Content marketing is a useful tool but only when there is a strong content strategy backing it up.

A good content strategy can help with expanding reach, increasing site traffic and getting more conversions.

What Is a Content Strategy?

A content strategy outlines all of your content goals and the types of content you will use for this. It makes for a more controlled way of reaching your goals rather than just publishing content and hoping for the best. A content strategy makes it more likely that you will achieve your content marketing goals.

Steps to Creating a Successful Content Strategy

1: Create a Goal

Content strategy begins with your goal. When setting your goal, think about your brand’s values and your marketing objective.

It’s good to remember that as your business grows your goals and objectives will change. Your content strategy will change with your business, so ensure that you review your strategy to make sure it’s in line with your business’ direction.

When setting goals, it’s useful to go by the principle of SMART goals. Read more about setting SMART goals for your business here. 

2 : Define Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience is vital. This will help you to serve the people who are the most likely to be interested in what you’re offering. Keeping your content targeted will provide your customers and audience informed and can increase sales or success.

Once you have identified your target audience, you can begin to create a content marketing persona. This is just a deeper view of your target audience. A content marketing persona can help you to know what type of content to make and channels to use to appeal directly to your audience.  In a previous blog post we discussed how to create a customer persona. The information in that post may serve useful with this step.

3: Check Your Competition

It’s good to check in on what your competition are doing. This can give you some ideas as to what is working for them and the tactics that they’re using. These tactics may be something that you can implement into your own marketing. Pay attention to your competitors traffic sources, paid and organic keywords, backlinks, and audience interests.

4. Keyword Research

Once you’ve identified and researched your target audience it will be easier to know what topics to focus on in your content marketing. The next step is to research what those people type into search engines.

A very useful tip is to go to your reviews or competitor reviews and read through bits of the reviews that you think will resonate with your audience. Then, use that exact wording in your content.

5: Choose Your Distribution Channels

Once you create your content, it has to be distributed and the distribution channel will depend on the type of content and your audience.

There are three types of content distribution channels:

Owned Content Distribution

These are channels that your company owns. You control when and how the content is published. Owned content distribution channels include your website and blog, social media profiles, and your email newsletter.

Paid Content Distribution

Paid content distribution channels are things like PPC (pay-per-click) or paid social ads as well as influencer content. Any content that you pay to have will fall under this bracket.

Earned Content Distribution

Earned content distribution channels could be other bloggers, customers, or anyone who shares your content for free. Public relations, social shares, product reviews, and guest posts, as well as forum posts fall into this type, too.

6: Create an Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar sets out where and when your content will be published. It should include any events or holidays that will impact your content. Make a list of different topics that you want to cover and then start to schedule out your content.

Here is an example of an editorial calendar template.

7: Create Content

You have everything you need to start creating your content: content marketing goals, a target audience with content marketing personas, topics and keywords, ways to get your content out, and a schedule.

8: Analyze Your Performance

Depending on what your goal/goals were, you’ll want to track if the content is helping you to achieve that goal or goals. This is important because if the content is not doing what you set out for it to do, you’ll need to go back and analyze whats going wrong and formulate a new plan from there.

Remember, that your content strategy is supposed to change with you and your business. When you find that your business goals have changed, you’ll need to revisit your content strategy to ensure that your content meets your new business needs.

Creating a content strategy is great and will really prove to be useful. If you feel you need more information or some assistance for any of the stages in this process or all of them, why not book in for a complimentary 30 minute discovery call and see how Savvy Business Gals can help. Click here to book your call now!