“Content is King.” You might be sick of constantly getting reminded of how important content is to your website. Still, you need to keep all communication channels open with your potential customers if you want to achieve some growth. The only way to do that is via content. Unfortunately, not just any content will do the trick. You need to be precise in the content format, the message, and the delivery time. Doing so will increase your reach, expand your audience, raise your leads and conversion rate and ultimately enlarge your revenue. Statistics show that quality content generates three times more leads than traditional outbound marketing, costing 62% less. 

Moreover, about 68% of internet users will invest time in reading about a brand before considering buying from it. So, quality content is the key to your brand’s success. But how do you know where and when to publish your content? Well, that’s where your content strategy comes into play. 

What is Content Strategy, and why do you need one

A content strategy is a blueprint behind your content creation. This blueprint is based on statistics and data. A good content strategy will answer all the who, what, where, when, and how questions you have before choosing, creating, and publishing every single piece of your content. However, it will do that way in advance with some specific goals and timelines in mind. A winning content strategy is integral to your overall marketing strategy, complementing all other aspects of your larger marketing plan. 

A content strategy will allow you to determine whether your content needs improvement. If your content doesn’t reach the predetermined goals, there is a problem. Moreover, a content strategy will help you focus your efforts where they are needed according to your overall marketing plan. Also, it will help you integrate your content to work on achieving your goals and keep track of your progress. This way, you can identify opportunities, measure your content’s quality, optimize your time and efforts, and ultimately cut costs. Most importantly, however, a good content strategy will help you optimize your content to correspond better to your target audience’s needs, leading to higher conversion rates, sales, and profits. 

A winning content strategy, however, is not easy to create. Usually, it takes a lot of research and effort to develop one genuinely good plan. Experience plays a huge role in this regard, as it will cut the trial and error period significantly. Still, as each business is unique, no one strategy will work 100% of the time. However, if you want to create a winning strategy, there are more than a few markers that good content plans share. 

Determine your target audience

This is the central pillar behind your content. If you don’t know who you are writing for, you will never be able to capture their interest. Naturally, as part of your marketing strategy, your target audience should be interested in your product. So, if you sell junk foods and soft drinks, targeting bodybuilders and people obsessed with their health won’t do you any good. Converting them into buyers will cost you a lot of time, money, and effort, making it impractical. Remember, your content needs to be part of the larger marketing strategy. 

Obviously, you need to determine your target audience based on data. However, if you are brand new on the market, creating a brand persona is the best way to start. Usually, the brand persona is based on some assumptions and some competition research. Identifying the industry trends and who is the primary target of your entire industry will help you narrow down your target audience.

For example, if you offer house cleaning services, it stands to reason that low-income homes won’t be interested in your services as they can’t afford them. Another good starting point is to determine which people are not your target audience. This way, you will narrow down your audience. Let’s take the cleaning service again. While the industry targets high-income households, if you are just starting and don’t have the resources to cover entire mansions, you might want to keep your target audience to upper-middle-class families instead. 

Continuing your analysis, you can use your own customers (if you have such) and your website visitors and even conduct marketing interviews to narrow your audience. Finally, you should have a brand persona with age, gender, home address, hobbies, income, profession, education level, marital status, what they enjoy watching and reading, and some personal beliefs.

Create your brand voice

After you’ve created your brand persona, it’s time to establish your brand voice. That’s how you will sound on all channels. Your brand voice is an integral part of your brand personality. Make sure that your brand personality corresponds closely to the brand persona. For example, if your brand persona is a 35-year-old, highly-religious businesswoman from Nebraska with a trophy husband and three kids*, you should sound precisely as such. A common mistake small-business owners make is to use their actual voice as their brand voice. They assume that their primary users will be just like them. However, if you haven’t done your analysis, you can’t be sure this is the case, and using your own voice as a brand voice may do more harm than good. 

Creating your brand voice is definitely not the most challenging part of creating a winning content strategy. In a nutshell, you need to:

• Follow your company’s mission statement closely.
• Ask your customers and users how they would describe your brand in three words
• Research how your brand persona talks
• Make sure to define your voice pretty accurately
• Make your brand voice charming and knowledgeable
• Do not deviate from the brand voice regardless of the communication channel. 

Nike is generally the best example of a perfect brand voice which entirely represents the brand’s slogan, “Just Do It.” The brand voice is assertive, confident, and motivational. Still, they try to keep their messaging simple and inspiring, which makes the entire brand voice even more convincing.

Define your content goals.

The Why question is just as important as the Who. A good content strategy will have several main goals. For example, you can’t simply allocate an entire year to brand awareness. You need to help those users who developed an interest in your brand to move down the funnel. In other words, you can’t just concentrate for an entire year on the start of the journey. You need to work on all ends simultaneously. 

Your content goals should correspond closely to the marketing funnel’s needs. 

1. Brand Awareness – The goal is to showcase your brand and attract the attention of the users whom you can help.
2. Create interest – Explain your product’s features, benefits, and how it will resolve the user’s problem.
3. Nurturing – Convince the user that your product is the best and only viable solution to their problem. 
4. Sale – Convert the user into a customer
5. Loyalty – Convince the customer to make your brand their main supplier
6. Advocacy – Convince the loyal customer to spread the word about your business and generate leads for your brand. 

