7 Questions to Define Your Content Strategy
The great irony of content creation is that it seems simple. When you think of a blog post, a graphic or a video, often times you’ll follow it with: I could do that. And it’s true, you could! But the act of creating a post or design then sharing online isn’t the only thing involved in content marketing.
A content strategy should be a narrative created to tell your brand’s story. Naturally, it will need to include the same elements as a novel: the who, what, why, when, where and how. Unlike a novel, the story won’t have a clear start and finish. It’s your job as content creators to make each piece of content stand alone to tell a story, while fitting into the narrative to accomplish company goals.
When you’re starting out planning a content strategy, you’ll need to figure out the following:
1. What is the goal of your content strategy?
There are infinite possibilities in content marketing, with choices to be made about what type of content, which topics to cover, etc. Defining a clear goal in the beginning will help you avoid overwhelm when creating each piece of content. Your goals should play into your customer journey, or the path you imagine your target audience takes to make a purchase from you.
2. Who will be consuming and engaging with your content?
Content marketing is not about casting a wide net, but about providing value to the individuals who consume your content. Take a moment to consider who it is you’re talking to. While you may have more than one target audience, depending on your company’s range of products and services, it’s best to stick to one target audience per piece of content, in order to add value to their life.
A few things to consider about your target audience include:
Age
Gender
Stage of Life
Family or Marital Status
Geographic Location
Occupation and Income
Hobbies
When They Spend Their Time Online
3. What content would benefit your target audience the most?
There are many different learning styles, and those translate pretty well into how we consume media. The same information can be given through a blog, video, graphic or podcast. But even choosing a different method of content delivery will mean targeting a different audience.
4. Where will you be publishing your content?
While it may be tempting to open an account on each major social media site, it’s not a good idea. The key element of content marketing is consistency. People will follow along on an account that regularly provides value, but are quick to drop if it stops. A good rule of thumb is to consider the different ways your competitors use their profiles and where they are. You’ll also want to reference your target audience research above, to understand where your audience is online.
You can also look into different automation tactics for social media, such as If This Then That, which helps to simplify content strategy [link to blog post on automation]. We use it to post our Instagram photos natively to Twitter, saving us time on management.
5. When will your content be published?
Creating a consistent schedule to use as a guideline for creating content is key. You’ll need to look ahead into coming months, while also focusing on individual posts each day. There are several tools available to help you plan this, but a safe bet is always using Google Calendar. Each content team is different, so take time to find the one that works best for your company.
6. How will you measure your content’s success?
You won’t hit it out of the ball park the first time, and it’s important to understand why a piece of content did or didn’t get the engagement you wanted. Having a clear way of measuring the success of a post is critical to making the right choices in the future. We recommend using an analytics service, looking over it once a month to decide what worked and what didn’t. Then you’ll be able to provide more of what your audience responds to and weed out the topics or content formats that they didn’t like.
7. Why are you posting each piece of content?
You should never create a piece of content without a clear idea of how it plays into the overall goals of your company. It can be to improve brand awareness by telling a brand story, to update stakeholders in the company of news, or to give insight on how current customers can use a product, to name a few.
Bonus Tip:
One important thing to note is that your goal for posting a piece of content should not be to make a sale. Expecting any single piece of content to be the reason someone makes a sale with your company is like saying that only the person who scores the goal in a sport matters. It’s not true. Like in football, points are scored when a bunch of plays are made down a field. It minimizes the work of everyone in your company to expect a sale to be made after each read your blog post gets.
See this youtube video to learn more about the common misconceptions of content marketing:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BXZet0SYJnA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Remember that marketing isn’t an exact science. You’ll need to create a strategy that can be revisited often to make changes. You’ll also need to be open to how the nature of digital content changes. You can stay up-to-date on the new practices and methods by following these five blogs on content marketing and social media management.
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