Creating A Killer Content Strategy

Creating a great content startegy can become a huge conundrum. From figuring out the media channels, to the brand tone, the schedule and even the actual content, creating a great strategy can provide a whole set of questions, accompanied with it’s fair share of headaches.

Now, whether you work in Public relations, Advertising, Digital marketing or you’re just a content creator for social media, a content strategy is imperative. It allows you clearly map out how you communicate to your audience and how you eventually intend to leverage off this audience.

While creating a great content strategy usually involves considering a lot of constantly evolving platform, a concrete way of approaching a content strategy is thinking of it as a science. There are 4 key actions to consider here and these are: Conceptualise, Validate, Experiment, Iterate.

CONCEPTUALISE

A content strategy can be a lot of things but it musn’t be boring. So you need to put on your creative hats and draw up concepts that will work for your audience. While conceptualising, you are allowed to be outlandish, out-of-the -box, the goal here is to exercise your mind. During this process it’s also recommended that you research similar businesses or brands as you can get inspired by their content. Remember good artists copy, great artists steal, so the key thing here is to draw inspiration from all over but to make these ideas and concepts your own.

VALIDATE

So now you have your ideas, rough as they may be, it’s time to question those concepts. Here are some of the questions you need to ask

What platforms are your demographic most predominantly on?

What time is the best to post for each platform?

Are these platform more text based like Twitter or more suited to visual cues like Instagram?

Does your content align with all of the above?

If you’re considering sponsored posts, which platform offers more value for money for your kind of service?

Validating some of the content ideas helps you drill down on the psychology of your target demographic and allows you better understand what they may want. This may involve you doing some research on social media statistics and consumer behavior. Validating your assumptions allows you remove a level of “guessing” from your content strategy.

What you may not realise when you’re initially conceptualising (the first setp) these ideas is you’re subconsiously making some light assumptions.

For example while creating content for a company that specialises in transportation & logistics, you consider creating funny posts remarking on traffic and delays in fulfilment. Now the assumption is that people who will want to use this service will be able to relate to this kind of content. Either because they’ve experienced something similar or just because it’s funny. That’s an assumption, and you have two ways to ascertain if you’re right.

The first is by seeking information to validate this claim either by doubling down on the motive behind possible content conversion or by researching on previous consumer reactions to similar content.

The second way to confirm your assumptions is by . . .

EXPERIMENTING

This is maybe the single post important rule in any content strategy. Don’t be afraid to try things, or try new hashtags, or content ideas. While you might be able to gain valuable insight into consumer behaviours from research, some things can only be learnt by hands-on experience, by experimenting. The golden rule of content marketing is experiment to find what works and then rinse & reapeat.

So after conceptualising and validating, now is the time to start trying out these ideas and you have to be very meticulous, like the way a scientist will take an experiment.

See each post like an hypothesis, set a metric you want it to achieve (likes, views, comments, retweet, conversion, click-through) to be considered a success. Also note the time and day this posts go up, and observe which hashtags works best so you have a clear understanding of all factors at play (in subsequest posts we will show an example). When you are this meticulous about your content execution you begin to see how well or not-so-well your content is doing and more importantly, these information will make you understand why.

Great content is a natural causality of a great content plan which is a by-product of understanding and predicting consumer behavior and that is a science you can master by experimenting.

ITERATE

No matter how great your content plan is, you content will fall flat sometimes. Either because audiences are disintersted, the timimg is not right or because it’s just downright bad content. When this happens, it’s no reason to be distraught. It’s part of the learning curve, in fact it’s a very important part.

The quicker you realise what is not working, the faster you can change things and try out new things that might work. The key thing is to fully undertsand why these content fell flat and to have this new information at the back of your mind when trying new things.

Your detailed experimentation with your content will provide valid inference you can work with and this will better position you to develop better content concepts while also doubling down on the concepts that already work.

So there you have it, the four Kickass processes you need to go through when making and executing a content strategy. Sometimes these things take time, and some content are more mainstream than others, however if you apprach this as a science you will quickly be able to achieve your content objectives.

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