Why? Aside from improving SEO and lead flow, high quality content allows you to control the narrative about your brand and your products: what others are talking about, how, and when. People will have an opinion (or lack of) regardless of what you do, but it’s content strategy that gives you the power to lead the conversation and drive business objectives.
Content marketing strategy is the process of planning and delivering curated content to a designated audience in order to accomplish a business objective. Let’s break that down into bite-size pieces:
- Process of planning and delivering: a high-level map of what you want to communicate, on which channels, and when.
- Curated content: depending on your business and which channels you’ll be using, content can be an article, an image, a video, a blog post, an interview…etc.
- To a designated audience: relevance is key to successful content, which is why there is no one-size-fits-all. For example, prospects or leads will be interested in introductory promotions or case studies, while existing customers will be interested in new products or services, loyalty programs, etc.
- To accomplish a business objective: from the obvious one (sales) to more nuanced ones, such as data collection, brand awareness, cross-category shopping behavior, etc.
So, how does one start crafting a content strategy? Although there are many ways to go about it, the most important thing is to create an organized process that everyone in the team is familiar with.
Here are five steps to a successful content marketing strategy:
- Map your personas: define who your audiences are and what they are interested in. For example, a press contact might want to know what new products you are launching and approximate price points, while a prospect might want to know what your company does and what you can do for them. Some other personas to consider: existing customers, lapsed customers, internal (employees), distributors, etc.
- Create a content calendar and adapt it to your different personas: map out your content for the year. Not everything needs to be detailed and final, but having a frame of reference helps. It’s also a good idea to consider the customer’s mindset (think holidays, spring cleaning, summertime, etc) and plan your brand moments around them. Lastly, imagine how each different audience will come in contact with your content and try to gauge if it makes sense from their point of view.
- Create a brief: make a list of all channels that will need assets (copy and/or creative) and their respective formats. Think articles, search ads, social media, display ads, email, print collateral, etc.
- Schedule content for maximum impact: decide when your content will be most relevant. For example, if you are preparing for a trade show, you should communicate that at least a few weeks in advance. If you are sending out an email campaign, you should try to optimize open rate by considering your audience’s time zone and habits.
- Measure, measure, measure: once something is published or a campaign is sent, it can continue to create value for your business in terms of data and analytics. What went well? What didn’t perform? How did a piece of content do in comparison to other content to the same or different audience?All these insights are clues into how you can test and continually optimize your content.
