Definition

Content Strategy is a process of creating content that drives key business objectives. It is a plan in which you use different forms of content to include audio, visual, and/or written to increase customer engagement.

Description

Defining marketing goals is of high importance especially when you are set for online marketing. With a content strategy, you can have better planning for your work that is directed towards marketing goals.

Content strategy is a blueprint that helps the marketers know his or her objectives. The strategy revolves around answering things like:

• Purpose of the content.
• What audience to address?
• How do we plan to promote the content?
• When and where to publish the content?
• How to resonate the content with the brand tone.

Building content strategy is about planning, creation, delivery and monitoring of content. The content would not only include words but will surround multimedia and images. A well defined content that caters the needs of the readers will improve the user’s experience.

Example

Canva used a marvel content strategy that took its revenue to $6B. The platform started with two key landing pages for most of their use cases. One was the page for discovery and the other was for creation.

The two landing pages have their relevance. On the left, the landing page ranked for the keywords “design certificates” and “create certificates” and got 16000 visits per month. On the right, the landing page ranked for the keyword “certificate template” which generated a traffic of 33000 per month.

As part of their content strategy, Canva understood the user’s intent. The brand created a landing page that ranked and converted for them. Canva also invested in outreaching backlinks.

In another mind blowing strategy to promote their brand, Canva made people aware of their offering like ”Customizable Zoom Backgrounds”. They launched it during the first time Covid had hit everyone and Zoom calls were a part of daily routine.

Canva wrote about the techniques on their blog that helped them increase their traffic by approximately 226% in less than 65 days (Source: https://foundationinc.co ). They focused on content to market their product and informed the users about “50 best business cards”, varied content like lists, feature articles, interviews, etc.

How Content Strategy Helps the Brands or marketers?

This is how a content strategy can help the brands and the marketers:

1. Content strategy helps the marketers in achieving their goals:

Creating content for the audience that does not fall under your target audience will be a waste of time. The results may then not appear as it seems to be. A content strategy in place helps to define goals and set priorities that even the content efforts are focused on achieving marketing objectives.

2. The strategy in place helps you trace progress:

A short-term and long-term content strategy helps you measure your success in all yardsticks. An effective content can influence more customers taking you close towards the goals.

3. Content strategy helps you identify new opportunities:

Content is to connect with the readers and help them with the new content always. When you have a strategy, you know exactly about the newer places where you can post the content and get new prospects.

4. Content strategy helps marketers cut costs:

Keeping content strategy in place saves you money. You know where and for which platform you have to make investments. Also, with a strategy a brand can concentrate on creating different types of content. It helps the marketers cut the cost.

5. The strategy helps you produce content that converts:

Keeping a perfect content strategy aligned with the marketing goals helps you deliver content consistently across different platforms. You can set standards for medium, decide the tone, and how to leverage the promotional channels. These activities take you close to achieving targets.

6. Content strategy optimises your the marketing team:

Along with setting goals for the company, a strategy defines actionable goals for different team members. It gives them directions to stick to guidelines and proceed in work. Ultimately, the whole team gets more productive.

How to build a content strategy?

Step 1: Define Your Goals:

Define the ultimate purpose for which you need a strategy. It gets easier to determine the strategy and set the timelines which are favourable and take you closer towards your goals.

Step 2: Conduct Persona Research:

You need to identify the buyer’s persona that will help you know what type of content your target audience likes. Knowing that you can produce more relevant content that the readers will consume.

For the existing clients, you need to present a content that is refurbished with what was missing earlier. And for a new target audience, giving comprehensive content shall help the brand grow.

Step 3: Run a Content Audit:

Run a content audit to know the best performing and the worst performing content. Evaluate the results and then take actions to create new content or refurbish what is missing.

Set goals with the changing trends and align it with what your readers expect. The content audit will help you find what your audience wants and what you have been serving. If there is a gap, you need to brainstorm for newer ideas that are trending and can get you a newer audience.

Step 4: Choose a Content Management System

Invest in a CMS to create, monitor, and manage your content across different platforms. The process gets automated and you get to save a lot of time.

Choose from the popular CMS and evaluate how your content performed along with the facts that how you can improve it.

Step 5: Determine the Type of Content

Determine what type of content you want to create to educate your audience. There are different forms that you can use from podcasts to tutorials. Remember, video content is always more engaging than the written content.

Step 6: Get new Content Ideas

Use tools like BuzzSumo, BlogAbout, Feedly, CoSchedule Headline Analyser, etc, to find out the fresh content ideas that you can use for your content.

Step 7: Publish and Manage your Content

Publish and manage the scheduling of the content across social media and other platforms. You can have higher chances of capturing the new audience.

The Future of Content Strategy

The need of creating a strategy will not cease due to the changing marketing styles and the ever increasing demand for the content. Some of the factors that will govern the future of the content strategy include:

Search Engines are Changing:

Updates in the search engine are changing the processes of how it shows the results. A search engine will show different results depending on the place you are searching at.

For example if you search “Salon near me”, Google will show completely different results if you are in California or if you are in India.

Apart from that search engines have also found to rank the content that comes with rich snippets and structure form of content.

Excessive use of mobile search:

As the number of mobile users have increased over the past few years. According to a report published in https://www.newzoo.com , the number of smartphone penetration in India has reached to more than 45% of the population.

This led to an increase in voice search. So the companies had to create and post content that was contextual and could yield results for the term closer to the keywords.

Deeper coverage around the cluster topic:

In order to create content consistently and give maximum information to the readers, brands now have to provide deeper coverage around the cluster topic.

They can post the content on any platform and link each type with another form with hyperlinks.

It gives detailed insights to the readers and helps in different keyword rankings.

Content is for the readers and not for the search engines:

Unlike the previous times when the content was produced for the search engines, the focus of the content has shifted to creating more meaningful content that the readers may like. It increases their engagement and gives high chances of business conversion.

Also Read – Why SEO Content Is Important?

FAQs

What are the essentials of a content strategy?

These are the essentials of a content strategy:

• Reflect organizational’s goals
• Offer people what they want to read.
• It should be useful
• Include facts
• Be consistent
• Be accessible
• Easy to navigate

What are the three components of a content strategy?

These are the 3 components of a content strategy:

• User-experience
• Brand focus
• Content distribution

How is a content plan different from content strategy?

A content plan is the type of content that and the topics you will produce to fulfil an effective strategy. On the other hand, a content strategy defines why you are using the content for like is it for lead generation or to upsell to the customers.

What are the tools you can use for content strategy?

The tools you can use to create an impressive content strategy are:

• SEMrush
• HubSpot
• MarketMuse
• SurveyMonkey
• Hotjar