How to create a killer content strategy in 7 steps
Content has become the backbone of any successful brand. But it’s an oversaturated market out there. To stand out and drive results, every piece of content you create must have direction and purpose.
Invest time and planning into a high-level content marketing strategy, and your content will play a big part in achieving the overarching goals for your business.
Here are 7 steps to ensure your communications cut through the cutter to increase your brand presence and drive conversions.
Step 1. Create Your Audience Personas
An audience persona (also known as a buyer or customer persona) is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It provides a snapshot of important demographic, psychological, and behavioural information, such as where they live, what they do, the problems they face, and the solutions they need. It helps you understand and empathise with your audience, so you can tailor your messaging to connect and have impact.
Most businesses have products and services that appeal to more than one audience and need multiple personas that showcase their distinct characteristics. Focus on the audiences that are most important to you – two to three at most – otherwise, you may try to be too many things to too many people, and your efforts become counterproductive.
Step 2. Write Your Content Marketing Mission Statement
Once you know your audience personas, you can define the purpose of your content and the value you aim to provide. Each piece may have its individual agenda, but it still needs to align with your overarching mission statement to be consistent and impactful.
What solution will your content provide?
How is this better than what’s provided by your competition?
What will your target audience achieve or come away with from consuming your content?
If you want your content to help you achieve your broader marketing goals, it must be useful to your target audience if they’re going to come on the journey with you.
Step 3. Develop Content Marketing Goals
Set realistic, measurable goals to give your content direction. Rather than wasting time, effort and resources creating content randomly, you’ll know exactly what you want to achieve from each piece, how to prioritise your content, and where to allocate your budget.
Some typical goals include:
Drive traffic to your website: to generate traffic, you need to create content that search engines will rank. Here are 3 steps to creating the foundations to rank well:
1. Understand your audience, their expectations and what they want from your content.
2. Research the types of keywords your audience will use to find such content and identify the ones that have the highest search volumes and lowest competition. Some great tools for keyword research are Uber Suggest, Ahrefs, Google Planner, Semrush, and Answer The Public.
3. Create unique, relevant content that satisfies your audience’s expectations, answers their queries and provides solutions.
Generate leads: once you’ve done all the hard work to create valuable, ranking content, how will you capture and nurture traffic into loyal, paying customers? Traffic means nothing to your business if it fails to generate leads.
Firstly, you need to decide what a lead looks like to you. Some examples include:
- Phone calls
- Online inquiries
- Email signups
- Form completions
You may decide all these things are leads then prioritise which ones your business can best handle and nurture into sales. For instance, you may not have the manpower to manage incoming calls, which need to be addressed instantly. In this case, form completions and online inquiries may be better.
Then you need to decide how you’ll drive and capture leads. To do this, consider these 2 questions:
What lead magnets can you use to turn traffic into leads? Special offers and discounts, or unique pieces of information can be great here. Consider offering these for free in exchange for contact details.
What Call To Actions (CTAs) will be most powerful to drive response? Your CTAs need to reflect what type of leads you want to collect. If you’re after phone calls, provide your phone number in your CTA. If you’re after online inquiries, ask them to submit their details in a quick and easy form.
Convert leads to signups or sales: your overall goal is to drive sales – and it’s possible to do this directly through just one piece of content. For example, carefully pick a keyword you can tie to a pain point that your products and services are solving. Create valuable information that shows how to solve the problem and, even better, include CTAs allowing you to solve it for them.
There are also less direct ways to generate sales through your content. By providing valuable information that puts your brand front of mind or showcases your knowledge and expertise, you can eventually convince people to buy from you.
Increasing sales and signups through content marketing doesn’t happen without some nurturing. You must add value, educate, and offer solutions that push people further down the funnel until they buy.
Retain existing customers: as many of us know, it’s easier to keep a customer than acquire a new one – it’s also cheaper. Content marketing can help you achieve that; just make sure you reserve a slice of your content calendar for existing customers.
What information is helpful to them?
How can you continue to be useful to them beyond the sale?
Are there special promotions, or alternative products and services that would be of interest to them?
