Information for the blog post was obtained from Hubspot.com, socialmediaexaminer.com, and contentmarketinginstitute.com
It is truly an art to turn a good idea into a great product, taking rough disorganized ideas and turning them into meaningful content. To begin creating great content, you need a plan. Content Strategy includes everything from your brand and tone to how you will promote your content and eventually repurpose it.
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Tips for Creating a Content Strategy
· Set your goals. Your goals could range from attracting more visitors to your site to generating more leads and everything in-between. Once you have set your goals, each piece of content you create should align with those goals.
· Create a buyer persona. You first need to know who you’re speaking to, how you want to speak to them, and where to find them. Pay attention to who’s engaging with you on social media and find common ground within their profiles, these people serve as a good model for your persona. This persona should serve as a representation of your target audience. Keep in mind that you want to make each reader feel like you are talking directly to them.
· Rely on the buyer’s journey. Each of your prospects follows a path to a solution — that path involves awareness, interest, desire, and action. You also want to select a format for your content so that it’s tailored to each stage of the buyer’s journey. Conducting a simple survey among your customer base or readers can tell you the answers to your buyer phase and demographic questions.
· Perform a content audit. A content audit is simply taking inventory of the work you’ve already done, then organizing it to fit under your new content plan. It will serve you well later on when you are ready to repurpose your content in new formats.
· Choose the right format. The format you choose might be a blog post, video, SlideShare, graphic, E-book, whitepaper, podcast, or whatever your creative mind can conceive. As long as it serves your persona, you’ll be in good shape. Mix it up, don’t need to stick to one format for every piece of content that you create. But you should be able to create content — in whatever format — on a consistent tempo.
· Choose content creators. You are ready to start creating content. Time to build a team of content creators to help you deliver content to your customers and turn views into purchases. Look into companies that offer freelance services. If you see something you from someone in your network as them for recommendations. If you want to produce a high volume of content, or need content to fill multiple channels and platforms at once, it may be worth having a full-time writing team to maintain control of the process. (Harris)
Now that you have a plan it is time to start the content creation process. Your content should serve as a platform for communicating your brand’s unique perspectives, capabilities, and value proposition. It also needs to tell a story that resonates strongly enough to convince readers to act. Consistently generating content ideas comes down to two basic things: focus and format. Focus is what you are talking about, and format is how you are bringing it to life.
Steps for Creating Content
· Start with SEO and keyword research, it will show you the search volume of a specific keyword phrase and whether it’s worth the investment of creating a piece of content around it. This is great if you have a large library of work with backlinks and others citing your work. If you are not there yet, consider long-tail keywords. Low-volume keywords with minimal keyword difficulty will give you the best chance of ranking on a keyword search and getting your content seen. If your search uncovers relevant questions for which useful answers aren’t forthcoming, it’s probably a topic worth addressing for your audience.
· Next step is to come up with ideas that tie into your keyword or topic. There are several ways to do this such as, pillar page, topic modeling, and topic clusters. Not every idea your team generates is a good fit for your business: Some may be fantastic on paper but require more time and attention to produce than your team can spare; others may be creatively brilliant but not useful for your target audience.
· You are ready to start writing. For this you may use a team of writers, taking into consideration factors like the nature of your business, your content competition, expertise your content requires, and budget resources. Remember you are creating something unique for your buyer persona. Be clear and concise, stay with one topic. To help your work be found use titles, meta descriptions, and other teasers to compel your audience to read your content. The goal is to produce content that highlights your products and the things you care about in a way that makes consumers care about them too.
· Time to edit. Whether you edit as you go or take a few days to reflect, there are a few things you should look out for as you refine your content, like active voice, clear language, short sentences, and plenty of whitespaces.
· Your piece is ready to be put in front of your customers, time to upload it. You may consider a content management system. CMS is software that hosts digital content and allows you to display it on your website. The benefit to a CMS is that it connects all of your content and stores it in one place. So, you can easily link to a landing page in your blog article or insert a content offer in an email. Not only that, but you can analyze the results of all the content you created for a specific campaign.
· Next consider when you are going to publish your work. You can publish your content immediately after uploading, or you can maximize its impact by waiting for an optimal time. A CMS will allow you to schedule posts for a future date and specific time, this way you reach your target market when they consume content.
· The last step is to promote your content. Your promotion plan should be guided by your persona. It is your job to entice your customers to keep coming back for new content. It’s important to become familiar with the strengths and limitations of each option to make informed decisions on which to pursue. Think about what channels your audience is on, and meet your customers where they are. This is a great time to collaborate with other brands so that your content reaches more people. (Perricone)
With content strategy planning and an outlined content creation process you will be able to take all those disorganized ideas and turn them into content gold!
Resources
Perricone, Christina. “The Ultimate Guide to Content Creation.” HubSpot Blog, 1 Feb. 2022, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-creation.
Dezeil, Melanie. “How to Create Content That Attracts Customers : Social Media Examiner.” Social Media Examiner | Social Media Marketing, https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-create-content-that-attracts-customers-melanie-deziel/.
Harris, Jodi. “Content Creation Process: The Essential Marketing Guide.” Content Marketing Institute, https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/09/content-creation-essentials/.
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