How To Plan A Content Strategy For Brand And Business Growth?
With the rise of social media, more and more content is being created than ever before. And yes, it can be overwhelming for marketers! Businesses and brands are finding it increasingly difficult to get their content noticed in the midst of all the competition.
So, you might wonder: How do you plan a content strategy? How do you define good content? What is the best way to reach the right audience? In what ways does it impact my business? Is there a strategic purpose for it?
And the answers depend significantly on what you are trying to accomplish in your organization or brand.
To get started, let’s cover some basics.
Content Strategies: What are they and why do they matter?
Content serves as the bridge between a brand and its audience, and if used strategically, it can lead to meaningful business growth.
In “What is content strategy?”, Camden Gaspar defines a content strategy as an ongoing process of “transforming business objectives and goals into a plan that uses content as a primary means of achieving those goals”.
In essence, it’s a guide to all content creation, delivery, and governance across an organization that ensures the right content is delivered at the right time to the right people, using the most efficient channels. A content marketing campaign can only be successfully implemented if planned and researched beforehand.
What are the elements of a Content Strategy?
Marketers have differing opinions on this topic. We’ll focus on the following core content strategy elements but take into account that you can always adjust and adapt to suit your business needs and expectations.
Goals: What do you want to achieve? Setting clear content objectives and aligning them with a company’s overall strategic goals and users’ needs is the first step in planning any content strategy.
Ask yourself, does your client or company want to drive more revenue, increase awareness, or build an audience? Are they looking for more engagement? Does the company plan to expand? Do they need more people to convert? Are they trying to deflect appropriate queries to a digital channel to reduce call center expenses? Consequently, your content efforts should follow that path and meet those expectations.
A content strategy cannot exist independently of the goals for the whole. It is an integral part of your overall business strategy, and by aligning your content marketing efforts with your company’s strategic goals, you can use content to grow your business.
Hubspot, for example, does an excellent job. The company makes marketing software and has translated its business strategy into content to help consumers along the funnel.
Audiences: Who are the people you want to engage and capture? Following that decision, you can consider what type of content you’ll be creating, how you’ll write it, and the tone and voice that will appeal to that audience.
Understanding your consumers and their needs is what will determine your content calendar, the channels you’ll use, and when and how you will publish. If you want to get a better understanding of who your content is targeted toward, you can create an audience persona.
But wait! How do personas work? In “Create a Buyer Persona: 9 Essentials”, Marcia Johnston describes buyer or audience personas as “a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customers that actively informs content strategy to drive productive buyer engagement”.
Creating personas will allow you to understand your customers better and tailor content to meet their needs, behaviors, and concerns. Personas usually include basic demographics like age, gender, location, income, and occupation. Moreover, personas identify customer motivations, fears, goals, likes and dislikes, behaviors, media preferences, and pain points.
Content creation: Who will create content? In addition, consider the resources you have and intend to use: Are they internal or external? Should you outsource content creation or keep the process in-house? Is it necessary to ensure that more people are involved in the content evaluation process?
Formats and channels: What content formats and media will you use? In terms of content formats, there are a wide variety of options, including videos, memes, listicles, newsletters, blogs, infographics, etc.
Additionally, content channels offer a variety of platforms for publishing, including owned media (e.g., blog, website) and social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok). Based on your target audiences and the skills and resources within your organization, you can decide what content formats and channels to use.
Content Management: What are your plans for managing content creation and publication? The use of a content strategy to drive business growth requires effective content management and integration across the organization, as well as a clear plan of what needs to be done and when.
Content is not isolated to one department or team. Knowing who is creating your content is just as important as knowing when you will create and publish it. It is crucial to identify content creators and publishers, as well as to engage stakeholders, in order to create and publish content on time. The legal department, crisis communication, copyright, and finance teams, among others, help you to ensure that all rules and regulations are followed, budgets are met, policies on data protection and privacy are adhered to, and that the content is appropriate for your audience and company.
Several techniques and practices can help you manage your content, workflow, and resources, such as content inventories & audits, content calendars, style/editorial guides, and taxonomies.
Governance and maintenance: What frameworks and processes will you use to manage your content? Developing structures to maintain your published content will become more and more important as your team and content library grow. You must continue to develop, publish, and manage content on a regular basis.
Therefore, governance is also a key component of well-managed content. It helps you to provide structure, and prevent delays, or even legal issues by defining: Who is responsible for maintaining your content and ensuring quality? What are the tasks or steps to complete a piece of content? How will it be updated or removed in the future? What is the process for approving content? What guidelines should be followed? What are the key roles and responsibilities?
Using content workflows or content governance frameworks allows you to assign ownership and define procedures to prevent random content creation and publishing.
Measurement: How will you measure your content performance? Content strategies are incomplete without knowing whether your actions are successful or not. And the only way to improve is to understand what your baseline is and how your campaigns are performing to develop KPIs to keep track, optimize and iterate.
As a result, you need to ask yourself: How will we measure the success of our content goals? What do we need to measure? How are we measuring consumer engagement within the evaluation process compared to how we measure conversions?
Testing and content analytics can help you achieve this. These measurements can help you improve your content and stay on track by providing valuable feedback. Katy French explains how to choose and use the right marketing metrics for content. You can also read The 5 W’s of content testing.
Exploring the latest trends and innovations in content
Last but not least, your content strategy should evolve with your business, audience, and new technologies. Future-proofing your brand and business won’t work, so you must be flexible and adapt.
It doesn’t matter if you are creating content or overseeing it, new tools and technologies are changing the way we do things. “Think of all the tasks that need to be performed before any piece of content goes live: keyword research, reviewing data, analytics and trends, search engine optimization, and content writing — from personalizing to optimizing. Tasks like these can quickly add up, and marketers are spending valuable writing hours researching, testing and optimizing”, Forbes explains.
With artificial intelligence (AI), content intelligence, machine learning, digital content management systems, or automation tools, content professionals can better understand their audiences, personalize, customize and optimize content in ways they couldn’t before.
Why Your Content Marketing Needs To Be On-Trend To Be Successful states, "Every content marketer and entrepreneur should keep up with the latest trends and stay on the cutting edge by learning about new platforms and emerging technologies.”
That’s something we agree with! Make sure you stay up-to-date and incorporate new ideas and technology into your content strategy. Don’t be afraid to explore new platforms and trends to determine what will work best for your audience and brand.
