By now, you know you need a content strategy. Producing authoritative, useful content is the most important factor in SEO. It’s also an important step in establishing your brand and building trust and loyalty with your audience. Here are ten steps to getting started with a content strategy:
- Do a deep dive on your audience. Who, specifically, are you trying to reach? Where are they in the buyer’s journey? How and where do they consume content? What do they need to know? Don’t try to target everyone. Instead, focus on providing valuable information for a specific target.
- Conduct an honest assessment of your resources. People tend to think content production will take less effort than it actually does, especially people who grew up prior to social media and categorize time spent there as recreational. Creating good content that achieves goals is time consuming. Consider how much time you have to put in, your level of expertise, staff resources, and your budget for outsourcing.
- Set goals. What do you want your content to achieve? How do you want people to feel about your brand when they consume your content? It’s essential that you clearly identify your objectives so that you can get your content in front of the right people at the time with the right message.
- Choose your channels. It’s a mistake to burst onto the scene of every social media channel at the same time with a content blitz. Instead, carefully consider where your ideal audience is, your abilities, your comfort level, and your available time. Remember that content isn’t only for social media, but also for your website and email marketing campaigns, so it’s best to choose one or two social media channels to start with. The worst thing you can do is burn yourself out and quit before your content makes an impact. Posting consistently on one channel to a specific audience is far more effective than posting on five channels to anyone who will listen.
- Plan for success. Make a plan for what channels you’ll use to distribute content, what kinds of content you’ll create (blogs, videos, newsletters, social posts, presentations, webinars, infographics, etc.), and the frequency of content production. Create a calendar with at least a basic schedule of content with ideas for specific posts so you can get in the habit of scheduling posts ahead of time.
- Create, create, create. As you create content, your main goal should always be to provide value to your audience. Solve problems, demonstrate your skill and authority, educate your customers, and be generous with information. Make sure you’re writing clear copy and creating visually appealing designs.
- Be consistent. Consistency isn’t just about scheduling content for the same days every week (though it’s important; people should know when to expect to hear from you). Consistency is also about branding. Your voice, visuals, and values should be recognizable across content type and platform. Your personality and tone should be relatively constant.
- Promote. Even though content is a form of promotion, you still must promote your content. Your channels should lead back to each other and to your website. Everything (especially your website) should be optimized to drive traffic through search. Your brand’s content should become part of larger conversations online.
- Scale. Once you are creating content, you will want to scale it. Content production needs have been steadily increasing for the last three years and show no signs of letting up. Get in the habit of writing larger pieces of content first and breaking them into parts for social posts. Think about how you can get multiple uses out of each piece of content.
- Analyze results and adjust strategy. Pay attention to what’s driving your website traffic, your engagement, and, ultimately, your sales. Reevaluate your strategy every few months. You want to make sure you’re getting results that justify the effort you’re putting in. Don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board if a certain strategy isn’t working; however, make sure you give things time to work, especially if SEO is your goal. SEO can be a notoriously long game.
Substance and Style 