One of the best ways to build trust and connection with your customers is through your content strategy.
“Content is a free tool that helps you generate brand awareness and traffic,” says Anaita Sakar, co-founder of Hero Packaging . “Especially when you’re starting as a bootstrapped business, it’s crucial that you continually produce content, whether it’s educational or product-based. Because when you create more content, it increases your credibility, and the search engines actually link to your website.”
A carefully planned content strategy allows you to showcase your brand’s unique point of view and appealing products – which ultimately helps attract more (and better) customers.
What is a content strategy?
A content strategy is the practice of planning marketing content that appeals to your audience and serves your business goals. This includes blog posts, russia email list emails, social media posts, videos, and podcasts.
A successful content strategy is the framework that helps you plan what kind of information you publish – and to whom. If you publish content haphazardly without a strategy, you’ll quickly waste your time. A solid strategy should always give you a return on investment (ROI) .
How do you develop a content strategy?
- Choose your template
- Define your goals
- Research your target group
- Review your existing content
- Analyze the competition
- Decide what types of content you want to create
- Create engaging content
- Build an editorial calendar
- Measure the effectiveness of your content
1. Choose your template
You don’t necessarily need a template to create your content marketing strategy. However, optimizing for a specific region a good template will make the process easier. The free content strategy template linked in this article has everything you need to get started.
2. Define your goals
Choose specific goals for your content strategy and determine the KPIs you will use to measure success. Consider what type of content would help you achieve those goals.
For example, china phone numbers your content marketing goals could look like this:
- Increase brand awareness by doubling your social media followers within six months
- Increase customer acquisition by increasing your conversion rate from 2% to 4% in six months
- Increase brand authority by increasing organic traffic (visits from unpaid search results) to your landing pages by 20% within a year
3. Research your target group
Research your audience’s interests and their preferred channels. Knowing this will help you create content that appeals to them on the platforms they actually use. Two ways to find your audience are:
1. Market research. You can use market research tools to learn about consumer behavior and trends, or you can conduct your own primary research, such as surveys or customer interviews. You can also gain valuable insights by reading customer feedback. This preliminary work can help you understand your target audience, their purchasing preferences, social media preferences, and the way they consume content.
2. Web analytics. Web analytics not only shows you who is visiting your site. It also lets you understand how much time visitors spend there, which pages they visit, and how they got to your site.
As you go through this process, it’s a good idea to create a buyer persona . This will help you better understand how to create content that will resonate with your target audience. Give your persona a name, occupation, age, hobbies, geographic location, income and goals, and list the types of content they consume. Use your buyer persona to guide your content marketing efforts.
4. Review your existing content
If you have already created content, review your existing assets. Ask yourself:
- Is my current content still relevant?
- Will my planned content differ significantly from my current content?
This might be the time to phase out some old content. Use social media analytics tools and Google Analytics to see what content is most popular and what isn’t performing well. Consider stopping producing content that isn’t resonating with your audience or that deviates from your goals.
5. Analyze the competition
Conduct a competitive analysis to compare and measure your competition’s content strategies. Make a list of your direct and indirect competitors, visit their websites and walk through their customer experience. Identify content you like or don’t like. Subscribe to their newsletters , read their blog posts , follow them on social media. Look at what types of content they post and how often.
If you like their content approach, think about what you could do better or differently. Use SEO tools to find out which keywords are driving traffic to competitors’ sites. This can help you determine which keywords are worth creating content for so your audience can find you.