A winning content strategy will pursue these goals with different content formats and, more importantly, communication channels.

Choose the correct communication channels

When we are done with the Who and Why it’s time to deal with the Where. Communication channels can be either online or offline. A good strategy will include both types but not all communication channels. Some simply won’t work for your needs. Relying on all communication channels for all phases of your customer journey is not only pointless but is actually counterproductive. For example, using blog posts as a sales tool is utterly pointless. Your main goal for such content, as you will see in a bit, is lead generation. The same goes for emails that have absolutely no chance of expanding your brand awareness. The different channels work best for different audience types and should be used at various stages of your marketing and sales processes. So let’s have a closer look at the main communication channels. 

Website

Your website is basically your brand’s online office. This is where users from different parts of the Marketing funnel will come and seek more information. Therefore, the content on your website should be short, affirmative, and proactive. You must create a customer journey ending with the CTA. Your content goal will differ depending on the page type (home page, landing page, or product page). For example, your home page should be more like a reception, where visitors are pointed in the right direction based on their needs. Your landing pages (a.k.a. sales pages) should persuade customers to finalize the purchase, while product pages should consist of valuable information that pushes the customer toward the buy button. Regardless of the page type, this communication channel is imperative for your brand as it plays too many roles in your marketing strategy. 

Blog

The blog has a different role. It targets a colder audience at the top or outside the marketing funnel. Blogs should share valuable information relevant to your target audience and invite them to check your product or service to solve their problem. Blogs are invaluable in promoting your brand awareness and creating brand authority. 

Emails

Emailing is a great way to stay in touch with your target audience already interested in your product. Despite being one channel, here, you can target at least two potential sub-groups of your target audience, depending on their action to get to your email list. 

Emails may contain a variety of content with different goals. Usually, however, their main goal is to keep your audience engaged and ready to receive promotions and offers. 

Social Networks

Social networks can be a great communication channel if you choose the one that corresponds with your audience’s interests. For example, Tik Tok may have a vast number of subscribers. Still, an in-depth look at their customers and most-watched videos shows that the audience is predominantly young and not economically active. Still, if that’s your target audience, TikTok is a great place to use as a flagman of your social network communication. In contrast, if you are a B2B business, Linked In is a far better choice. Still, a good content strategy involves at least a few social media, depending on the targeted audience’s preferences. 

YouTube

YouTube is THE platform if you can manage to create regular video content. It’s astonishingly good for brand awareness, as well as for generating leads. Moreover, it’s a great place to determine what type of content flies with your audience. Needless to say, the video and sound should be of high quality, which demands some additional investments and effort. 

Guest Posts

Guest posts are a great way to diversify your audience within your industry. Moreover, with such posts, you will increase your authority, and this is one outstanding authority proof. Guest posts work excellently for lukewarm audiences interested in the industry but still have no idea of your product or whether it will accommodate their needs. Usually, such content is inviting and should point to a dedicated landing page, a product page, or the home page, depending on the goal of the content. 

Podcasts

Podcasts are a relatively new addition to this list, as they have gained popularity in the past few years. Today, however, many people would listen to a podcast the same way they listened to the radio back in the day. So, creating your own podcast or at least being a guest on a different industry-relevant podcast will significantly boost your brand awareness, credibility, and authority.  

Q&A websites

Another place where you can spread the word about your brand and gather some much-needed credibility as an expert in your industry’s field. Q&A websites are great places to target lukewarm audiences who have a problem but still have no idea what the solution is. If you represent your product or service as a solution, this will immensely benefit your brand. 

Online Lists Websites

Dozens of outlets are famous for creating brand listings within specific industries. Usually, they work as Yellow Pages of the brands that can help customers with their problems. So naturally, with the proper content, they can be a gold mine for your lead generation campaigns. 

Offline channels

PR, Magazines, Newspapers, TV channels, billboards, flyers, and brochures can still considerably impact your revenue and conversion rate, especially if you target older audiences who are used to these communication channels. However, make sure your messages are spread through the correct outlet. For example, if you offer a high-end B2B product that needs serious investment, advertising on TMZ won’t be as sufficient as investing in a dedicated article in Financial Times. 

Using all these channels is pointless and can be time and resource-consuming. Instead, a content strategist’s main job is choosing the right mix that perfectly corresponds with your audience’s preferences and general marketing goals. 

Decide on the content format

The next decision on the list is the What. So, you need to decide what your content’s format will be. Content comes in various formats, each working better for some goals and worse for others. For example, a paid article will enhance your brand awareness and establish you as an authority figure. What it won’t do, however, is convert users into customers. In the same way, a landing page will be pretty efficient at convincing users to buy but not as good at building loyalty and advocacy. 

Deciding whether to create a blog post, infographic, case study, or video depends on the goal, channel, and audience. It’s not that hard to conclude that text content won’t work very well on YouTube, for example. However, not all decisions are as obvious as this one, as in Facebook, for example, you have the opportunity to go either with pictures or videos. So, while the channel allows you to choose the content format, the goal will certainly push you in only one direction. 

