Whether you are a beginner with content marketing or an expert who has been using the same approach for some time, it won’t hurt to revisit your existing content strategy plan and ensure you are using the best one. To have the best content strategy, the approach has to be up-to-date, engaging, and innovative for prospects and customers- regardless of how or when they intend to make a purchase.
With companies increasing their spending on content marketing, you must ensure that suitable approaches are put in place for better results. Content strategy, a powerful and precious commodity, can never be used on a whim. This is owing to the fact that successful content marketing is highly dependent on a solid content strategy that makes the most out of every asset, wherever and whenever it is promoted or shared.
With this, let’s dive in and understand what the best content strategy is all about and ways of doing it right.
What is content strategy?
Content strategy refers to the process of creating, planning, measuring, and distributing content on all online platforms to achieve a pre-defined marketing and business goal. Companies can easily leverage content performance data to meet KPIs and maximize and control their content marketing efforts with the best content strategy.
Content strategy can either cover short or long-term strategies.
Why is the best content strategy important?
Promoting and creating content is not a cheap endeavor. With the existing industry where every marketing dollar has to prove its ROI, marketers have to ideally strategized better marketing efforts and ensure it meets all the pre-defined KPIs. It must also support the company’s financial and business goals.
Whether you intend to generate leads, raise brand awareness, or increase sales, having the best content strategy will help you close the gap between your marketing OPIs and actual results. It will certainly assist you in getting the most out of the content.
What is the best Content Strategy?
The simple thought of creating a content strategy by itself may seem overwhelming. However, it becomes simpler when you think of the content strategy as your working game plan aimed at your content marketing processes, goals, and expectations.
The best content strategy has to consider a KPI and work towards achieving it. It should act as a roadmap that helps in planning the exact steps to be taken to reach the desired goal.
Regardless, even with the best execution and planning, the content campaigns sometimes may not meet the desired KPIs. Well, that’s ok, since content strategy also features the analysis and measurement processes. This means the content can therefore be optimized for better performance in the future.
What Should a Reliable Content Strategy Include?
Different elements make up the best content strategy. All of these elements are vital if you wish to have a successful content strategy. This includes:
- Detailed content calendar: There are lots of moving parts within a content strategy. This means it’s important to have a calendar in place that will help you plan out your publication schedule. A visual map of your content calendar makes it easy to manage.
- Detailed KPIs and goals: Every digitalized content campaign has to be measured and tracked. This helps in comprehending if it is meeting its intended goal. It also makes defining the goals more precisely and detailed.
- Different content types: The best content strategy uses different content types to capture the audience’s interest from different perspectives. Examples of the content types include ebooks, videos, articles, info graphics, testimonials, podcasts, and more.
- Talented designers and writers: Great content will not simply come out of thin air. You have to outsource reliable writers, video editors, and graphic designers who have what it takes to produce high-quality content. The content has to be readable, inviting, appealing, and inviting to a specific audience.
- The right automation and marketing tools: The current content strategy features lots of complexity to be manually handled. Luckily, there are many digital marketing tools, with some being even free. Marketers can make use of these tools to automate different processes within their content marketing efforts.
- A good budget: There is nothing like free lunch. The same applies to content. Content marketing is also an investment that is designed to generate revenue and leads. Assigning a good budget gives room to the realization of potential content strategy.
How to Develop the Best Content Strategy Framework?
The best content strategy will require a good planning. Here we’ve narrowed it down to five steps that form the basic framework for a successful strategy:
Step 1: Define the Content Business Goals
The first step in creating a content strategy is by defining your business. Who are you? What do you do? Why do you do it? What customer queries are you trying to solve? How do you solve it differently or better? What are your short and also long-term goals? How will content marketing help you?
Your content strategy approach has to be as solid as your answers to the above questions. Well, create a list and being creative.
Step 2: Research More about your Audience
Content has to be consumed. It’s therefore important to understand who you are creating the content for. This is only achievable by identifying your target audience. This includes their interests, problems, and where they spend time online.
A better way of understanding your audience is by researching and creating a general profile for each client type that you intend to target. This is called a buyers persona.
Step 3: Come up with an Original and Unique Voice for your Content
Most of the time, people usually make the mistake of coming up with a content that is not original. So how do you make your content original, unique and valuable? Well, the answer is simple. All you need to do is connect to your brand’s authentic heart, share your unique perspective and knowledge, and find your unique voice!
Step 4: Select the Best Channels when Promoting your Content
Multichannel marketing is the new norm to digital marketing. Promoting your content while interacting with your audience on different platforms will easily seal the deal. Some of these channels include email marketing, social media, owned websites, and display ads, among others. All these channels have what it takes to take your content strategy to a whole new level.
The trick lies with identifying which channels best work with your audience. For example, a B2C strategy will focus more on Facebook and TikTok for the younger audiences, while a B2B content strategy has to include Linkedln as the key channel.
Step 5: Test your Campaigns and Content
The best content strategy feature more than just uploading the content and clicking the publish button. Lots of variables determine the performance of the content, and the only way of knowing what is working and what is not is through testing.
The best way of testing your digital campaigns is through A/B testing, commonly referred to as spilt testing. The testing involves running two versions of your content or ad concurrently, with a single element different in each content or ad like the headline, image, CTA copy, among others. You then track the performance of each version and analyze it to see which one is performing better.
Finally
There is a lot that goes into the best content strategy. You have to ensure you optimize and repurpose your content for the best results. Remember, a good content strategy will never happen overnight. However, the sooner you begin, the sooner you will have your best content strategy in place.
