A content strategy is a plan for how you will create, publish, and manage your content. It includes your overall goals for your content, who will create it, what kind of content you will create, and when and where you will publish it.
A content strategy ensures that all of your content is created with a purpose in mind. It helps you be consistent with your messaging and branding and keeps you from wasting time and resources on creating content that doesn’t serve a purpose. Creating a content strategy doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming.
Follow these six steps to creating a content strategy that will help you to grow your business:
Step One: Define Your Goals
What do you want the content you publish to achieve? For example, do you want to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or generate new leads? First, be detailed about the goals of your content, including narrowing down the purpose of one particular piece of content. Then, you want an overall strategy to help you achieve those goals.
Step Two: Know Your Audience
Who do you want to reach with your content? Creating personas for your ideal customers will help you understand their needs and how they like to consume content. Then, with this information in mind, you can create content that appeals to them and speaks to their specific pain points.
Step Three: Create Valuable Content
Your content should be interesting and informative, and it should offer value to your audience. Ask yourself if your content is something that people would actually want to read or watch. Would it help them to solve a problem? Is it entertaining? If not, ditch it and start over.
Step Four: Promote Your Content
Once you’ve created great content, don’t let it languish on your website or blog. Instead, share your content on social media, email it to your list, and get creative with other promotion strategies. The more who see it, the more likely your content marketing will achieve your goals.
Step Five: Analyze and Adjust
After you’ve published your content, take some time to analyze how well it performed. Look at things like website traffic, social media engagement, and conversion rates. You can make adjustments moving forward based on your findings.
Step Six: Rinse and Repeat
The best way to keep your content strategy effective is to create new, fresh content constantly. This doesn’t mean you have to publish a new blog post every day, but you should have a regular publishing schedule that you stick to. By continually putting out new content, you’ll keep people coming back for more and eventually achieve your goals.
Consistency is vital if you want to be successful with content marketing. A well-thought-out content strategy will help you be consistent with your messaging and branding and keep you from time wasters. After all, publishing content that doesn’t serve a purpose wastes time and resources. By following these six steps, you can create a content strategy to help you grow your business.
Now my focus is on using all that I’ve learnt, and everything I know about marketing and communication to help entrepreneurs like you gain clarity on how to market your business. Hiring a marketing agency or spending thousands on campaigns might not be possible now, but your business deserves to be seen. And together, we can make that happen!