If the phrase content strategy sounds a bit illusive to you, we’re here to give you the lowdown on what it is, and how it can benefit your business. From enhanced brand awareness, to growing your bottom line, find out more about how a targeted content strategy can help you to meet your objectives.
What is a content strategy?
A content strategy is made up of the ideation, planning, creation, and sharing of assets related to your business. Your content strategy serves as a central point for all of the ways you’d like to build authority online and amongst your target audience, and when it’s used in this way it can be a genuine asset to your business. Content strategies aren’t a set-in-stone concept; they evolve and grow with your business, adapting to solve new challenges and create more meaningful awareness.
What are the components of a content strategy?
The components of a content strategy are basically any kind of material that you create, publish, and share; consider all of the following examples:
- Blog posts
- Landing pages
- Whitepapers
- Newsletters
- Podcasts
- PR campaign content
- Press releases
- Infographics
- Videos
- PDFs
What is the purpose of a content strategy?
Here’s where it gets juicy! There are a few different purposes that a well-executed content strategy can serve, and they’re all of equal importance.
Streamlining content creation
First and foremost, and perhaps the most practical advantage to be had is that by creating a content strategy, you’ll have a clear, coordinated approach to follow when it comes to sharing points of engagement with your audience. The plan that you create could be laid out as a calendar to help you to ensure you’re publishing content frequently, or you might take a thematic approach, focusing on targeting different topics over a set period with various content formats. There are plenty of other ways that you could approach this, but the outcome will be similar; you’ll have a roadmap that helps you to create and share targeted content.
Creating a clear, consistent brand voice
A considered content strategy can also help you to create a more cohesive, consistent brand voice. The smartest usage of messaging is to create a brand voice that your customers can resonate with, and in order to do this, you have to understand exactly who your content strategy will be ‘talking’ to. To find these topics, lean on your business values first:
- What’s your mission?
- What do you want to change?
- What values are non-negotiable to your brand?
Let’s use the example of an organic period products startup:
- What’s your mission? To change the way women perceive and use period products by providing sustainable, organic alternatives that are effective and environmentally friendly.
- What do you want to change? We want to play a part in reducing the environmental impact of traditional period products and promote a healthier lifestyle for women, eliminating harmful chemicals and plastics from their menstrual care.
- What values are non-negotiables to your brand? Sustainability, intersectionality and equality in menstrual health, inclusivity, community, transparency, education.
Now, you know exactly what your brand voice needs to communicate; you just need to come up with the content pieces that match this!
Helping you to hit your business goals
Your content strategy will also be a key tool in helping you to reach your business goals. Consider your business objectives before making any kind of content strategy plans:
- You’re a fintech startup looking to build your audience and boost brand awareness.
- You’re a subscription-based wellness retailer looking to boost customer retention.
- You’re a non-profit organization aiming to generate more signups to your latest in-person event.
- You’re a digital travel company looking to refresh your customer experience.
You can create a content strategy based on each ‘goal’ we have outlined – all it takes is doing the right kind of research, and knowing your audience.
Boosting brand awareness
There’s no real one-stop shop for boosting brand awareness, as efforts from multiple marketing channels can contribute to building and sustaining your presence – but your content strategy can definitely play a part in this.
A content cluster is an approach used by organic marketers, intended to help clients to gain essential online credibility (brand awareness brownie points!). In this approach, you’d take a theme from your content roadmap and come up with a wealth of supporting topics, all of which would serve users with additional context on the theme that you chose. When you’re creating your subcategories/supporting content, you’d still go into as much detail as possible, as the aim is to communicate how much of an expert you are on the topic in question.
This expertise is understood as Topical Authority, a system used by Google to understand which results provide users with the most valuable, trustworthy, authoritative answers to their queries. In principle, websites that demonstrate plenty of Topical Authority are more likely to be shown in SERPs, boosting brand awareness in turn.
If you take the content cluster route, you’ll amass plenty of pieces that have Digital PR potential – by this, we mean content that you could push out to relevant publications, with the aim of securing backlinks from credible, off-site sources. This way, you’ll be getting more out of your content creation efforts, too – all you’ll need is an accompanying pitch or press release. Links and off-page SEO authority all serve to solidify your position as a trusted expert.
Increased ROI
Content strategies can boost your bottom line! When you’re publishing targeted, engaging, high-value content regularly, you’re going to attract more users to your website based on relevance. For example, the content that you’ve created could be remedying a pain point for them, or it could simply coincide with the values that they feel are important. These organic connections foster enhanced brand perception, boosting the likelihood of conversions, boosting ROI over time.
What does a good content strategy look like?
The only factor that truly distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ when it comes to content strategy is research. You have to dive deep during the early stages, both in relation to your customer and your business. Your customer research should cover all eventualities – from your existing client base, to the customers that you’d like to have. Scope out their demographics, define their interests, and find out what they’re lacking in – i.e, what are they not getting from your competitors? When it comes to your business, be transparent and authentic when exploring your values. Customers will look for legitimacy to be able to trust in your content, so don’t make superficial associations to the climate crisis if your mission statement doesn’t align with this!
Refresh your content strategy with us
If you’re keen to revamp the way you communicate with your customers, get in touch with us! We’re here to help you to see the long-term benefits that a meaningful content strategy can have.