Google has begun to hunt down websites that churn out content just for the sake of it, making it all the more important to have a proper content strategy for your brand’s website.
Google’s 2023 helpful content update has sent marketers into a frenzy with many websites reporting a lower view count for their blogs.
If you’ve just launched your brand’s website or you’re thinking of revamping your content strategy, then this blog is your ultimate guide. We’ll tell you everything about content strategy, including what it is, why your business needs it, and how you can use it for your business.
Let’s start with the basics:
Table of Contents
Why Your Business Needs a Content Strategy?
How to Create a Content Strategy for Your Business?
Step 1: Define your content goals
Step 2: Research your target audience
Step 3: Perform a content audit
Step 4: Choose your content types
Step 5: Create your content plan
Step 6: Develop a process for content creation
What is Content Strategy?
Content strategy is how you plan, make, and use content to reach your goals and help your audience. Content is anything you create to share your message, like words, pictures, sounds, etc. Content strategy helps you choose what to say, how to say it, where to say it, and when to say it.
Why Your Business Needs a Content Strategy?
A content marketing strategy is a plan that guides your content creation and distribution to achieve your business goals and satisfy your audience needs. A content strategy can help your business:
- Generate more traffic and leads from your website and other platforms
- Experiment with different marketing tactics to increase your revenue
- Educate your prospects and build your brand awareness
- Create content with purpose and quality
- Optimize your budget and resources
- Understand your content’s performance and where you can improve it
A content marketing plan is essential for any business that wants to succeed in the digital age. A 2023 State of Content Marketing Report by Semrush found that 80% of the most successful content marketers have a documented strategy.
The Content Writer team, with years of experience writing content, found several common mistakes that companies make while writing blogs for their website. These mistakes can have a negative effect on SEO – read our guide about how you can avoid content writing mistakes.
How to Create a Content Strategy for Your Business?
Step 1: Define your content goals
Before you start creating any content, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your content strategy. What are the specific outcomes that you want to see from your content efforts? How will you measure your success?
To answer these questions, you need to set SMART goals for your content strategy. SMART stands for:
Specific: Goals should be clear and well-defined goals
Measurable: Goals must be quantifiable and trackable
Achievable: Realistic and attainable goals
Relevant: Aligned with your overall business aims and vision
Time-bound: Should have a deadline or a timeframe
Some examples of SMART content goals are:
- Increase organic traffic to your website by 50% in the next 6 months
- Grow your email subscribers by 25% in the next 3 months
- Reduce your bounce rate by 10% in the next 4 weeks
Setting SMART goals for your content strategy will help you:
- Focus your content efforts on the most important and impactful areas
- Track and evaluate your content performance and progress
- Adjust and optimize your content strategy as needed
Step 2: Research your target audience
Once you have defined your content goals, you need to have a deeper understanding of who you are creating content for – your target audience
Who are your ideal customers? What are their needs, fears, tastes, and actions? How can you create content that resonates with them and solves their problems?
To answer these questions, you need to conduct a buyer persona research to understand your target audience.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some educated assumptions. Personas help you create content that is relevant, engaging, and personalized for your audience.
There are many methods and tools you can use to conduct persona research, such as:
- Surveys
You can use online tools like SurveyMonkey to create and distribute surveys to your existing or potential customers. Surveys help you collect quantitative and qualitative data about your audience, such as their demographics, interests, pain points, goals, etc.
- Interviews
Interviews help you gain deeper insights into your audience’s motivations, frustrations, expectations, and opinions. You can use phone calls or face-to-face meetings to interview your customers or prospects.
- Analytics
Analytics help you track and measure your audience’s behavior, such as how they find your content, how long they stay on your pages, what actions they take, etc. Google Analytics or Facebook Insights helps you analyze your brand’s website and social media performance.
- Social media
Social media help you learn more about your audience’s preferences, opinions, feedback, and questions.
HubSpot provides a free Make My Persona tool to help you organize and visualize your persona data. If you’re wondering what a buyer persona typically includes, the following are the basic items:
- Name: A fictitious name that helps you humanize your character
- Photo: A stock photo that represents your persona’s appearance
- Background: Basic information about your persona’s personal and professional life, such as age, gender, location, education, income, job title, industry, etc.
- Goals: The main objectives or outcomes that your persona wants to achieve
- Challenges: The main problems or pain points that your persona faces or wants to overcome
- Solutions: The ways that your product or service can help your persona achieve their goals and overcome their challenges
- Sources: The channels or platforms that your persona uses to find information or solutions, such as search engines, social media, blogs, podcasts, etc.
- Objections: The potential barriers or concerns that your persona might have before buying your product or service, such as price, quality, trust, etc.
Step 3: Perform a content audit
You need to evaluate the current state of your content and identify gaps and opportunities.
How well is your existing content performing? Which content needs to be improved, updated, or deleted? Which content topics or types are missing or underrepresented?
To answer these questions, you need to conduct a content audit.
A content audit is the process of collecting and analyzing your content assets, such as landing pages, blog posts, ebooks, videos, etc. A content audit helps you keep an inventory of your content and give insights into how to optimize it for your goals and audience.
