Improve Your Content Strategy
Every marketing campaign relies heavily on content. Here are a few ways to enhance your content strategy and boost performance.
To be successful, every digital marketing strategy depends on a variety of factors.
You should think about how you’ll approach reputation management, paid search, social media posts, and email marketing for a comprehensive campaign.
Despite the fact that they are all significant, content is the most important factor of all.
Regularly publishing fresh, insightful content is a tested strategy for boosting brand recognition, fostering audience engagement, and urging action. However, posting any old content won’t cut it.
You require well-written, purposeful content. You’ll also need a plan of action for that.
A content strategy also referred to as a content plan, is a group of strategies employed in the production, application, and management of marketing data, materials, and collateral. It serves as your marketing battle plan if you will.
Like any good plan, yours needs to be specific and all-inclusive, including what kind of content you’ll post, when and where you’ll post it, and who is in charge of what.
Here are five strategies you can use to advance your content strategy.
- Think Like A Publisher
You are well-versed in your brand, which is advantageous but has drawbacks as well.
One reason is that when something is so familiar to you, it becomes simple to take it for granted, often without even realizing it.
Unfortunately, your audience may become frustrated as a result of this.
Thinking like a publisher is the simplest way to do away with that. Identify the needs of your audience and create content to meet them, in other words.
Here are some pointers to help you with that:
assemble a content team. Your organization already has a tonne of knowledge. Use it.
Your team may consist of marketers, product team members, PR experts, customer service representatives, and IT.
Roles and responsibilities should be defined. Each member of the editorial team should play a particular part in developing the strategy and distributing the content.
Ensure that everyone is aware of their responsibilities at every stage of the creation and management processes.
Create workflows. To ensure that everything goes through the proper approval channels, be sure to spell out exactly how your process operates in writing.
This might entail involving executives, brand experts, or the legal team.
Obtain commentary. It’s unfortunate that so many businesses ignore social listening.
Participate actively in the discussions that customers are having about your brand.
Additionally, it’s a good idea to follow hot topics that may present opportunities for your company.
Organize your online activities. Paid media and general marketing should cooperate to strengthen one another.
Work together with your paid media team to find opportunities to increase effectiveness and make sure your message is consistent.
Purchase the appropriate CMS technology. Utilizing a top-notch content management system (CMS) enables you to utilize the most recent technology.
Platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and Squarespace can help you manage the entire process from ideation to publication and greatly simplify your workflow.
With the right CMS, you can manage your content across channels without needing to write a single line of code.
- Make Sure Everything Fits Into Your Sales Funnel
It’s all about conversions these days. This usually refers to sales, but it can also mean clicks, newsletter signups, or any other marketing-specific objective you can come up with.
Sharing a popular video from the office, writing a blog post about the state of your sector, or linking to an infographic you made are just a few examples of content marketing.
Yes, it does have those elements, but it also involves telling a narrative. It must have an emotional hook to influence a target’s behavior, ideas, or feelings regarding your brand. And one minor component that is searched.
All of your offline and online marketing efforts must be consistent with your brand story and relate to a particular stage of your sales funnel.
All of your content, including social media posts, photos, new blogs, and even press releases, is therefore crucial. And for everything to advance your targets’ sales journeys, it must all work together.
And to do this successfully, you must have a solid plan in place before you begin.
- Refine And Document Your Editorial Process
Every piece of content needs to go through the same editorial process, regardless of whether you’re producing it all yourself, with a team, or by hiring freelancers
This starts with assessing your current procedure. Is everything being checked for errors, typos, and the like by multiple sets of eyes? It can be challenging for writers to recognize their own errors.
Refine your process, and then include comprehensive step-by-step instructions in your documentation. There should be absolutely no ambiguity regarding the stage a piece of content is in, what is done there, and what will happen next.
Always remember to keep your brand in mind. Don’t forget to consider the fonts, images, and tone that your audience has come to expect from you when choosing your content.
