Developing a Winning Content Strategy

Content. It is unavoidable for digital marketers. All internet marketing relies on some content strategy, whether it’s videos, social media postings, native ads, landing pages, marketing emails, or blog articles.

It is reflected in marketing budgets. According to SEMrush, 69% of organizations want to boost their content marketing investment this year, with more than 40% increasing their budgets by more than 10%.

Such a valuable and powerful commodity cannot be utilized on a whim. Good content planning that maximizes the use of every asset, whenever and wherever it is shared or promoted, is essential for successful content marketing.

Let’s dig deeper into what content strategy is all about and how to accomplish it well.

What Is A Content Strategy?

Content strategy is the act of planning, developing, distributing, and measuring all forms of online content to achieve specific marketing and business objectives. Companies can use a content strategy to harness performance data to satisfy KPIs while controlling and optimizing their content marketing activities.

Content strategy can encompass the short term, such as a single, time-limited campaign, or it could be a long-term strategy that includes a variety of content marketing initiatives over a quarter or a year.

Why Is A Content Strategy Important?

Compared to other types of outbound marketing, content marketing generates up to three times as many leads while costing 62% less. Implementing comprehensive and data-driven content planning would be best to attain such results.

A content management system and a written content marketing strategy can provide various benefits to your business, including:

• Establish credibility and authority in your niche: You can promote yourself as an industry expert by providing high-quality content that your audience will value.
• Create brand awareness: A content plan can help maintain a consistent brand image across all media. This consistency in language and tone helps increase brand awareness and trust among your target audience.
• Save time and resources: Focusing your efforts on providing the correct type of content for your audience can save time and resources.
• Improve the content creation workflow: A content strategy establishes an organized content generation and dissemination approach.
• Accountability and clarification: A defined strategy outlines specific goals and techniques, assuring responsibility and clarity in your content marketing efforts.
• Measure progress and identify areas for improvement: A content strategy contains measurements and KPIs, which enable you to track progress and identify areas for improvement.
• Track content ROI: A content planning helps you track the ROI of your content marketing activities, allowing you to make more educated investment decisions in the future.

Content Strategy vs Content Tactics

People frequently confuse content strategy with content-related methods such as copywriting or editing, video creation, infographic design, and social media promotion. Before tactics, there is a content strategy. It plans, defines, and relates the methods to a larger aim.

Why is it still difficult to distinguish between tactics and strategy? Unfortunately, many organizations still regard content as an afterthought rather than an asset (Halvorson, 2012, p. 31). They value user interface design over necessary information.

Others fail to recognize the importance of content strategy until it is too late. The information becomes so burdensome and incoherent that people abandon the product or service entirely. In many circumstances, content cleanup activities take more time than developing a deliberate strategy from the beginning.

In our study, content specialists in one-person UX teams reported unhappiness with their businesses’ lack of content strategy awareness. Many of these content specialists stated they were required to write, edit, and promote material. Their uneven focus on techniques gives them little time to consider content holistically.

Regardless of the cause, step back and plan your content before publication. Identify goals that will benefit the organization and its users to align efforts and create a unified content strategy.

8 Key Elements of a Content Strategy Plan

Since a content strategy plan is a roadmap designed to guide the creation, dissemination, and governance of meaningful information, here are some crucial elements you should include when developing your own.

1. Content Goals And Objectives

What do you hope to achieve with your content? Do you wish to raise brand awareness? How do I generate leads? Or perhaps improve client engagement? Is it all three—or something else?

When you outline the aims and objectives you want your content to help you reach, you create your North Star. So, if you’re unsure whether to include specific content in your strategy, consult your North Star to see if that content type will guide you correctly.

2. Audience Persona

A target audience persona (or buyer persona) is a semi-fictional depiction of your ideal consumer based on statistics and studies. It allows you to understand better who you’re providing material for.

To establish an authentic audience profile, conduct research through surveys and interviews and evaluate your social media interactions for insights. These insights include your audience’s demographics, interests, pain issues, and content choices, to name a few.