There are many steps and tools you can use to conduct a content audit, such as:
- Gather your content and create an inventory
You need to list all the content assets on your website and organize them in a spreadsheet. Collect the URL, title, format, word count, traffic, bounce rate, conversions, etc.
- Categorize your content
Group your content into categories based on topic, keyword, buyer stage, persona, etc. This will help you see which content is relevant and engaging for your audience and which content is not.
- Evaluate your content
Assess the quality and performance of your content based on your content goals and audience needs with tools like Yoast SEO or SEMrush to check the SEO optimization of your content.
- Recommend actions for your content
Decide what to do with your content using the 4 R’s framework – Retain, Refresh, Repurpose, or Remove.
- Retain the content that is high-quality and high-performing.
- Refresh the content that is outdated or underperforming.
- Repurpose the content in a new form to reuse in other formats or channels.
- Remove the content that is irrelevant, duplicate, or low-quality.
Step 4: Choose your content types
Content types are the formats or mediums you use to present your content, such as blog posts, ebooks, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc.
But you need to align your marketing plan with your business goals, and for that, there are three things to consider:
- Your content goals
What are the specific outcomes that you want to achieve with your content?
For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, you can choose content types that have high shareability and virality, such as infographics or videos.
If you want to generate leads, you can choose content types that offer value and require opt-in, such as ebooks and webinars.
- Your target audience
What are the preferences and expectations of your ideal customers?
If your audience is busy and prefers to consume content on the go, you might choose content types that are easy to access and digest, such as podcasts or blogs.
If your audience is visual and likes to see how things work, you might choose content types that are engaging and interactive, such as demos or quizzes.
- Your resources
What are the time, budget, and skills that you have available for creating and distributing content?
If you are a small business owner with a limited budget and a small team, you might choose content types that are low-cost and easy to produce, such as blog posts or social media posts.
If you have a larger budget and a dedicated content team, you might choose content types that are high-quality and professional, such as white papers or case studies.
There are many types of content that you can use for your content strategy, but here are some of the most popular ones:
- Blog posts
- Ebooks
- Infographics
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Webinars
Step 5: Create your content plan
The next step is to create a content plan that outlines the topics, formats, channels, and schedules for your content strategy. A content plan helps you organize and streamline your content creation and distribution process.
Here’s how to create a content plan:
- Brainstorm content ideas.
- Sit together with your content team and write down a list of content ideas that are relevant, engaging, and valuable for your audience and your business.
- You can use tools like Semrush’s Topic Research or AnswerThePublic to find popular and trending topics in your industry.
- You can also use Google Trends to analyze the performance and demand of different content types and formats.
- Prioritize content ideas.
- From this long list of content ideas, rank the ones based on their importance, urgency, and feasibility.
- You can use tools like Trello or Asana to create a content backlog and assign priorities to each content idea.
- Semrush’s Content Marketing Platform or HubSpot’s Content Strategy Tool to map your content ideas to your buyer personas and buyer stages.
- Choose content formats and channels.
- You need to decide which content types and mediums you will use to create and distribute your content.
- Google Analytics helps you evaluate the performance and preferences of your existing content formats and channels.
- Use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to optimize your content headlines and formats for different platforms.
- Create a content calendar.
- One of the most important steps in your content strategy is to create a schedule that specifies when and where you will publish your content.
- For small businesses, free tools like Google Calendar is more than enough to manage your content calendar.
- You can also use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to automate and streamline your content distribution across multiple channels.
Step 6: Develop a process for content creation
Your content creation process must follow three ideologies – quality, consistency, and efficiency.
A content creation process is a series of steps that you follow to produce and deliver your content, from research to optimization.
Developing a content creation process involves the following steps:
- Research your topic
You need to gather relevant and reliable information and data to support your content idea. Here’s our guide to find and hire expert content writers for your brand’s content.
- Outline your content
Create a structure and a flow for your content that covers the main points and subpoints of your topic.
- Draft your content
Then write or create your content based on your outline and research. Use Grammarly or Hemingway to check and improve the writing quality of your content.
- Edit and proofread your content
You need to review and revise your content to ensure that it is clear, accurate, and error-free.
- Optimize your content
Use tools like Semrush’s On Page SEO Checker to optimize your content for your audience and your goals, such as SEO, conversions, engagement, etc.
To Sum Up
You need to publish and manage your content to maximize its reach, engagement, and performance. Publishing and managing your content involves the actions you take to deliver and maintain your content.
Publishing and managing your content involves the following steps:
- Upload your content to your website or platform
- Share your content on your channels and networks
- Update your content regularly
- Delete or archive your content when necessary
We understand if all this sounds too much work. At the same time, a content strategy is a crucial step in a brand’s marketing plan.
If you feel stuck at any point, reach out to The Content Writer. We are a content writing agency in Dubai with expertise in blog writing, website content writing, technical writing, ecommerce content, and other SEO content writing projects.
Call us any time at +971566447213.
