Content Strategy

If you’ve researched the latest digital marketing and business blogs, there’s a good chance you’ll have seen the phrase, “Content strategy.” This is a pretty hot topic within the realm of online marketing, so we’re going to break it down for you.

We like Margot Bloomstein’s (Appropriate Inc.) definition, “Planning for the creation, aggregation, delivery, and useful governance of useful, usable, and appropriate content in an experience.”

Hannah Smith and Adria Saracino also came up with a fabulous explanation: “A content strategy is a high-level vision that guides future content development to deliver against a specific business objective.”

With these descriptions in mind, this begs the question: Why do you need a content strategy?

Why do you need a content strategy?

As a wise person once said: “Fail to plan and plan to fail,” well this couldn’t be more true when it comes to content creation. If there’s no strategy behind it, you won’t reap the rewards of your hard work. Instead, you might risk confusing your target demographic. After all, if you’re publishing random material left, right, and center, you’ll likely water down the purpose and vision of your brand. You’re also more likely to produce generic content which probably won’t be shared by your following or rank highly in Google’s search results.

The wider implication of producing content without a strategy is that it’ll negatively impact your brand’s credibility, resulting in poorer conversion rates.

How to create a content strategy

If you want to start planning your content strategically, there are three kinds of research you need to do:

• Customer Research
• Competitor Research
• Company Research

Customer Research

The point of customer research is to understand the wants and needs of your audience better. Once you’ve established that, you can piece together the kind of purchasing journey your customers take and then market to them accordingly. This includes finding out how, where, and when they consume content.

Competitor Research

Quite simply, competitor research is when you review information about rival businesses. When it comes to content, you want to focus on the kinds of material they’re producing and where they’re distributing it. This works wonders for helping you stay on top of all the latest marketing tactics.

Company Research

During this phase, you need to sit down and work out what your brand’s values and strengths actually are; most notably, your brand’s unique selling point. You’ll also want to examine your existing content to see whether you’re providing value. Ask yourself: Does this material bring us closer to meeting our overarching business objectives?

The broader targets of your brand should always drive your content so you’ll need to tailor materials towards meeting these aims by aligning your content with your brand’s core values and message. In short, everything you publish should serve to boost the credibility of your business and provide your following with value—it really is as simple as that.