “Just Do It” tagline, think again. This video from Nike shows how they gave it a whole different spin in a great cause. They showed you when you “For once, don’t do it!”
The way you set your goals for content strategy can make all the difference to your prospects of success. There are usually 6 areas in which businesses may have goals.
Whatever your goals, though, they have to be articulated as SMART goals – that is, they have to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Vague goals never work.
Here are some examples of how you can articulate your content strategy goals:
“To increase brand awareness … our goal is to publish X number of blog posts per week on our website and share them on social media platforms X number of times per day, targeting X number of new users and achieving X percentage increase in website traffic within the next 6 months.
“To boost engagement … our goal is to publish X number of interactive content pieces, such as quizzes, polls, and surveys, per month, targeting X number of active users and achieving X percentage increase in engagement rate within the next 3 months.”
“To generate leads … our goal is to publish X number of thought leadership pieces, such as whitepapers and eBooks, per quarter, targeting X number of potential customers and achieving X number of leads generated within the next 6 months.”
“To improve customer satisfaction … our goal is to publish X number of customer success stories per quarter, targeting X number of customers and achieving X percentage increase in customer satisfaction score within the next 9 months.”
By following the SMART goals template from Lifehack, shown in this video, you can establish a more concrete foundation of goal setting. It will ensure your goal is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound—attributes that cover the necessities of an effectively written goal.
If you want to be ultra-successful with your content marketing, you have to do “micro-segmentation” of the audiences you want to target. For example, if you have an e-commerce store with all sorts of implements that left-handers can use – and they can be of any age from kids to the elderly, and you have different products for men and women – you’d need to look at so many separate target segments:
The more you break down your audience segments, the more accurate your blog posts or other content will be for your target audience segments.
The next thing to do is to create a fictionialized “persona” (a typical imaginary member) of each target segment. Put a stock image of such a persona on a sheet and start describing what the person may be like, how the person may think or buy … whatever details flesh out the persona and make it feel like a living person.
Here’s an example persona from Fake Crow:
After creating all your personas (for all your target segments) you need to trace the buying journey of each persona you have.
Every human goes through different stages of buying – Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Onboarding, and Adoption/Retention. At each stage of this journey – from broad information gathering, to narrowing down choices, to ultimately trying and buying, and then repurchasing – different forms of content will be needed to nudge the customer to the next step. So knowing their journeys is vital.
Here is a simple buying journey map that shows how buyer behavior changes at each stage of the buying journey – and content strategy nuancing will need to change at each stage.
For each persona you have, see how their progress along the buying journey may be, and what challenges they may face that your content can ease.
In the set of two videos below Matthew Woodget of GoNarrative first explains the process of developing and utilizing a buyer persona for each of your brand’s target customer groups will help you reach and connect with them more effectively … and then explores their journey with your brand, from awareness to evangelism.
Along buying journeys, your personas may have hurdles, bottlenecks or pain points. Your content has to be variegated to help solve customer issues at each buying journey stage.
Most people’s pain points fall into these categories.
How do you identify your target personas’ pain points? People vent at certain places online where they feel they will be heard. These include comment boxes under blog posts, in special groups or forums, on social media, or on product review pages.
If you regularly check these places online, you can harvest ever so many unsolved needs of your target audiences that your content can help them with.
For the sharpest first-hand understanding of your target audiences needs, desires and paints, what could be better than a chat with them in person, over phone or over Zoom? Or you could send around a very short survey and elicit some responses that give clues to the bigger picture.
Locate just 10-20 people who sharply resemble the target audiences you want to aim at, and ask them on LinkedIn if they can help you in your quest for information. Make them feel like they are helping you, and not that they are being interrogated on their behaviors or preferences.
This video from Chrystabelle from ChrysMedia really explains the process she uses to quickly and efficiently idenitfy her coustomers’ pain points. When we understand the biggest pain points and challenges our prospective customers face, we can position our products and services as the solution to their biggest challenges.
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Once you know what the buying stages journey are, and what the customer pain points at each stage of the journey are, it’s time to decide what content you need to create to solve each pain point.
Adapting the customer buying journey map we used earlier we can use a content planner that expands to look like this:
In this diagram, you will notice that we have added two more rows than before. We have included in Row 3 some objectives for the content we need to create to satisfy the customer journey stages … and in Row 4, we have included some specific types of content we can offer.
Why is it so important to have high-quality, useful content for every stage of every persona’s buying journey? There are two big reasons:
Reason #1: Experts believe it used to take at least 7 touches of a customer before the customer gets ready to trust and buy from you. These days, given the competition level online, it takes at least 12 touches before a customer is yours to nurture and grow.
So the more opportunities we create for customers to see us as the best go-to resource, grows their trust in us … resulting in more affinity, loyalty, conversions, and sales.
Reason #2: It’s very easy to leak customers during their buying journeys to the competition. You bring them so close to you at the earlier stages of the buying journey, and then suddenly, some neglect of suitable content along some stage of the buying journey makes them run off to competition for a better answer. It happens all too often.
That’s why every piece of content you create needs to have a Call-To-Action and some backup email nurturing to ensure that the next stage of the buying journey is taken with you and not your competitor.
Hubspot has this terrific video where they show us their “content mapping” process to the stages of the customer journey. Your description of the customer journey stages may vary slightly from theirs, but how they catch content for each journey step is worth following.
Planning your channels of reach to your audiences needs a lot of thinking. It is first dictated by where your target audiences generally hang out. Do they populate some particular social channels, online forums, or groups? Do they read some specific types of websites or online magazines?
If you can identify where your audiences primarily congregate, it’s easy to include those communication channels in your content strategy plan.
