Whether you are new to content marketing or you’re are familiar with using the same old approach, revisiting your content strategy plan to make sure it’s up-to-date, innovative and strong will do you no harm. Content strategy dives into the creation, publication and governance of usable content.
What is Content Strategy?
Content Strategy is the piece of your marketing and development plan that refers to the management of pretty much any significant media that you create or own. You need to ask yourself some certain questions when developing a content strategy
- Why and Who are you creating it for?
- How to make it unique
- The Format and structure you focus on
The Success of your content marketing strategy depends on the nature of your content. If your content is good it would boost your marketing effort,but on the other hand if it is fairly ordinary your marketing campaign will fall apart faster than you realize
A Three Step Approach to making great content marketing strategy includes;
#1. Define your Goals
The first step to making great content strategy is to gather the ideas of your content. Brainstorm on those ideas and define them. It is imperative that you allow a structured ideation process to get your hands on the right ideas. A well structured ideation process involves:
- Drafting ideas — make a list of ideas relevant to your niche
- Curating ideas — after you’ve made a list of ideas that you feel are worthy of follow up then you curate them to focus on those ideas you are pretty sure would translate into a fantastic content
- Finalize ideas — After curation, you will be left with 2 to 3 ideas that have “content” written all over them. Pick one and save the other for future reference.
After the structured ideation process, you should go ahead to make your to research. Be honest with yourself, look at things internally and externally. From an external stand point, take the time to research and evaluate the possible future of you niche or industry. Also, from an internal stand point, make a true assessment of your current audience so you can determine where you take things. This also where you describe the specific audience for whom you will create content, what their needs are, and what their content engagement circle might look like.
2. Define the content’s format and structure.
Once you have done your research, identify the content’s format that will help you maximize the potentials of the content ideas you have, keeping your audience preference in mind and also considering if the format will allow you do full justice to your ideas. After which you can move to define the structure of this process. This is one of the critical steps of content marketing strategy. You should create a content wireframe that lists all important point you want to cover.
This ensures you don't forget to mention anything that is crucial for making an impression on the target. The structure of your content depends on the format you choose. For instance the structure of a video will be different from the structure of a blog post.
3. Take action and test your content.
When it comes to taking action with your content, we imagine sitting down and actually cranking it out. You have to critically examine the feasibility of the options involved in planning the content development process so as to keep you from going down the wrong path.
To examine this feasibility you need to test your content, make sure the people who are interested in its success take a good look at it. It is important to get their feedbacks and make suggested improvement, this will keep you from going south.
You can ask them if ;
- the content was readable
- this content added value
- the user flow was spot on
- they are willing to share this content with their friends and followers
- there was something they did not like about the content
This way you will be able to get genuine opinion about your content and you would know if there is need for readjustment. In case of readjustment, keep refining your article until you are absolutely sure it is perfect and meets the standards required for an epic content.
