If you want your brand to stand out from the crowd, you need to build a content strategy. An effective content strategy will help you to communicate with your customers and ultimately convert them to your services. Find an SEO Specialist near me.
A content strategy will also help you to boost your SEO, or search engine optimisation. This will increase your organic traffic to your website, helping you to increase your customer base. When you hire a local SEO specialist, they’re likely to ask whether you have a content strategy in place.
It can be hard to know where to begin, especially if it’s your first time creating a content strategy. You’ll need to set goals, know your target audience and map out how buyers will interact with your content.
We’ve put together a simple guide to creating your first content strategy to help you to get started.
Set your goals
You need to have a clear goal to work towards and a clear vision of where you’re going. This will help you to target your content strategy and measure what is really important to your business.
You need a solid message that you’re communicating through your content. If you try and communicate ten different messages, it’ll become a blur and your potential customers won’t understand what you want them to do.
Define your audience
Before you can decide on your content, you need to know who you’re talking to. If you try to talk to everyone, your message won’t be targeted enough. Narrow it down too much and your message will be too specific.
It’s useful to interview your target audience at this point. Here are some questions to ask:
· What are the demographics of your target audience?
· What publications do they read?
· What websites do they visit daily / weekly?
· What social media accounts do they have?
· What problems do they have?
· What topics interest them?
Once you understand your target audience, you can make sure that your content strategy is perfectly tailored to them.
Perform SEO analysis
When you understand your customer, you can begin to research the topics that they care about the most.
Use tools such as BuzzSumo and Google Search Console to compile a list of primary and secondary keywords. These keywords will form a key part of your content strategy, allowing you to target the topics that your customers are interested in and reach them organically through the search engines.
Map your customer’s journey
The next stage of the process is to under your buyer’s journey, from their first encounter with your brand through to making their purchase and even their potential for repeat custom in the future.
When you’re planning your content, you’ll need to ensure that you balance it through the sales funnel, targeting each area of the funnel so that relevant content reaches your prospective customer at each stage of their journey.
Create a distribution strategy
No matter how great your content is, it isn’t going to distribute itself. Planning your distribution strategy is equally as important as the content strategy itself.
This is where you go back to that customer research you conducted and check where they’re finding their information. If your customer base loves social media, that’s where you’ll reach them. Alternatively, if they spend their free time reading trade magazines or official publications, that’s where you need to be.
Develop a content calendar
This final step is the bridge between your content strategy and the creation of your content. You know what you need to create but the calendar defines how it will happen and when.
Creating a content calendar which covers the first three months of your content strategy helps to ensure that your content follows your plan and you don’t go off track.
Be realistic with your calendar to prevent you from becoming overwhelmed. There’s only so much that you can create alongside your everyday operations and it’s easy to go off track if you commit to doing too much at once.
Take away message
Creating a content strategy can feel overwhelming, but you could hire a Digital Marketing Agency to do the work for you, but in the meantime, following our simple steps will help you to break down the process and take it one step at a time.