Content has become so crucial in today’s digital world, and creating a comprehensive content strategy is vital to help achieve your business objectives.
Table of Contents
What is a content strategy?
A content strategy is a concrete plan for creating and distributing content for a business to achieve its goals. Any company or business can create content, but having the right strategy in place can be a big part of your company’s success. Here we look at a few things to consider when thinking about your content and your business goals.
What is the goal of your content?
Think about the reason you are creating content for your business. Setting clear goals and understanding what you want to achieve can help with the other elements of your content strategy.
Some examples of goals include building brand awareness, building trust, education, building an audience, increasing website traffic, lead generation and/or conversion.
For example, if one of your goals is to increase website traffic, you could create content based on keywords with high search volume, which will have readers continuously coming to your website.
If you want to educate your audience, you will need to create content that is thorough, clear, informative, and concise.
These are examples of what your goals may look like and how it can define other parts of your content strategy. The goal is to determine what they are and create content based on them.
Define your target audience
What is the nature of your business? Based on that, you will get a clearer understanding of your target audience, which can help lead your content strategy.
For example, suppose you own a travel agency specifically geared towards budget travelers. This can help you create content that will be valuable for your audience, which can help you achieve any of your content goals.
Define your content pillars
Consider the different ‘buckets’ or ‘themes’ your target audience may enjoy reading about. For example, if you have a travel website targeting budget travelers, some of your content pillars can be food, things to do, hotels, etc.
Your content pillars should be broad enough that you create critical pieces of content for each pillar yet niche enough to stay focused. You can then create specific content that falls under each pillar.
In this example, you won’t be inclined to write about the newest five-star hotels that have opened; instead, a better article could be about new all-inclusive resorts.
Defining your content pillars can help make your content strategy cohesive and ensure consistency across all sorts of content creation, which can ultimately lead to achieving your content goals.
What channels will you use to publish and share your content?
You will need to think about where your target audience consumes content. If you are targeting budget travelers between the ages of 18-25, they may use TikTok and Snapchat to view your content versus a group of luxury travelers between the ages of 45-55. As a result, you will need to think about this factor and plan accordingly. There is no point sharing your content on platforms that don’t necessarily reach your target audience. Read more: The Importance of Content Distribution
Measure your results
Once you define your business goals, you can also describe what success means to you. Look at website traffic, revenue, social media followers and engagement and more to measure how well your content performs on various channels. By looking at and tracking these metrics, you can understand what is working and what is not and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Conclusion
To summarize, a content strategy helps you ensure your content is aligned with your business goals. As you move through your journey, you can also get a better understanding of your audience, which leads to an increase in trust, brand awareness, and ultimately, increased revenue.