There are some pretty important considerations that you need to make in order to benefit from a content strategy – and before you ask, no, it’s definitely not as simple as creating the odd blog once every so often! If you want your content strategy to add long-term, tangible value to your website, then there’s a few steps that you will need to take. We’re giving you the perfect starting point with this introductory guide, so take note of each stage and use this process as part of your own approach.
1. Get clear on your goals.
The first phase of any strategy ought to be outlining the goals that you want to achieve. Your goals might include:
- Growing brand awareness
- Developing brand visibility
- Supporting lead generation
- Enhancing customer retention
- Becoming a thought leader within your space
- Supporting seasonal marketing campaigns
It might be tempting to want to cover a few different aims at once with your strategy plans, and while it’s okay to expand the focus, our best suggestion would be to prioritise the themes that also tie into your wider business objectives. For example, if you’re a startup business in the femtech space, your initial priorities will be to grow brand awareness and visibility first and foremost. In this way, you’re emphasising the goals that reflect where your business is at in its own journey. As this type of business progresses, its goals are inevitably going to change and evolve, and this can be reflected by switching up your content strategy efforts.
2. Setting your KPIs
Once you’ve set your strategy objectives, it’s time to turn your attention towards every marketer’s favourite acronym – KPIs. Having goals is one feat, but coming up with a way to measure the progress you’ve made towards meeting them is a whole different ball game. KPIs allow you to track your content strategy efforts, and they can also tell you what might not be working as well in terms of bringing your business closer to its aims. When choosing which KPIs to measure, consider the two main types:
Qualitative
A qualitative KPI represents subjective measurements, associated with things like customer sentiment, feedback, and engagement.
Quantitative
A quantitative KPI is a measurement associated with hard data, like website visitors, events, or revenue generated.
It’s likely that you’ll benefit from measuring a blend of both types of KPIs to give you a bigger picture of your efforts, and to help you understand where you have opportunities for iteration.
3. Establish your target audience
Content is designed to make users resonate with your brand – but what type of users are we talking about? Scoping out an identity for your target audience is essential, and it will inform a lot of the decisions that you make. You might be targeting a handful of different personas, and the more familiar you are with the characteristics of each, the better you’ll be able to apply these findings to your content. Take some time to set out some definitive audience segments, and list their key qualities, the 3 P’s:
Priorities – a gen Z audience will have polar opposite priorities to baby boomers.
Preferences – different lifestyles and demographics will present different preferences in terms of content themes, platforms used and more.
Problems – what issues do they face that your content needs to address? How can your business solve their problems?
Create a persona for each audience segment, and answer the above. Then, when it comes to content ideation, you’ll be able to vet your suggestions against what you know about your target audience.
4. Identifying customer journey touchpoints
Unfortunately, one piece of content won’t resonate with every touchpoint in your customer journey. When we’re talking about touchpoints, we’re referring to the five defined stages of a customer journey: awareness, consideration, purchase/decision, loyalty, and advocacy
Your content will be viewed differently from each touchpoint – whether it’s a user discovering your business for the first time, revisiting your website while weighing up their options, or finally choosing to convert. This also stretches to the customers that have converted and may go on to share their experience of your business with others. To address each touchpoint, you need to consider the things that matter to a customer at each stage, for example:
Using long-form, educational blogs, social media posts, or short explainer videos to build awareness.
Sharing whitepapers, case studies, email newsletters or hosting webinars to target those at the consideration stage.
Producing optimised product landing pages, offering free trials/freemium plans to encourage a decision or conversion.
Creating onboarding collateral for new customers or encouraging user-generated content to drive retention.
Devising referral plans or holding VIP events to nurture advocacy.
5. Choose your content formats
As our customer journey content list suggests, there’s a few different ways to capture your audience’s attention. Content formatting involves mapping out your themes and ideas, and choosing the most suitable means of presenting each topic. Here, the goal should be to choose a format that users will find valuable and engaging – and our best piece of advice would be to venture beyond what you know. If you’ve only ever used blog posts, could you try summarising a post in a short explainer-style video? Or could you turn your blog post into an industry-wide whitepaper? Infographics are another great way to add onsite value, and they double up as an effective digital PR asset.
Come up with some formatting options for each idea, and use the customer journey stages to determine the best approach for each.
6. Start creating your content
Once you’re happy with your ideas and supporting formats, you can start planning content production! It’s always helpful to centralise this process, and a simple way to do so could be to create a quarterly content calendar. This helps you to stay accountable, and it’s also handy for giving your strategy opportunities to engage with other events – for example, you could plan in key awareness days on your calendar, so you can create relevant pieces that coincide with these times of the year.
Personally, we’d take an extra step here and research when search volume peaks for subtopics within your calendar, planning a content production timeline that aligns with the spike in search interest. It’s an added SEO layer… clever, right?
7. Ask for feedback
Lastly, once you’ve started implementing your strategy and you’re reporting regularly on the KPIs that matter based on your goals, don’t shy away from asking for feedback. Creating internal feedback loops with key areas of your business, such as sales teams, could be an efficient way to build real customer experiences into your content strategy.
Craft a content strategy for your business that creates a clear impact
When your content strategy factors in all of the considerations that we have outlined, it stands a greater chance of generating tangible value for your business – and who doesn’t want that? Targeted content can be used to support your lead generation efforts, grow brand visibility, and increase customer loyalty. Stop sleeping on your strategy, and contact us today to put content marketing to work.