Knowing this information can help you identify the content types, subjects, and marketing channels that will help you achieve your objectives.

3. Content Audit And Analysis

Once you’ve established your audience persona, review your previous content to see what works and what doesn’t. This allows you to detect gaps and opportunities for content personalization.

In the content auditing part of your content strategy plan, explain:

• The kind of content and themes already functioning effectively for you (e.g., blogs about web development, micro-videos that teach coding tips and tricks, etc.)
• The kind of information and themes that are not gaining traction (for example, white papers about the evolution of programming).
• The content gap analysis and possibilities you’ve identified

Pro tip: Use Google Analytics and social media analytics to assess the performance of your content. Look for patterns in which types of content work well and use this information to guide future content creation.

4. Content Types & Channels

Next, decide on the types of content you’ll develop (e.g., blog posts, videos, infographics) and the marketing channels you’ll use to distribute it (website, social media, email). You should select these content types and channels based on your target audience‘s tastes and where they spend their time online.

Before deciding on your perfect marketing mix, try several forms and channels and measure their effectiveness.

5. The Content Creation Process

This component of your content strategy plan explains the process of creating content, from idea development to publication. This involves delegating duties and obligations to other team members or freelancers.

Pro tip: Create a content calendar to plan and schedule your material in advance. Use collaboration tools to speed up the content development process and keep team members (and/or freelancers) on the same page.

6. Measurement And Analytics

You now understand your audience personas, the content topics that interest them, the content distribution channels you will utilize, and the content development process.

The next stage is to define the metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring the success of your content (content KPIs). Define specific measurements for each target, such as brand recognition or lead generation engagement rates.

Use content analytics tools such as Google Analytics and native social media analytics tools to track results and adjust your plan as needed. Other solutions, such as HubSpot’s analytics platform, can help you gain a holistic view of your content distribution efforts across numerous channels, including social media, emails, PPC ads, and more.

7. Content Governance

Content governance establishes rules and procedures for content development, publication, and maintenance to assure consistency and quality. In this portion of your content strategy plan, you will create and incorporate content style rules, tone of voice guidelines, and content quality criteria.

This guarantees that your team members and/or freelancers produce consistent, unified content.

8. Editorial Calendar

Content planning may be challenging without careful planning. An editorial calendar provides a game-changing solution to this problem. By planning your content subjects, formats, publishing dates, and allocated team members, you can ensure your content is well-coordinated and connected with your overall business objectives. An editorial schedule also helps you maintain consistency, fulfill deadlines, and manage resources more effectively.

Using tools like Trello, Asana, or Google Sheets, you can quickly establish an editorial calendar that works for your team, allowing everyone involved in content creation to know what is coming up, what is due, and what has been finished.

How to Create a Content Strategy Framework

Successful content planning must always be well-planned. So, we’ve condensed it down to nine phases that serve as the framework for any successful content strategy:

Step 1: Define Your Content Business Objectives

The first step in developing a content strategy is defining your business. Who are we? What do we do? Why do we do this? What consumer pain points are we attempting to address? How can we approach it better or differently? What are our immediate and long-term goals? How can content marketing help us?

Your content strategy will only be as strong as your responses to these inquiries. So, make a list and start brainstorming.

Step 2: Learn All You Can About Your Audience

Content is intended to be consumed, so it’s critical to understand who you’re providing it for. Identify your target audience. What are their interests? What are their problems? Where do they spend their time online?

The most effective strategy to understand your target audiences is to conduct research and develop a broad profile for each client type. These are called “buyer personas.” Check out this helpful starting guide for creating great personas.

Step 3: Develop An Original Voice For Your Material

Your product or service is probably not unique. And there’s certainly already a lot of related stuff online. How can you make your material unique, distinctive, and valuable? Connect with your brand’s true heart and share your exceptional knowledge and opinion.

We know that genuineness works. Eighty-eight percent of consumers believe authenticity is crucial when selecting brands they like or support. So don’t wait – find your voice today!

Step 4: Create A Documented Roadmap

A content strategy will not succeed if it is in the air. A recent Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs study shows that 63% of B2B organizations lack a written content strategy.

