Content Strategy refers to the strategic management of content that is used to market your business. Content can be anything ranging from written, visual, audible, or even downloadable stuff.
Publishing meaningful content like guidelines, product reviews, blogs, videos can actually seize the customer’s attention, get them into purchasing your products and keep them coming back for more.
Appropriate content will make your website easy for search engines and customers to spot.
1. Content Preparation
Content creation ain’t child’s play. Creating meaningful and quality content requires a lot of preparation. This has to be taken seriously with due preparations so that you can approach the further stages without any fuss.
Let’s have a look at approaches needed to create meaningful content.
Making of Intriguing Content
First of all, you need to identify what makes content intriguing and take it all into consideration.
The content can be informative, short, long, serious, funny or it can be literally just anything!
But, one has to make sure that it provides the audience with value. The content is of no use if it is not able to cater to the needs of the target audience.
Meaningful content is all about understanding the target audience and their needs and also how well the content is able to communicate your brand message.
Types of Content
Identifying the different types of content available can actually help you decide which suits the best for your marketing needs. This will help you convey your brand message effectively to the target audience.
To begin with, you need to find an appropriate style and then create content that fits into the style rather than creating content first and then making it fit into a peculiar style.
Here are some of the popular content types:
- Case Studies: These are a great way to present a product or service to reveal its value. Usually, a problem or situation is presented, a solution is determined and implemented.
- Giveaway Posts: These are used to promote a product by persuading the target audience to take part in a competition.
- Inspirational Posts: To share inspirational posts to motivate the reader.
- How-to Posts: Contain guidelines to accomplish some tasks.
- Interviews: Interview prominent figures and share the same on your blog site.
- Launch Posts: Write a blog post in connection with a product or service launch.
- Q&A: Write about something in the Question & Answer format for a better understanding of the concept.
- Reviews: Comments on a certain product or service that will influence the consumers in making a purchasing decision.
- Personal Story: Share a personal story with the reader.
Like content writing, copywriting also have a significant impact on digital marketing. But, both content writing and copywriting is having a big difference in their functionalities
Who writes your content
Writing content that is both engaging and meaningful requires profound expertise. While some of the business brands are able to create and manage content on their own, some may not possess the necessary skills for doing so.
You can create content on your own, publish articles from guest bloggers, hire ghostwriters who’ll write for you, or even a combination of these three. The choice is yours!
Defining your Topic Categories
It’s important to decide what topics you’ll be working on. Only then, you can create content that is both meaningful and relevant to your target audience.
Some examples are, Getting traffic, Interviews & inspirations, Personality Development, E-Commerce, Banking.
In order to create good content, you must have a content idea. This is the first and foremost thing in the content preparation process.
Incorporating Keywords
This is an important part of the content preparation process. Before creating content, it’s necessary that you decide which keywords you are going to include in your content.
Also, keywords play a vital role in the SEO of your post. Hence, it’s advisable to carry out keyword research before you start with the content.
Defining Content Objectives
Before you work on the content, here are a few things that you should take into consideration:
- The content should be informative for the audience to understand better.
- The content should be explicit and comprehensible.
- It should provide your audience with genuine information and suggestions.
- The content should be able to establish connections with the featured businesses.
- The content should aid SEO, to help you to rank higher in search engines.
2. Content Production
Now let’s move on to the production of great content.
Writing an Exceptional Content
Writing exceptional content is all about creating content that:
- People need
- people share and
- Google shows
This requires understanding your audience as well as the latest trends in the content market, preparing a piece of content based on it and delivering it.
Also, an exceptional content will have the following:
- A catchy headline
- Brief introduction
- A good flow of content, that is easy to understand.
- Supporting content
- Required word count
Another important thing to take care of is the proper spelling, grammar, punctuation and the overall sentence structure. Not everyone is proficient at this. You can make use of tools like Grammarly, Title Case, etc.
Enhancing your Content
Mere content creation ain’t enough to achieve the desired results. The content must be engaging and for this, you can add appropriate images, videos, links.
Following are some of the ideas for the same:
- Images: Images can be used to capture the attention of the target audience.
- Links: Links provide additional information as and when required.
- Videos: Videos are necessary to make content engaging and intriguing.
- Webinars: These serve as a source to educate the audience about your products, services, current trends, and even challenges
- Surveys: Surveys act as a powerful tool to collect user information, expectations, and requirements.
- Giveaways & Contests: These are necessary for the promotion of your products and services.
- Sharing Buttons: Promotes the sharing of your content.
- Comment Forms: Helps the audience to share their valuable thoughts and suggestions.
Proofreading the Content
Proofreading refers to the act of reading the content to find and correct the errors before you publish it to the public. Always proofread your content before publishing. Although it may seem that everything is perfect, proofreading for one last time can actually save you from making silly errors before you publish the content.
3. Content Publication
Let’s move on to the content publication process.
Making a Content-Posting Schedule & Posting Frequency
Make a posting schedule and adhere to it. Don’t make a schedule that is difficult to keep up with. Make sure that you post your content as regularly as you can.
You can post your content every twice a week or even twice in a month. However, how often you publish your quality content is totally up to you!
The best day to post your content is when your website has high traffic. You can use analytics to find out the total number of visitors.
Conducting Final Review
This is quite similar to the proofreading process. You can find out any silly and easily correctable mistakes in this stage.
You can even view the content in “preview” mode so as to find formatting errors, if any.
Date of Publication
Date of Publication matters! It indicates the relevance of the post. Also, it can affect the SEO.
Well-written content with clearly mentioned date of publication indicates that your website is up-to-date.
4. Content Promotion
Content promotion is something that shouldn’t be neglected. It’s as important as any other process involved in content strategy. But, it requires so much time and effort just like the content creation process.
Content Promotion Optimization
Before you move on to the content promotion process, you gotta figure out how do you want the audience to respond to it. Since the action for each piece of content will be different, you need to consider each piece of content individually.
The actions could be expecting the reader to share the content with their peers, to subscribe to your mailing list or even it could be to buy a product. Before expecting your fellow audience to take any action, you need to make sure that the content that you provide adds value to the audience.
Content Promotion Copy
Before you start out on promoting the content, keep in hand a promotion copy with a well-written promotional message for your audience.
Copy’s what helps to sell your content. It has to capture customer attention. Hence, your copy must be sweet and short, precise and provide clear cut information to the audience. A copy that’s not interesting diminishes the traffic on your website.
Content Promotion Channels
Content Promotion is the most time-consuming process. Hence, to promote your content, you need to make sure that there are adequate promotion channels.
The more channels you have, the more exposure your content will have.
Some of the content promotion channels that you can utilize are:
- Post to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram & Instagram Stories.
- Pin to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or even save to your Instagram Highlights.
- Promote on industry content & resource sharing sites.
- Create an email list and send out content to your list frequently.
- Create a profile on Quora and answer questions that are related to your content.
- Reach out to influencers and share your article with them in the hope that they’ll share it with their audience.
