Creating compelling, high-quality content is essential for the online visibility of your business.
It’s great to have a stack of original articles to drip feed to your audience. However, they are just a pile of carefully chosen words if you don’t have a content strategy.
What is a content strategy?
Before you develop your content strategy, you must first determine your company’s values and core strengths, understand the wants and needs of your customers and discover the USPs and brand values of your competitors.
Without a strategy, you’ll end up with generic content that’s no good to man nor beast. It won’t rank particularly well. It won’t get shared. It won’t engage and interest your audience.
Basically, without a strategy, you’ll end up alienate and confuse your readership.
Your strategy is, therefore, to research, write and share content that’s relevant to your business, the needs of your customers and that stands out from your competitor’s content. All you need to is ask yourself:
- What do your customers want and need? Is your content delivering?
- Do your competitors (both commercial and content) already providing this?
- If the answer is no, could this be an opportunity for your brand to shine?
- Will doing this deliver against your business objectives?
What are the elements of your content strategy?
There’s a lot more to your strategy than just writing. You also have to consider:
- Content formats: infographics, videos, blogs posts, podcasts, case studies. eBooks
- Channels: website or blog, social media, email marketing, newsletters
- Creation and publication: editorial calendar, in-house or professional copywriter
The whole point of content marketing is to help your business prepare and plan reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads. If you can create one blog post that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, it will continue generating leads for you as time goes on.
That’s pretty powerful stuff.
Just remember, blindly running in and creating content won’t work. Planning is everything and creating a strategy that’s right for your business.