Create a timeline

For your content strategy to be successful, you must post the right content at the right time. For a single customer journey, you can’t start with the loyalty goal and go back to the brand awareness toward the end. So, your content publishing time should correspond with the customer journey and the marketing funnel. Thus creating a timeline where you can prepare your content in advance will help you execute your strategy flawlessly. 

Moreover, when creating content, you should consider when would be the best time of the day to publish it. Naturally, that doesn’t apply to all channels, as you don’t have control over when guest posts will be published. However, when it comes to emails, social media posts, and blog posts, getting them at the right time will make them more effective. There are a few good examples of that with emails. Statistics have shown that emails sent on Thursdays at 10 am will lead to the best results. Still, not all emails should be sent precisely at 10 am. on Thursday. For example, if the goal is to create loyalty, you must send an email a week after the delivery time asking for a review. Then, you can create a whole sequence of emails that would remind and entice the customer to return to your business.  

Creating a timeline for your content is highly individual, depending mainly on the industry, the audience, and the product type. So, do your research and make sure your content timetable shows not only the goal and the channel but also the added value of the content.

Add value to your content

That should go without saying, but still, each of your content pieces should have some additional value to the audience. For example, you can’t just showcase your product’s features on your product page. You need to acknowledge what common problems they can resolve and why they can do it better than other products. The added value, however, can range significantly based on the type of content. Blogs are typically educational, but they can answer a pressing question trending around the industry or express a company’s position on an important issue. Emails, on the other hand, can be informative or promotional. Social Media posts can be entertaining, educational, promotional, etc. 

When creating your timetable, make sure you consider all other aspects of your marketing, as your content strategy needs to complement the overall marketing strategy of your product. For example, if there is an ongoing promotion of skirts in your online store, you need to focus your efforts on showcasing this product across channels and with your added value as well. In this scenario, emailing your loyal customers a promotional code for jackets would be highly insufficient. Not to mention if you go ahead and showcase your shorts collection on social media and post an educational blog about how T-shirts can help you keep cool during summer heats. Your content strategy across all channels should be in unison. 

Introduce KPIs and improve your content strategy

Naturally, you need to be able to keep track of how efficient your content is and revise it every quarter. The most effective way to achieve this is by introducing some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), so you can measure your progress. Naturally, the KPIs depend on the content’s goal, and each format has its own metrics that must be followed. However, a good idea is to create a benchmark or a target to show you whether your content is successful or not.

Naturally, placing such values should be based either on previous results, or if you have none, you can do some research and put a provisional benchmark. For example, your PPC campaign’s primary goal is to bring leads. So naturally, you will measure it by the number of leads it generates. On the other hand, the landing page has the main task of selling, so the KPI should be the conversion rate. 

A brand awareness campaign should bring views, while a blog post should bring visits. 

Of course, you can place several KPIs for each content type. For example, you can follow your email’s open, click, and conversion rates. This way, you can determine more precisely where exactly the problem is – the Headline (if the open rate is too small), the email body (if the CTR is not high enough), or the landing page (if the conversion rate is not as expected). 

A winning content strategy should have all these KPIs thoroughly written and followed over time. 

Audit your results

Naturally, when you gather data, you might as well use it to better your performance. It’s a good idea to follow your progress every week, but the bare minimum is once a month. This way, you will know if you are on track and make the necessary changes to reach your quarterly goals. An audit usually takes 1 to 2 days, checking all the numbers, the best and the worst performers, and drawing some conclusions. For example, when comparing the best SMM campaign with the worst, you need to check the wording, the length of the copy, the visuals, whether it’s an image or a video, the colors, the language, the products, and everything that might be responsible for the results. Finally, you need to write down your findings and use them in the next period to check if your conclusions are true. 

What do you need to start?

That’s all there is to creating a winning content strategy. No one said that creating such a complicated document would be easy. It’s anything but. Still, if you want to avoid chaotic content and cross-channel discrepancy when communicating with your customers, introducing a content strategy is a must. 

As you can see, creating such and executing it takes a lot of time and resources. So, naturally, how detailed and extensive your content strategy depends on your abilities and resources. For example, if you can’t allocate enough resources to create quality YouTube videos, you should sack this channel altogether until you can afford it. Also, if you can’t afford to advertise offline, it won’t be the end of the world if you postpone that part. Therefore, your content strategy should reflect, before anything else, your abilities to execute it. 

Needless to say, to even consider having content, you need to have at least a website. Before you make decisions about your website’s design and content, however, you need to consider its hosting, as this will be integral to your success. Poor hosting services will slow down your website, make it unavailable when too many people rush in simultaneously, and ultimately destroy your credibility and hinder your success. With HostArmada, you have nothing to worry about. Our cloud-based hosting services guarantee high speed, trustworthy security, and unwavering reliability. 

Before you start creating your content strategy, take your time to check our hosting plans and ask our experts to help you choose the best plan according to your needs and goals. 

*That’s an entirely made-up brand persona that doesn’t correspond to any known brand and is intended only for an example.