A good content strategy is key to taking off your other digital marketing efforts , improving the image of your company, gaining credibility and getting your website to a good position in Google.
Do you want to receive these and more benefits, but don’t know how to do it? In this post I am going to explain everything you need to know: what a content strategy is, what advantages it offers, how it should be done and more .
What is a content strategy?
A content strategy consists of planning and managing to design quality content , both textual and visual, that will be used in marketing strategies to deliver messages to the target audience.
Content must be created for the various areas of a company. For example, marketing needs content; design needs content; the same sales, support and all departments within a company.
This, in order to have material ready for when you have contact with prospects or to attract the attention of potential customers.
With quality content , it is easier to stand out and for prospects to find us. On the other hand, the contents produce the opposite effect: it affects our image and makes customers end up moving away or not even approaching.
Content strategy vs. content marketing strategy
A content strategy is a document that companies have to organize and have clarity about all the content they create internally and how it affects or helps each area of the business.
A good strategy has to start from a global vision of where you want to advance as a company and how the content will allow you to reach those objectives.
A content strategy goes beyond updating or creating an editorial calendar, reviewing traffic or conversion metrics, and posting updates on social media.
It’s not just about having an editorial calendar, but really knowing what to do or achieve with each piece of content, no matter what format it’s created in.
Advantages of having a content strategy
Spending time on this process brings many benefits for companies. Some of the advantages of a content strategy are:
1. A good content strategy allows you to build/improve your brand
The content is excellent to show what we know and gain authority within the industry to which we belong.
This is not automatic, but over time, if the content is valuable and there is a good strategy behind it, they will begin to rank in search engines , making our brand trustworthy.
For this, each piece has to be optimized for SEO (search engine positioning).
Also, as you grow, you can add formats to your content strategy, such as newsletter , to build a stronger and more lasting relationship with your visitors and offer your products more easily and with better results.
2. A content strategy helps build trust
In content marketing, not everything is about producing. Care must be taken that each piece generated communicates trust. This is the most important thing ever. Therefore, you should focus on educational material and not 100% sales.
Creating trust between the company and the users through the creation of content will allow you to build a contact base, since people, whenever they have questions about your industry, will go to your blog.
As trust grows, the content will evolve and position itself better.
3. With an effective content strategy you offer added value
Beyond focusing on business, you should always focus on answering frequently asked questions from your potential customers.
If they find the answers to their problems every time they enter your website , you will begin to position yourself in their minds.
And, when they are considering a final solution, which they know they can find with you, they will look for you! You will be the first option.
4. A content strategy does not require a lot of financial investment
Building and executing a content strategy does not require a large monetary investment, only time.
In addition, if it is well designed, the results do not stop coming. A content made a year ago can continue to generate traffic, clicks and even customers, because it improves its position in Google as the months go by.
How to make a good content strategy
Creating a content strategy is not an easy thing; It requires a few steps because it is a comprehensive process to improve the positioning of a brand.
For this, in addition to having clear objectives, tactics must be developed throughout the planning, such as:
1. Study your current situation
The first thing you have to do is investigate your current situation, that is, find out and identify what problems your company has, what opportunities there are and what resources you have (economic and human).
You also have to analyze your competition and thoroughly study the trends within your industry, as well as your ideal customers, their behaviors, their opinions, and the new audience you want to reach.
2. Develop your buyer persona (ideal customer)
Before fully entering into creating a content strategy, it is very important to know what type of users you want to receive your messages. Therefore, it is key that you develop your buyer persona , that is, your ideal client.
It is the first step when you want to make a content strategy. This is because companies should focus on creating content for users and NOT for the brand.
You have to solve the problems and needs of consumers, not think about how to sell your products through them.
For example, if a company wants a housewife to be interested in buying a vehicle, they should not talk about the car as such, but about everything that could make things easier for her so that she is curious and wants to know more about it.
Some key points to create your buyer persona are:
- Your preferences
- Worries or pain
- Short, medium and long term objectives
- Issues
- digital interaction
3. Define the objectives of your content strategy
After that analysis, you have to determine the objectives that you will pursue through your content strategy.
The best thing is that you base yourself on the SMART method so that you have specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-defined objectives.
To define them, base yourself on your business and also on marketing. Some of the most common can be:
- Improve the SEO of your website
- Increase web traffic
- Loyalty to your customers
Think about how your content will contribute to the overall goals of your company.
4. Produce valuable content aligned to your buyer persona
When you define all of the above clearly and strategically, now is the time for more work.
The first thing to do is determine the formats to use. Remember that a corporate blog is very flexible, so you can publish from texts, ebooks, infographics and videos, to podcasts or landing pages.
In addition, there are other resources such as newsletters, email marketing strategies and much more.
You can start with a couple of them and, as you progress and learn, add others to cover different needs and have more momentum.
In order to produce all this content, you have to take into account some actions that are fundamental.
I. Keyword Research
If there is no keyword research behind a content strategy, you are not doing it right.
Now, what can help you most organically is Google, because if you position yourself in this and other search engines you will be able to connect more easily and directly with your ideal users, that is, those who are looking for your products.
This process takes time, but there are several platforms, like SEMrush , that can help you get data on keywords, search volume, etc.
II. User Intent
Beyond having strong keywords related to your industry, it is important to analyze user intent, which is the way they interact with the web: what words they use, what information they want to obtain with each search, etc.
For this step, Google Search Console can help you, since it shows information about the queries that users make to go to a website.
This way you will know if you are attacking all the important keywords or not and, failing that, modify them. In addition, it will help you know whether to change the structure of the content, adding or removing subtopics.
III. Content optimized for SEO
Having the above ready, it is time to start production, but here you also have to have knowledge about SEO, that is, all the elements considered by Google to position the pages.