These days there is a big buzz around the idea of “omnichannel marketing.” Omnichannel marketing refers to an organization’s presence across multiple channels. These channels can include websites, apps, social media, email, and more.
But while, earlier, we used to consider these channels and the content we create for them as separate pieces, we now need to see all our channels of communication through a different prism. Our customers have become multi-screen users … they may use laptops, desktops, tablets, or mobiles to reach our sites and content.
We, therefore, need “omnichannel marketing.”
In omnichannel marketing, the objective is to choreograph content delivery in such a way that the customer has a seamless experience of our content stream, no matter which channel or device he wants to be on at any moment. This takes a lot of planning and a deep study of how people use their devices and channels, and what types of information they want to see on these.
The Salesforce State Of The Connected Consumer Report of 2020 states that 74% of consumers have used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction. And Omnisend says marketers with campaigns involving 3 or more channels have a 90% higher retention rate than single-channel marketers.
In this video below from WebFX, you get the whole idea of omnichannel marketing in about 8 minutes. It’s worth a watch if the topic has got you intrigued.
Content creation is a process. For marketers who want to leverage a content-based strategy, it’s an ongoing process. It, therefore, helps to create a system by which content creation workflows become automatic.
There are seven simple steps to any content creation:
Instead of thinking of each content piece separately and planning for it, it helps to batch your work for speed and scale of content creation.
One of the ways to do this is to brainstorm, do your keyword research, pick the topics you want to create content for … and then calendarize them all for at least the next three to six months.
An editorial calendar can contain not just the dates and topics for content creation but also dates and methods of content promotion. If it’s all on a calendar, life gets streamlined.
CoSchedule’s All-In-One Marketing Calendar allows you to enter your social media calendar, events calendar, blog schedule, email cadence, and all other important marketing projects side-by-side.
Scaling content creation is not easy. More content usually means content quality starts to go south. It also becomes more expensive because companies usually build systems in an inefficient way. This educative video from Ahrefs shows how to build a scalable content creation system without degrading content quality
To evaluate if content strategy is on track we have to plan ahead on what metrics we will use to judge performance. If we look again at the buying jouney diagram, notice there is now a new Row 5 that shows the kind of performance measurements we may need to use at the different stages of customer progress.
Semrush provides another excellent breakdown of how to view performance analytics of content in their infographic below:
If only more people knew how simple it is to set the free Google Analytics tools to get all the metrics they want! Since many of us need to shed our fears and go for Google Analytics, who best can teach us to set it up than Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media? He makes it sound so easy!
To find a special gift waiting for you on this page, click the button below to take a peek, before you read on …
Some of the most commonly asked questions on content strategy development are listed below … with their quick answers. These are good extra angles from which to understand some nuances of the topic to get the most bang for the buck.
The frequency of updating a content strategy can depend on several factors, such as changes in the target audience, shifts in the competitive landscape, and new business objectives or launches. In general, it’s a good idea to review and update your content strategy on a regular basis, such as quarterly or annually. This can help ensure that your strategy remains aligned with your business goals and audience needs and that you’re leveraging the latest trends and best practices in content marketing.
First, avoid creating content in a vacuum without understanding your audience’s needs and preferences. Second, avoid creating too much content without a clear purpose or goals, as this can lead to content fatigue and reduced engagement. Third, avoid creating content without a plan for distribution and promotion, as this can limit its reach and impact. Prioritize quality over quantity to maximize engagement and ROI.
To improve ROI for a content strategy, it’s essential to continuously analyze and optimize your content to ensure it’s meeting your business objectives. It’s important to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and use data to inform content decisions, such as which channels to focus on, what content to prioritize, and where to allocate resources. Testing and experimenting with new approaches, such as interactive content or personalization, can also keep your content fresh and engaging for your audience.
Yes, even very small brands need a content strategy. While the scale and scope of the strategy may be smaller, having a plan in place for creating and distributing content can help small brands build brand awareness, engage with their audience, and ultimately drive business growth. A content strategy can help small brands define their voice, messaging, and tone, and ensure that they are creating content that resonates with their target audience.
A content strategist must have a range of skills, including a deep understanding of the target audience and their needs, excellent communication skills, and the ability to analyze data and measure the effectiveness of content. Additionally, a content strategist should be able to think creatively and strategically to develop and execute campaigns that meet business objectives.
1. A content strategy is critical for businesses and brands to have because it helps streamline content-led outreach to prospective customers. It also helps plan how to convert them into buyers systematically.
2. With a content strategy, marketers can streamline their budgets to make a little money go a long way. You can put clear non-overlapping plans in place to hit your targets.
3. Businesses with written-down content strategies succeed far beyond those who have not articulated their strategies as sacrosanct documents. So that’s where you need to get moving first.
Branding and content marketing are tough because they require a deep understanding of the target audience, a commitment to delivering high-quality content consistently, and ongoing optimization to remain effective. This is where an expert hand can be invaluable.
With cutting-edge knowledge of the latest industry trends and best practices, an expert can help provide the guidance and support needed to achieve the desired results.
"I am committed to elevating my clients' branding and content marketing to a dominant position because I believe that a strong and distinctive brand identity, coupled with high-quality content, can be a game-changer for businesses. I've done it over and over for 40+ years and 125+ clients."
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Give yourself truly big benefits.
Get my weekly newsletter packed with cutting edge brand content tips, tricks, tactics, techniques, and trends. I scour the Net for you.
Get a free download of my 93-page eBook “BRANDSPEAK” … on how to deploy content marketing for total brand domination.
Just fill in the form to join my community … we have big and small brands for company. You’ll stay on the speedway to growth.
