March 26 2021
How to Create a Content Strategy
If you consider that everything you see on a website is some form of content, then you can see the importance of a strong content strategy. A good mix of content can help reach potential customers at all stages of the buying process.
When developing a content strategy, it’s important to understand two things: Who is your target audience and what are they trying to solve with your products or services? Once you have identified both, you can focus on creating a content strategy that speaks directly to your target audience(s), addresses their pain points and provides a solution.
What is a Content Strategy?
A content strategy is a plan that outlines an appropriate content mix to achieve your company’s goals. It should include a broad mix of content (which we outlined in a previous blog post). You should also have content types that engage your target audience at each level of the marketing funnel: awareness, engagement and interest, decision, action and post-purchase. Effective content can serve as an important sales tool and provide value to re-engage customers even after they make a purchase – especially for industrial or B2B companies with longer sales cycles to account for.
Steps for Creating a Content Strategy
Step 1: Set Goals Every piece of content that you create should be focused on achieving a specific goal.
- What are you hoping to achieve for your business?
- Are you looking to grow your brand awareness, increase your sales, provide more customer service engagement?
Once you know what your goals are, you can develop KPIs to track progress towards the achievement of those goals such as traffic growth, increase in search rankings, increase in leads or even more time for your sales team to spend on selling versus customer service. If at all possible, create specific quantifiable targets associated with those KPIs/goals.
Step 2: Define Your Audience Take the time to define the target audience for each of your goals.
For instance, if you wanted to focus on increasing repeat business, your target audience would be your existing customers. Or, if you want to increase inquiries for a specific product or service, your target audience would be users within the industries that use that product and could range from technical engineers to purchasing agents. Understanding who your content should appeal to will help define the strategy you create.
Step 3: Choose Your Content Once you know who you are looking to reach, it’s time to create content that will help achieve those goals and establish a schedule for developing and publishing that content.
- What speaks best to your target audience? For example, if your audience is comprised of technical engineers in the aerospace industry, then specifications and technical information may be your best form of content. If it’s a purchasing agent, video content might work instead. When we asked our industrial clients what types of content are important when considering a new vendor or supplier, 78% said technical information and pricing were crucial to their decision-making process. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: C86-B84-0A5)
- What is the user’s ideal journey through the website to the point of submitting an inquiry or calling your business? This means making sure your new content is easy to find through the navigation, internal links, or even a new banner image.
- What are the best channels for reaching that audience? These can vary from social media or email marketing to organic search or paid search.
- How much and how often should you be publishing that content? For example, if you are in an industry that is impacted by new rules or regulations or one where your pricing changes based on global supply and demand, you will want to keep your content up to date with that type of information whenever it becomes available.
Step 4: Do Your Research Develop a list of potential content ideas, connect with your sales team, analyze your leads and internal site search queries, conduct keyword research and review the search landscape for target terms.
Each topic should contribute to the achievement of a goal and speak directly to your target audience. You can do this by utilizing TopSpot’s B-SMART Method® to identify the right phrases to target and topics you want to address. Then, set KPIs for each piece of content based on the type of actions you want your potential customers to engage in.
Next Steps
Once you have created the content strategy, it’s time to create the content itself. Make sure you optimize the content using the keywords you identified in the research phase and keep long-term SEO and content strategies in mind. You will also want to continue to measure your content KPIs and make adjustments as you go. Once you have published content, keeping it fresh and up-to-date is important.
After your new content has been crawled by search engines, you can expect to see initial results in the form of keyword ranking improvements. Typically, you will not see the full measure of results until three to six months after implementation (however this can vary based on competitiveness).
What This Means for You
A content strategy is a necessary part of digital marketing. Taking the time to create a strong content strategy will bolster your SEO and paid search efforts through multiple channels. As you build up the content that appeals most to your potential customers, your business’s overall digital presence and lead generation will grow.