In an era where content is king, a powerful and effective content strategy is the lifeblood of any successful digital marketing campaign. But maintaining your edge in a constantly evolving landscape can be challenging.
What is a Content Strategy?
With 70 percent of marketers actively investing in content marketing, your business must develop a solid content strategy to compete in your industry.
But what exactly is a content strategy?
As HubSpot explains, “A content strategy is the planning, creation, publication, management, and governance of content. A great content strategy will attract and engage a target audience, meeting their needs while driving business goals.”
You can create a content strategy any way you want, but if you want the most logical and streamlined approach to developing a framework, here’s the proper approach:
- Define your goal and what you want to accomplish with your content strategy
- Conduct detailed persona research to understand who your target audience is
- Run a content audit to get a feel for where things currently stand
- Research and choose a content management system (CMS)
- Determine the types of content you want to create
- Brainstorm different content ideas
- Publish and manage your content on an ongoing basis.
As you can see, there’s more to a content strategy than most people think. Make sure you take your time and put the right foundational blocks in place to be successful.
Tips for Improving Your Content Strategy
As you analyze your content strategy looking for ways to improve, here are a few tangible steps you can take to see some immediate growth.
- Get to Know Your Target Audience
Most brands approach content creation totally backwards. They start with ideas for the kind of content they want to create and then try to force it into the mould of who their customers are. But that never works. If you want your content to resonate, you must begin with the target audience in mind.
The best thing you can do is find where your target audience spends time online and study them (rather than just relying on cold data points from the latest Census Bureau report). When you infiltrate the places they spend time, you can read what they complain about, how they communicate, what their biggest desires are, etc. All of this information then goes into a big research document where you paint a clear picture of who they are.
- Find the Right Content System
Use the right tools and platforms to organize and execute your content strategy. And in the world of CMS, you could argue that there’s no better platform than Umbraco 12.
“With the Content Delivery API in Umbraco 12, you can manage all your content from a single location,” Marcel Digital explains. “When you update content in Umbraco, the changes are automatically pushed to all your platforms via the API. This ensures consistency across all your platforms and frees up your team to focus on creating great content rather than managing it.”
There are plenty of other options out there as well. While Umbraco 12 is great, ensure you find the right fit for your business needs.
- Become an SEO Whiz Kid
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a fundamental part of any successful content strategy. It involves improving your website and content visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs), thereby driving organic, or unpaid, traffic. High-quality SEO can improve your brand visibility, credibility, and customer reach.
To begin with, keyword research is vital. By understanding and implementing the phrases and words your audience uses when they’re looking for the services or products you offer, you can better align your content with their needs. Tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush can assist in finding the most effective keywords for your business.
You’ll also want to learn about the use of meta tags, which are basically snippets of text that describe your page’s content so that Google can properly index your pages and content for relevant search results.
Ready, Set, Go
If it were easy to be successful with content, every brand in the world would be spending 7-figure sums on content marketing and generating triple-digit ROI. But, alas, it requires work and strategy to be successful in this area.
But with that being said, there are ways to gain a competitive advantage and get ahead. Start by implementing a couple of the tips from this article and see how far they take you.