Your audience will become perplexed if your tone fluctuates from business-like professionalism in one section to casual familiarity in another.
Additionally, you want to confirm that the narrative is followed throughout all of your content. Ensure that each content creator is knowledgeable about things like:
Positioning: The pillars on which your content is constructed should be mentioned in your brand narrative.
What matters are important to your brand in terms of your values? (Ecology, civil rights, etc.)
What does the public’s perception of your brand say about it? What about the neighborhood?
What topics are your customers discussing when they aren’t engaging with your brand?
What kind of content has historically produced positive results for you? What remained?
What do your targets search for in terms of search behavior? What words do they use?
What are the recurrent support issues that you consistently hear from your customers?
It will be much simpler to create an effective content strategy and alter customer behaviour once you’ve determined your brand narrative, whether you’re trying to increase sales, reposition your business, or change how people perceive your brand.
Invest the necessary funds into properly educating your team on this new procedure.
You should also regularly take refresher courses and participate in continuing education programs based on the most recent best practices because there is always room for improvement.
- Review, Refresh, Replace
Although nothing is permanent, if you can produce content with a long shelf life, you’ll be able to drive traffic, clicks, and interaction for months or even years. Some pieces will burn brilliantly for a brief time.
You must decide what needs to go, what needs to be changed, and what just needs a minor refresh.
Examine your current content to determine what should remain and what should be deleted. Make sure you regularly verify any stats or links to other content if you use them.
Certain content, referred to as evergreen content, will stay current for a very long time. Even though you can’t just leave it alone, it needs much less maintenance than hot topics.
How do you determine the kinds of tutorials, blog posts, and videos that will continue to be useful? without a doubt, with research.
Examine your current traffic, research your rivals, and consulting resources for the sector.
What subjects keep coming up time and time again, no matter how recently they were published? Find words and phrases that have received a lot of searches over an extended period of time using your keyword research tools.
The article on the PlayStation 5 might be popular right now, but it won’t drive much traffic once the PlayStation 6 is released. Either completely avoid news, trends, or technology that could be easily replaced, or make it with the understanding that it will have a shorter shelf life.
Select images that are appropriate and less likely to appear dated.
Above all, make sure it is helpful. People looking for information on learning to ride a unicycle will still find your blog post to be useful ten years from now if it provides a step-by-step tutorial (barring some massive change in unicycle technology, that is). A variety of educational materials can endure for a long time.
- Use Your Network
More than just your own domain should be included in your content strategy.
A great way to raise brand awareness and create backlinks that will benefit your traffic and SEO ranking is through guest blogging.
Furthermore, your authority and credibility will automatically increase in the eyes of your audience if your guest post appears on a website they trust.
Find opportunities to cross-promote your brand by using your connections. Make contact with industry websites and influencers to establish a relationship that benefits both parties.
Include this in your content strategy as you can enhance and profit from it using platforms like social media.
Share content and blog posts from people in your network in addition to your own. Direct competitors are probably not a good idea, but links to anyone on the outskirts are acceptable.
Make sure to tag the articles’ sources, authors, and anyone else who is mentioned in it.
Exist popular trade shows, conferences, or events in your sector? This is a fantastic location to gain exposure and advertise your content.
You could host a booth, speak, or just have someone available to hand out flyers and literature. This offers you the chance to gain more exposure, as well as opportunities to link back.
Speaking of digital content, be sure to include additional pertinent and linkable sources in your own work. This makes it possible to establish reciprocal links.
And it’s even better if you can get a specific, original quote from a subject matter expert.
Good Content Starts With A Good Strategy
A good content strategy takes some effort to create. You’re not going to be able to write it down on a piece of paper in 15 minutes; you’ll need to do some research.
In general, the more effort you put in upfront, the simpler it will be to develop and implement content.
Keep in mind who your targets are and what they are looking for. How can you give them the most value while also getting the most exposure?
Make sure your strategy is based on original content that you can use across platforms to grow your social media following, raise your SEO rankings in digital marketing, and foster relationships.