Don’t become a statistic; document your content strategy today. It will help you make sense of your content marketing and make it much more accessible to adapt and refine as necessary. You may also use it to help your team align so everyone works toward the same goals.

Step 5: Determine The Best Channels For Promoting Your Content

Multichannel marketing is now the mainstream approach to digital marketing. This includes marketing content and engaging with audiences across a range of media. A content strategy should include channels such as social media, email marketing, native advertising, owned websites, display ads, and more.

The trick is to figure out which channels are most popular with the intended audience. For example, a B2B content strategy will undoubtedly include LinkedIn as a core channel, but a B2C strategy will focus on Instagram or TikTok for younger consumers.

A company that does not receive much traffic to its blog may wish to consider pitching guest articles to famous blogs in the niche, with hyperlinks to their site, to increase site visits. Numerous outlets and options are available, so choose the finest ones.

Step 6: Evaluate Your Content Approach Whenever Possible

Successful content planning must be measurable. Content marketing KPIs are broadly classified into four categories: consumption, sharing, lead generation, and sales.

First, set your KPIs so that you have a clear picture of your content objectives. Then, using various analytics tools and software, you can monitor the success of your content and have a better idea of how it is doing for you. Finally, you can use these indicators to refine your plan and achieve your objectives.

Step 7: Test Your Content And Campaigns

One of the most frequent methods for testing digital campaigns is A/B testing, commonly known as split testing. To do A/B tests, run two versions of an ad or content simultaneously, changing only one element in each, such as the headline, image, or color of the CTA button. Then, you track and analyze the performance of each version to see which one outperforms.

A content strategy is more than submitting content and pressing the “Publish” button. Because so many variables influence content performance, testing is the only way to determine what is and isn’t practical.

Step 8: Optimize Your Material Regularly

But why should you optimize your material regularly? This tracking, measuring, and testing contributes to collecting data required for campaign performance enhancement. Content optimization entails rewriting an article using essential keywords, updating subject lines for an email campaign, or even improving the layout and appearance.

After gathering data and analyzing the content’s performance among the target audience, you should continue to optimize it.

Step 9: Repurpose Content For Different Uses

Creating compelling content that generates results is difficult and time-consuming. If the material performs well, it is a shame to let it stale. You may extend the life of material by incorporating repurposing into your plan.

Content repurposing occurs when content is updated, modified, refreshed, or repurposed for a different purpose, allowing you to gain more from it over time. Consider it “recycling”: don’t waste material when it can be squeezed for additional clicks, conversions, and customer engagement.

For example, suppose a particular blog post is gaining traction. Why not use it as the foundation for an enormous e-book sold through native advertisements or social media? Convert a popular “how-to” tutorial into a step-by-step video. Countless methods exist to repurpose and revitalize content; the only limit is your imagination.

Content Marketing Strategy Example

To better understand a content strategy, consider the following example: A prospect calls a Wistia sales representative and inquires about the company’s video hosting service. As the Wistia sales representative interacts with him, he discovers that her company uses a variety of other platforms, including Intercom, to turn leads into sales.

Bingo.

After the conversation, the sales representative sends the prospect a follow-up email with a blog post about Wistia’s connection with Intercom. This allows Intercom users to personalize further messaging to prospects based on video-watching data collected through Wistia.

This is an excellent example of leveraging content planning as a sales enabler. On the surface, it may appear weird that Wistia has dedicated content to another business product.

However, this content is an excellent resource for Wistia’s sales staff, especially when buyers are concerned about how Wistia’s product will connect with their current software or procedures.

Conclusion: Creating a Better Content Strategy

There’s a lot more to content marketing than just SEO content writing or making an interesting video. It necessitates a comprehensive approach that includes content creation, promotion, and intended outcomes.

It necessitates meticulous planning, perfect execution, extraordinary attention to detail, and the involvement of numerous organizational stakeholders. A solid content strategy cannot be developed overnight; nevertheless, the sooner you begin, the sooner you will have an effective content plan and meet your KPIs.