Sometimes, there's a common issue your customers are facing that you can address in your content. This saves them time and stress from having to seek out the answers or solutions themselves, making your content super valuable and creating a positive association with your brand.
Think about the different ways you could deliver this content, like user guides, ‘how-to’ blog posts, videos, webinars, FAQs, etc. FAQ pages can be a great way to provide quick, concise answers to common queries. They’re also an effective SEO tool. Choose relevant queries with high search volumes (and ideally low competition/keyword difficulty) to position as FAQs, and they will have a good chance of ranking if your answers are helpful and targeted.
Step 4. Identify Your Metrics for Success
Gain an understanding of how your content is performing, and you can channel your efforts into the areas that are working best. But first, you need to know how to evaluate success.
For example, your primary metric might be the revenue generated by your content marketing, your Return on Investment (ROI). When you know your ROI, you can decide whether your efforts and resources are paying off. From this, you can work out your cost per acquisition (how much it costs to acquire one paying customer), so you can forecast what it will cost to acquire new customers.
Your secondary metrics could be things like the number of shares, leads, rankings, and traffic.
It’s a good idea to get a holistic understanding of how your content is performing so you can weigh up its overall effectiveness. The long-term effects of a campaign can be difficult to measure as leads may come in long after a campaign has finished. When you understand the bigger picture, you can attribute all sales and leads to evaluate the overall success of your content marketing strategy.
Semrush splits all the possible metrics for success into 4 categories: user behaviour, engagement, SEO outcome, and company revenue.
Image source: https://www.semrush.com/blog/measure-your-digital-content-performance/
Step 5. Design Your Content Funnel
Each piece of your content should lure users further down your funnel (i.e. towards buying or signing up). Typically, there are 4 phases to a content funnel:
Awareness: Educate, inform, or entertain your audience, creating intrigue around your brand. Thought leadership pieces, blog posts, social media posts, and advertisements can be useful here.
Consideration: Answer users’ questions and show how your products and services are the ultimate solution. Think how-to guides, demonstrations, and instructional videos during this phase of the funnel.
Decision: Persuade users to why you’re the best choice. Case studies, reviews, and success stories can be a powerful ‘show’ not ‘tell’ tool. Now is the time to include powerful CTAs (Call To Actions) to convert leads into sales.
Retention: Give special offers, new features, and how-to solve common issues. Provide in-depth content, like knowledge-based articles and eBooks.
With your content funnel in mind, you can categorise each piece of content by its purpose and which phase of your user journey it targets.
Step 6. Create an Action Plan
Once you have your audience, goals, metrics, and funnel identified, you can begin mapping out an action plan that will act as the framework for your content marketing strategy.
How do you create an action plan?
- Choose content topics and decide which funnel they target.
- Determine which content formats you will produce.
- Pick the channels for content distribution.
- Create a content calendar that includes the following for each piece of content:
o Topics or keywords
o Target dates
o Headlines
o Categories or keyword clusters
o Content formats
o Goals
o Success metrics
Your action plan will help you set timelines, allocate resources effectively, and ensure your content is created and distributed consistently and purposefully.
Step 7. Execute!
With your content marketing strategy mapped out, you can begin executing. Make sure every piece of content you create is unique, engaging, and goal oriented. Include SEO formatting with your identified keywords and strong CTAs.
When you schedule your content for publication, consider the best days and times to publish. When will your audience be most receptive and engaged? Consider using a social media publishing tool like Hootsuite.
Don’t forget to exploit each piece of content by repurposing it across different channels and formats:
- Turn an article into an infographic, slideshow, podcast, or video.
- Segment a long article or video into shorter pieces or social posts that you can publish as a series.
- Use blog posts to create usable snippets and informative images for social media.
Conclusion
Content marketing is an evolving process, so prepare to be flexible and adaptive. Continually measure results against your key metrics and adjust your strategy, making sure you channel your efforts into the areas that are working best.
Good luck!
As I’m a contributor to Flying Solo, this article first appeared on the Flying Solo Micro Business Community website.