With marketing savvy consumers, creating a marketing strategy has long evolved from the days of traditional printing and posting methods, commonly known as broadcasting content. Integrating the various channels and ensuring your content is interesting, requires stripping back and embracing a cleaner and more strategic format of ensuring what you share, is actually shareable.

Results from the GfK Roper study shows that 61% of consumers feel better about a company that delivers custom content therefore, encouraging them to buy from that company too. Combining statistics such as the above with the wealth of market research tools available, businesses now have direct access to a broad range of individuals spanning across various demographics.

Essentially, a great content strategy has the core consumer at the start, middle and end of the strategy. In fact, the customer should remain central to all content that is created and shared through the various channels available. Creating a content strategy can be as simple as the six steps listed below:

1. Define your audience

Who is your customer? Using standard demographic profiles, you can begin creating your content strategy on solid foundations. By determining their age, gender, marital status and income bracket, you can then begin assessing their needs and focusing on deeper data.

2. Assess their needs

Normally, businesses rely on insights provided by various tools to analyze the success of content delivered. This then determines whether or not the ‘type of content’ is delivering results. However, a growing trend for businesses is to invest in survey sampling to gauge deeper thoughts and opinions on what works and what doesn’t. Simply asking survey respondents questions such as ‘what types of brands do you like to engage with on social media’ or even ‘what do you like to do on weekends’ will help you understand what matters to your audience and their needs.

3. Confirm your business goals

Understanding your overall business objective needs to be at the forefront of all strategies, however, that being said, when creating a content strategy, the goals need to reflect your audience and the platform you are using. For example, if your aim is to increase engagement, the content must have reasonable call to actions and resonate with your target audience. Essentially, all content should support an objective, whether that is web traffic, brand awareness or engagement.

4. Create original content

With your core audience defined and business goals agreed, you can begin creating original content. Utilize the environment and current affairs to generate opinion led pieces that encourage your customers to engage with you. ‘News-jacking’ has become increasingly popular on social media channels with brands sharing breaking news that affects their audience. Oreo mastered the art by tweeting an image on the back of the Superbowl blackout, which has now become a legendary tweet by the brand. Always being ready and knowing your audience helps. Alternatively, consider categorizing content: lifestyle, product, and knowledge to help plan content calendars.

5. Publish on relevant channels

Dependent on the channel, content can vary and should vary. Twitter facilitates snappy tweets only whereas you have more room to share content on Facebook. Alternatively, a blog is where you can delve in deeper. Ideally, long content should be shared on various social channels to increase your digital footprint and have a number of touch-points for prospective customers. The insights received from the survey sampling will help you identify the channels that your customers are using.

6. Measure, analyze and refine results

With data insights, you evaluate whether or not the content has been successful in achieving your objectives (established in step 3). For example, if a Facebook post was shared focusing on brand awareness as an objective, measure the organic reach to determine success. Did it reach a high number of individuals? If not, investigate why. As with all content, it is trial and error when testing different content concepts that will help you understand what your customer likes.

The six-step guide is not only suitable for creating the initial content marketing strategy but can also be used for each new piece of content you create. Always remember who your audience is and what they like in order to ensure your content is relevant and most importantly, successful.

 

By Bo Mattsson, chief executive of Cint. 

 

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