You have to research about it and comply with the key elements, such as:
- Use of keywords in title, first paragraph, meta description, URL, subtopics, etc.
- Use of images within the content with alternative text.
- Good organization of information (H1, H2, H3…)
- proper extension
- internal link
Outside of this, you should also review SEO elements of your website, such as loading speed, user experience, responsiveness, among others.
4. Publicize the content created
When you have the content ready, as planned and with all the SEO guidelines that I have mentioned, you have to push that material so that it reaches more people. You can’t wait for it to generate results by itself.
Some actions you can do to enhance your content strategy are:
email marketing
Email and newsletter flows are great for engaging directly with users who might be interested in your brand, thus starting a more personal and up-close interaction.
Therefore, it is important that you schedule a flow so that your contact list receives updates from your blog or your other resources and is aware of everything that is being published.
If they ever subscribed, rest assured it was because something caught their eye about your brand, so take advantage of that interest and grow it.
Backlinks
Both internal and external linking helps the authority a lot if you have a good strategy, in addition to giving value to users.
However, something that needs to be paid the most attention, because it enhances the content strategy, is externally, since it is what can help you the most so that your content receives visits through other portals.
Backlinks are very important for SEO because others linking to our articles indicates that they are valuable and educational, which is quickly detected by search engines.
Social media
Social media is an excellent medium to publicize your content strategy because it allows you to reach many people, who spend more than 2-5 hours on different social platforms.
You just have to carry out tests to find out what is liked the most in each network and create social media strategies so that your reach has a greater impact and the time invested is worth it.
5. Constantly measure/monitor the content strategy
When it comes to marketing, the most important thing is always to measure and monitor what is being achieved. Otherwise, it could all be a waste of time.
Before starting with your content strategy, it is key that you establish the metrics that you are going to follow to evaluate the results.
Through them, you will be able to know how you can grow your strategy, what you should change, why, and much more.
What metrics should you consider? I give you some examples.
ROI
It is one of the most important indicators, since it focuses on how long it will take you to recover the money you invest in the content strategy.
Having a positive result in ROI (return on investment) indicates that it is profitable. Otherwise, it tells you that you must make adjustments or changes in order to have the expected results. Therefore, you cannot lose sight of this metric.
Engagement
Engagement refers to the reach that the content strategy achieves beyond superficial elements, such as visits or clicks.
It has to do with the connection generated by the content you create for users and to calculate it, you have to take into account comments, reactions, shares, interactions, etc.
In social networks you can have access to these metrics in a simple way, in addition to the fact that they are the platforms that most allow communication between users and companies.
web traffic
Web traffic is the visits you receive to your blog posts organically, that is, without paying. Elements such as opening emails, among others, also enter.
This will allow you to know which traffic sources are best for your blog and what content is most visited so that you have an idea about what can work better and what does not and make adjustments in your content strategy.
Based on this number, you will know if your website is already well positioned and authoritative (high traffic) or if you should generate more pieces to increase your presence in networks and search engines.
SEO positioning
Several elements enter SEO positioning, such as the keywords positioned in Google, the indexed pages, the queries that bring traffic to your website, etc.
One of the best tools to analyze this indicator is Google Search Console, as it is the most used search engine worldwide.
How to improve your content strategy
All the previous steps are important, but now I want to give you a couple of tips to get better results with your content strategy .
1. Align your strategy with your business goals
It is true that each area or department of a company has its own objectives, but they all have to be focused on business growth.
Therefore, it is important to have good coordination and communication. This will make it much easier for everyone to head towards the same destination.
For this, before starting with a content strategy, it is key to define what a good lead is, when the contact should be passed on to sales and, in general, to be clear about the processes that will be followed.
It is also important that, if you do not have a CRM (customer relationship management), you consider having one to monitor and follow up on them. This makes it easier to know when to move from one stage to another in the buyer’s journey.
2. Focus on creating evergreen content
Evergreen content is one of the strongest when it comes to a strategy, since it does not have an expiration date and, therefore, it lasts and maintains its quality and effectiveness over time.
Believe it or not, it is not difficult to find topics of this type, so better focus on this and offer value to your users.
You’ll see how good it turns out if you do it right.
3. Plan your content
Another important part is organization and planning.
Dedicate enough time to your SEO strategy and always determine beforehand the topics, who you are going to target and the action you expect to get with each piece. Everything must be perfectly planned and based on an editorial calendar, so you will have greater control.
As you put the strategy into action, you will see that it will be easier to comply in a timely manner with what was agreed because you will learn from times, results and more.
4. Update your content regularly
As good as content may seem to you, it is important that, from time to time, you make reviews and see if there have been no changes in processes or tools to update it.
The update is also key when there has been no movement in terms of search engine positioning and there are possibilities that it can improve.
In this case, you can extend the content, add videos or photos, enter long-tail keywords to rank better, among other things.
How often should a content strategy be updated?
Some time ago, it was no problem to aim to create a content strategy for more than 12 months, but now it is not so feasible because the changes are faster and more constant.
This does not mean that you should start from scratch every time something goes wrong or that you need to make small adjustments to your strategy, but you do have to constantly review your plan and maintain it.
You can create a content strategy for a year, but give yourself the task of reviewing and updating it every two or three months.
This will give you a margin and greater freedom to respond in time to the changes that arise.
Conclusion
Now you know what a content strategy is, how it can help you and how to create an infallible one for your company, so it’s time to start with yours.
If you have questions about how you can enhance it or even start, contact us.
At Media Source, we have a team of professionals focused on generating quality content who can help you achieve the results you’ve always wanted but, due to ignorance or lack of time, you haven’t achieved.
Schedule a meeting with us to talk about your goals and find effective ways to achieve them.
