Give your content some direction and maintain momentum

It can be a real challenge to keep coming up with new ideas for all the different marketing channels that you use to represent your business. Businesses can now target customers through more channels than ever before – your website, blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, third party media (through PR), but with this opportunity comes the responsibility to generate targeted, relevant content.

Google places a high priority on quality and frequency of content, so it’s crucial to maintain momentum. If you’re struggling in-house you may be thinking of hiring a content manager, or to use an agency to relieve some of the pressure. Either way, having a strategy behind your content is imperative if you wish to successfully maintain your web presence and engage potential customers.

There are a lot of variables to consider when it comes to content creation, and the best way to ensure a consistent flow of relevant copy is to create a content strategy early on and stick to it. That’s why we’ve devised an easy nine-step content strategy that we customise for each client. It takes into account each client’s various platforms, audiences and goals, resulting in an informed strategic plan. We’ve outlined the basic framework we use below to show you how we can generate content ideas and plan ahead to provide you with a secure, long-term content plan.

1. Define the goal(s) of your content strategy.

Fundamental to the success of a content strategy is in achieving your goal – so what is it? To increase brand awareness? To improve engagement with existing customers? To drive website traffic? Setting out specific KPIs before you start (e.g. ‘increase blog views by a factor of 5 in three months’) will help you to measure the results of your strategy.

2. Refresh your messaging.

Whatever content you create for your various platforms needs to reflect and embody your company’s messaging. Is your business’s messaging up to date? We recommend refreshing your messaging once a year, or following any major company upheaval.

3. Plan for your platforms.

Tabulate each of the different platforms where you post content, and bullet point the audiences, their pain points, the platform copy style and tone and so on. For example, a chair company’s platform might look like this:

  • Platform - Blog
  • Style & Tone - Professional, Friendly, Engaging, Non-salesy
  • Audience - Parents, Landlords, Businesses
  • Audience pain - Cheap easily breakable chairs, Unsafe chairs, Lack of matching chairs, Unprofessional appearance, Nowhere comfortable for clients to sit in reception

4. Messaging for individual platforms.

Once you have your platforms, audiences and their pain points listed, start thinking about the content messaging for each one. For example, to address a customer’s pain point regarding chair safety, you could base your content messaging around the safety certifications around the chair. By doing this, you will create a targeted content strategy for each platform. Your company messaging (step two) will help to inform this step.

5. The brainstorm.

Once you’ve generated content messaging for each platform you can start to generate compelling content ideas that will appeal to your audiences. For example, a post such as ‘How do I know my child’s chair is safe?’ would incorporate the safety messaging in step four. At this point in our content strategy we refer to our content creation matrix that helps us to come up with lots of concepts for new articles and posts. We list all our potential content ideas for clients to select and approve.

6. Go meta.

Find out which keywords your customers are searching for around the topic you’re addressing, and make sure you write these into the copy. More information about SEO.

7. Set parameters.

Create a three-month content plan for each platform. We like to agree with our clients a content plan for a three-month period, as this is long enough to provide them with a strong base of content with which to increase Google and audience interest, whilst short enough to ensure the content is still relevant by the time it comes to publication.

8. Plan the logistics.

Who will post your content to each platform, and how will they do it? Will the schedule in advance or upload on the day? Do they have access to the passwords to each platform? Who else does? Make sure that this is clearly stipulated in the plan to save any errors at a later date.

9. Measure and analyse.

So how did your content perform? What customer activity occurred as a result of the content? Did you receive any feedback from readers? What will you do differently from now on? Use any feedback and web analytics to inform your content strategy moving forwards.

 

By Mary Stringer, Marketing Consultant at Resonates.

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