The success of your content lies in a well thought out strategy. When done right, strategic content will attract and engage your audience, create brand trust and support your business needs. Even if you’re a seasoned pro, it never hurts to review and refresh your approach. And if you’re completely new, then this is the best place for you to start on your journey towards content marketing.
- Define your goals
Start by defining your goals. These should be in relation to your wider business objectives, so have a think about how your content can help you achieve these. Next, arrange your content goals in order of priority, and by whether they are short term (achievable in the next couple of months) or long term (achievable over the next couple of years). This exercise will be particularly helpful when it comes to figuring out resource needs later down the line.
Using the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound) framework is a great way to add detail and specificity to your goal setting.
- Audit, audit, audit
As they say, you can’t know where you’re going, until you know where you’ve been. And the same is true when it comes to content. Take a look through what you’ve already posted and assess what is and isn’t working. It’s also worthwhile looking at which topics are resonating with your audience, whether there are any formatting gaps, and which days and times are best for posting your content.
Analysing engagement, views, impressions, dwell time etc. using tools like Google analytics and other platform specific analytics is an easy way to gather the data you need to assess the above.
You’ll also want to have a look through and see what can be repurposed or re-used from existing content. This will not only help you decide the direction going forward but it’ll also help you distinguish your seasonal from your evergreen content.
- Get to know your audience
Knowing your audience is vital to the success of your content and the achievement of your goals. This is true for whether you’re starting out or wanting to expand to a new audience base.
First picture who your ideal audience is. What’s their personality like? Do they like to travel? Do they spend time researching before making a purchase? Once you’ve defined a top level idea of that person, then begin to segment them by demographics like age, gender, geography, education, income, etc. This will allow you to create targeted content for these audience personas.
- Building your strategy
Onto crafting your strategy. Start by defining your content proposition - that is, what value does your content bring to your audience? Once you have distilled that into a sentence, have a think about the creative wrapper for your content. This looks like a central idea that communicates who you are as a brand, as well as your content proposition. Your content should ultimately ladder up to this idea.
Next are your content pillars - themes or buckets that will guide the topics/messaging that your content will focus on. These can be anything from educational and community based, to promotional and inspiring. As long as they reflect your values and communicate the central idea, it’s up to you. From these can come content formats or franchises which act as a repeatable content series. Think Refinery29’s ‘Money Diaries’ where the theme stays the same but the stories change.
You’ll also want to think about the roles of specific platforms and how they can help you achieve your goals as well as best practices and ways in which you can best optimise your content for them.
- Put your content to work
Once you’ve finalised your strategy and generated content from it, you’ll need an editorial content calendar with relevant calendar moments in the world and your industry (e.g International Women’s Day, Easter, fashion week, etc). This will allow you to strategically plan when it is best to post each piece of content. It will also give you an overview of the frequency at which you’re posting, so you can see (in theory) if you’re posting too much or too little.
After putting your strategy into action, it’s always a good idea to track how it (and your content) is performing against your goals and targets. Don’t be afraid to revisit your strategy and course-correct based on what is and isn’t working.