Having a clear content strategy will help you stay on top of your posting schedule and ensure that everything you put out is in line with your overall goals.
How you craft a content strategy will ultimately be unique to your situation. There is no grand solution that every brand can copy to triple their revenue. However, there are a few core tactics that will put you on the right path:
1. Have a clear objective: Set specific objectives and they will guide all your content. Have you ever asked yourself why you need to publish content in the first place? Your objectives can be both short-term, for instance, posts leading up to an event or a product launch, and long-term: improving the SEO ranking of your website, generating more leads overall, or gaining more followers across various platforms. Your content should always contribute to an objective. They should also be in line with your brand/company’s overall objectives.
2. Set Long-term Goals (Divided into Smaller Goals): Building your content strategy goes more smoothly when you have something to strive for, as it helps you stay on track with your plans. You want to set a long-term goal, such as having a set number of subscribers within 2 years. From there, you want to set smaller goals or benchmarks and work backward to develop a plan to achieve them. Developing content is an assembly line of output, and when you’re working on it day in and day out, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Breaking down your strategy into manageable pieces simply prevents your process from becoming overwhelming. These smaller goals can be a breakdown of subscribers. Especially in companies where a small number of people manage a lot of content, it helps to keep your goals well within reach.
3. Write about what you know: As a reflection of your business, you want to demonstrate your expertise by writing about your industry and what you know about it. That lets you show off and make yourself a trusted resource in your field while also making your task simpler because you already put in the legwork to know what you’re writing about. It could also make your writing feel more natural, as you will be able to put your personal voice into it. Writing about what you know also keeps your topics within the scope of your industry. It’s good to write about topics that directly pertain to your business, but it also allows you to touch on topics that can help customers without being part of your sales.
4. Study your audience: In content chaos, the first mistake marketers make is leaning too heavily on intuition. They either try to reach everyone, or they trim their focus too narrowly on the person who has the most purchasing power. Gut instinct has a place in content marketing, but not if it goes unchecked. Do research to find out more about your primary and secondary audiences. And don’t be afraid to weave together qualitative and quantitative data.
5. Follow-up with metrics: Regardless of how you implement your strategy, backing up your ideas with data is the best way to know how your content will perform. For blogs, you can use CRM software to determine how many people visited your page, how they got to the page, as well as other information such as how long they stayed or if they clicked on anything else. That will help you learn what your most popular posts are, as well as which encourages action. Your metrics on emails or social media posts sharing content are also highly important. Knowing results for those is how you get insight for A/B testing to know which titles or posts perform better. You can use them to adjust your strategy and style to adhere to what people respond to best.
6. Experience and have fun: With any ongoing task, your blog will benefit from experimentation with new topics, title formats, and different distribution paths. There are few strings attached to blogs, so if something doesn’t work, it will likely only go unnoticed. At worst, you simply remove it from your site. But chances are, your experimentation won’t address anything controversial, just things that are slightly off the mark. The way you want to experiment is by choosing topics that are a little out of your wheelhouse and see if they gain extra attention.
