A sentence commonly shared in content marketing circles is, “You need a content strategy, not just a content marketing strategy.” I know this to be true because I was one of the content strategists making this proclamation. Initially, this advice was met with a healthy skepticism from content marketers, many of whom were up to their eyeballs creating blogs, e-books, white papers, guides, and so-called snackable content to be shared on social media.
It didn’t take long, however, for bloggers and marketers to realize the need to order their steps strategically while moving from content ideation to content creation and content amplification. That’s where content strategy comes into play. While content marketing strategy focuses on the ideation, design, creation, and amplification of your content, content strategy focuses primarily on ensuring the content you create maps to your business’s goals and the needs of your customers and would-be customers.
In this article, we’ll be focused on content strategy, which is not only necessary and achievable by even the smallest outfits—including one-person organizations—it can actually be easy and fun. By the time you’re done reading this post, you’ll realize the truth of those words.
In this article:
What is a Content Strategy?
First, let’s tackle the obvious question you likely have: What is content strategy? And though there are many definitions, the one often taken as gospel comes from Kristina Halvorson, who popularized the discipline and who is the first person to use it prominently in the U.S.
“Content strategy guides planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content,” she has said and written on numerous occasions.
Kristina Halvorson
In a nutshell, content strategy connects your business’s content ideas and efforts to your overarching business goals and users’ needs. That is, everything you do related to content maps back to the needs of the business, with the added benefit of helping prospects and customers fulfill their goals as well. I make content strategy real to small business owners by saying, “Content helps ensure you don’t waste time on content that won’t help your business.”
Content strategy is a throughline for your business, helping you get from where you are to where you want to go as quickly and as easily as possible. Not having a content strategy is like walking a tightrope or highwire, as it helps keep you singularly focused on the goal in front of you.
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If a goal for your WordPress.com website is to attract more traffic to the site, then an element of your content strategy would highlight the various steps you’d take (tactics) to accomplish that goal and what the impact of doing so would be.
It’s important to remember that while your website might be the center of your business’s universe, the discovery process for your blog or business often takes place away from your site, even offline entirely, such as via word of mouth. That’s why a thorough content strategy covers online and offline and takes into account all content forms, including text, video, images, audio, and video. Our content strategy template will help guide you along the way.
Who benefits from a Content Strategy?
Most midsize and larger brands understand the need for having a content strategy, but it’s not uncommon to hear, from small outfits, such as solopreneurs and bloggers, “Do I really need a content strategy?” The answer is yes. Here’s why.
First, there are more than 572 million blogs online, and more than 7 million blog posts are published per day. Sadly, most of the content online is never read in its entirety, and more than 90% gets zero organic traffic.
With a content strategy, you can be certain to never fall into this category. Your blog’s pages and posts, email content and social media content work to help you accomplish your business’s goals.
What are the benefits of creating a content strategy
Recent research makes clear the need for a content strategy, as brands that have one are far more likely to be successful, not the least because it helps ensure your goals and content are aligned.
How to apply the 5 W’s to create a Content Strategy Framework
Content strategy begins with the business, not the customer or user. That’s an important distinction because you cannot afford to provide prospects with content they find valuable but that won’t help your business.
That’s why a sound content strategy begins with the 5W’s:
- Why are you creating content
- Who are you creating content for
- What content will you create
- Where will you publish content
- When will you create the content
Businesses that get these areas right more easily create content that earns trust, loyalty, and traffic to their websites.
Who are you creating content for?
Once you have your business’s goal firmly established, you can then draw from the knowledge you have of your current customers, plus your ideal prospects and customers, to determine who you’d like to work with in the future. By gleaning learnings from your previous clients and customers, you gather an understanding of the best fit for you and your ideal customers—that is, who you most enjoy working with and with who you’re able to get the best results for.
The Content Strategy Template helps you easily keep track of this information
With these experiences top of mind, you’re able to better understand your target customers’ needs and goals. You also have a mental profile of who they are, what challenges and pain points they have and, most important, how you are uniquely positioned to help them.
Now, you can start doing some investigating to find these prospects online, beginning with a simple google search using the keywords associated with your business or service.
Other places to look might include the following:
- Facebook groups
- Slack groups
- Reddit subreddits
Once you find the populations online, make note of the terms they are using to describe their pain points and where they go for information on how to remedy the problems. This social listening is invaluable for finding and growing your audience.
Why do you need to create content?
In addition to helping you attract and retain your ideal customers, and solve their pain points, a major focus of the content on your website is to generate traffic, engagement, revenue, and loyalty for your brand. When you create content on your site, it’s not just seen by the people who visit the site; it’s also possible for it to be shared on social media, in a text or by email.
