To create a successful content strategy, you first have to understand the concept behind creating a content strategy. Content strategy is the creation of content that is delivered to the right people at the right time. Your strategy will outline what types of content are appropriate at what times.
Companies need content strategies because it is the content blueprint that guides staff to know how and what to create, why to create it, where to distribute it and a comprehensive timeline to when it should be distributed. With a strategy in place, your company can more easily and congruently generate content that is creative, relative and positions your organization as a thought leader in the space. There are a few must have components to your overall strategy. Here are some points to consider on your way to creating the right content at the right time.
Create Personas
A buyer persona is a reflection of your ideal customer that you create based on market research and real data from existing customers. These act as a reference for what your customers are looking for as well as who they are. Some data points you might want to collect are demographic points such as age and gender, firmographic points such as the number of employees and revenue generated and behavior points such as interests and communication preferences. These will assist in building the model of your ideal customer. Creating a name for your personas, such as Office Manager Oliver or Bank Analyst Barbara will allow you to refer to them later on when creating content for those persona types. Before creating content, consider what persona you are targeting. Will it be a blog that contains minimal technical elements for someone like Office Manager Oliver or will it be a blog with highly technical elements that Bank Analyst Barbara will more likely understand? Create content that aligns with the data points and notes in your buyer personas.
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Alignment with Goals and Values
As you create your strategy, think about how you will align your company’s overall goals and values in your content. You need to understand where and how your company wants to grow, as well as what main values you need to focus on to get there. Is the plan to grow your business among executive leaders? If so, you need to create and message your content in places where executives such as chief executive officers and chief operations officers would consume it. After you have your personas created, you’ll have an idea of where executives go for their industry information and can then start generating content tailored for that space. What are your company’s core values? Embodying your core values in all aspects of your company, especially your content, is a way to show your prospects and audience what is important to your company and what you are all about.
Test Content
Testing is crucial to determine what content is performing the best among your audience. One way you can test is to A/B test different types of content. For example, let’s say you have an email campaign going out to your primary audience, which consists of executive and business leaders that are interested in purchasing your banking software. Before sending the email to the entire group, test a small percentage of those executives. Send 10% an article and send 10% a video. If you receive more opens and reads with your article than you receive views of your video, email the balance of that executive group the article.
Repurpose Existing Content
Not all content needs to be created from scratch. Conduct a content audit and you might find that you have some pieces that can be repurposed and repackaged into new content. For example, you have an old whitepaper that might not be up-to-date on design elements, but the information is still relevant and valuable to your audience. You can take the information from this whitepaper and create an eBook with a fresh design or even take small snippets and create social media content. Creating content is the hard part, but once you have it, you can revamp it to fit your audience and your plan.
Ultimately, you want to be a resource for your customers or prospects. If they think of you as the leader in the industry, they’ll go to you for best practices as well as your services. When your customer understands that you know the space, they continue to trust you build a relationship and these relationships are crucial to business success.
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