Content marketing helps to build brand awareness, loyalty, and trust. It’s a vital part of your broader marketing strategy, and the benefits cannot be overstated. Putting together an effective content strategy takes times, research, and careful consideration – if you want it to be a success, that is. Here are the five things you can’t afford to ignore when building a content strategy for your business.
Your audience
So often, businesses start their plans with what they will write, where they’ll publish it, how they’ll promote it and so on. But this is putting the horse before the cart. All of these elements are important. But you can’t possibly make an informed decision for any of these without knowing who your audience is. Don’t write for the sake of writing. Find out who your audience is, what their pain points are, and how your content will bring them value. Discover where they hang out online, and the kinds of content they consume and share. Many content strategists find it useful to create buyer personas for this purpose.
Promotion
You put all that effort into creating compelling content, but how will your readers find it? You’ll need to consider how you’ll promote your content to your target audience. Consider all bases, but some useful ones are email newsletters and social media. Use paid social media, like Facebook ads, to target specific audiences who would find value in your content, and who may not discover your business otherwise.
SEO
Make your content work for you and boost your ranking in search engines. Your blog posts offer an opportunity to maximize on your keywords and to generate links, all of which will see you rank higher in Google. For this precise reason, it might also be worth guest posting as part of your content strategy so that you can get important links back to your site. Not sure where to start with SEO? You can hire SEO experts to optimize your content, or even get a professional SEO audit of your website.
Variety
Yes, blog posts might be the obvious form of content – and they are very valuable. But could you produce a more diverse range of content? This might not make sense for every business. However, if it suits your niche and your audience, why not consider videos, podcasts, infographics, and so on. That way, your content appears to be more fresh and appealing. It also gives you a wider variety of material to draw upon for social media.
Your voice
When you first set out to create a content strategy, you’ll likely spend a lot of time looking around for inspiration. This is great, just remember not to copy. Stick to your business’s brand and voice, and aim your writing at your particular audience. That way, you’ll appeal to the right people and start building up your brand awareness. Take time to develop a brand guide that outlines your brand’s tone of voice, grammar guidelines, and language use. That way, you can maintain a distinctive brand voice that builds trust and loyalty among readers.