It can also show up in the search engine results pages (SERPs), exposing your website to potentially thousands of people interested in your services. That’s why creating a content strategy that begins with the needs of your brand is critical: It helps ensure that the people who end up on your website know what you’re uniquely qualified to deliver and that they can have confidence in your ability to do so.
A very important element to keep top of mind as you’re creating content is making sure it continues to track with the goals outlined in the content strategy roadmap. For example, if increasing awareness and sales are your goals, you’ll need to make sure you’re tracking your content’s performance with these goals in mind.
Instead of tracking generic traffic to your site, you’ll need to measure brand mentions online (awareness) and qualified traffic, that is, from people who are visiting the pages that help you identify them as warm leads (e.g., product pages, guides, contact us, etc.)
What content types should you publish?
A major hurdle most WordPress.com site owners have to get over is what type of content they should create. Often, the owners are more comfortable creating a single type of content—blog posts, for example, but worry that they should also be creating videos, infographics, slide decks, and podcasts.
Add in the various categories (how-to guides, product tutorials, thought leadership pieces, case studies, news pieces, feature stories, etc.), and it can get downright overwhelming.
What I recommend to my clients is to focus on the probable and not the possible. That means delivering content that (a) you are most capable and able to deliver and (b) that has the highest chance of success in reaching your goals based on previous experience.
To do this, I have them view content through the prism of the marketing funnel instead of concerning themselves with the various content types or categories. The marketing funnel accounts for the various stages of the buying journey that all prospects eventually pass through—but not everyone goes through all of the stages.
The four stages of the marketing funnel include the following areas:
- Awareness: This is when people are looking to learn more about a product or service you might offer, so they are likely to read blog posts, peruse social feeds or sign up for emails.
- Consideration: They’ve discovered your business and are now taking in your information, especially guides and case studies, to see if it helps remove their pain points or reach their goals.
- Purchase: You have been chosen as the brand they want to do business with, so they are looking at your pricing, support, and contact pages.
- Support or retention: They are now a customer and are likely to frequent your forum or read how-to articles on your site.
Thinking holistically, aligning goals with what you know about your ideal customers helps make everything flow more smoothly and prevents you from doing work that has little value to your brand.
When and where will you create and publish content?
At its core, content strategy ensures you do far less guessing before, during, and after you create and share content. If you’ve committed to prioritizing the goals of your business, understanding your audience and their pain points, and done some social listening to decipher where they hang out online, you’re ahead of 90% of your competition.
The popular Bullseye Framework can help you further refine and streamline the process of creating contention. It involves a simple three-step process using a bullseye:
- Brainstorm the marketing channels, based on your content strategy, that could be used to help you reach your goals. Place those marketing channels in the outermost ring of the bullseye.
- Place the channels you deem to have the greatest potential for impact in the middle ring.
- Test the channels in the middle ring.
- Add the best-performing channels to the center of the bullseye, and focus your energies on those channels.
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As you know, there are dozens of marketing channels:
- Websites (your own or as a guest blogger on another site)
- Blogs
- Social Media
- Podcast
- YouTube
- Offline events (e.g., trade shows, events, etc.)
- Public relations
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Social and Display ads
- Etc.
The challenge is likely to be less that you cannot find the optimal channel to test your content. It’s more likely that you’ll spend the most time agonizing over what content you should create. The best answer is “It depends.”
Now that you have a better understanding of how best to determine the content you should create and where the best places are to share it, the next question you’ll likely have is, “How often should I be creating and sharing content?”
I feel confident saying that there is no best publishing cadence, regardless of channel. What I’ve seen work the best for bloggers and business owners is to have a plan and then stick with it until they find something better.
Often, time is one of the biggest challenges. Creating content and then sharing it across different platforms takes time and effort. It’s best to start where you can with what you can produce without taking focus away from your business and share it on the platforms you’ve identified as most likely to have the greatest yield. You can always create more content, or more content types, later and share it on additional platforms.
These three tips provide a good starting place:
- Plan your content using an editorial calendar, which helps you stay organized and track progress.
- A huge plus of using an editorial calendar is it allows you to map out the cadence of your content by channel. You can see, at a glance, which channels need more or less content, based on your goals, and you can make changes accordingly.
- Develop a reporting schedule to measure the impact of your content strategy. This will allow you to see if your content efforts are having the desired result; it also allows you to see which content types and content platforms are performing best.
Conclusion
When people hear “content strategy,” they think of a large, multifaceted documentation effort that’s a chore to create, maintain and adhere to. What a content strategy really amounts to, however, is simply a plan that helps align your content goals with your brand’s overall goals. By following the steps in this guide, you can quickly and easily create a content strategy that helps you stay on track and more easily reach your goals.
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