I have a question for you. What if we attempt to build a tower on a not-so-sturdy foundation? What do you think the outcomes might be?
The same goes for your content strategy too. Content marketing can often be an awesome task. So, planning a content marketing strategy should be thorough with precision and care so that it helps us achieve the results we seek.
If we do content marketing without clarity or a previous framework, one will keep going round and round in a circle without understanding why things aren’t working out. Keeping this in mind, I’ve got prepared a list of questions that will help you to formulate this basic structure as well as help gain clarity!!
So before planning your content strategy, you want to find out the answers to these questions. These questions will provide you with more clarity and a robust foundation, you’ll build your content strategy.
1. What are your business Goals?
What is the end goal or the results you want from creating a smart content strategy? It is to drive your content to create a buzz for your brand or generate more leads or conversions, right?
Exactly!! The goals of your content strategy are directly associated with the goals of your business. Therefore, knowing your business goals helps a ton!! Your business goals will offer you the guidelines on that you should base your content marketing strategy.
Knowing the monthly or quarterly goals of your business will act because the key pointers on what your content strategy will be.
For example, your goal is to extend sales by 25%. This goal will facilitate you to plan a content strategy in a way that will complement you to achieve this goal. This goal will prompt the CTAs of your content to be ‘buy now. it’ll prompt you to focus more on the content that will nurture your target audience and convert them into customers.
This way, before starting together with your content marketing strategy, the first question you should ask is: what are the goals that you have set for the next quarter or next month? Keep the highest priority goal in your mind and design a content strategy according to that.
This approach may be a sure-shot way for you to create content that will maximize your ROI.
2. does one have a Buyer Persona ready?
A buyer’s persona is just a fictional depiction of your ‘ideal customer’. A buyer’s persona will facilitate to creation of your content in such a way that your target audience will not only connect with your brand and product but also will convert into a customer.
A Buyer persona helps you to make content that is personalized for the different stages in the buyer’s journey or different segments you have created.
In practicality, a buyer Persona will facilitate your finding the tone, pitch, imagery, or references that will connect and convert a potential buyer.
For example, if your buyer persona may be a working mom in her late 20s to early 30s; this will give you an idea of what kind of language, tone and pitch you would like to use for your content. What quote images or aesthetics will invoke certain emotions in them? Now contrary to the present, if your buyer persona is young adults aged from 18 to 25 mostly gen-z; the tone, pitch, and references used for his demographic are going to be different.
Therefore, ask yourself the question, who is your buyer persona? This question will facilitate you to understand what kind of language, tone, pitch, aesthetic and overall branding you ought to go for!!
3. does one have a Brand Blueprint?
A Brand Blueprint is your business strategy, vision, marketing strategy, unique selling points, story, voice, and visual expression that helps you instill your unique identity within the mind of your customers that will in turn help you achieve your goals.
A brand blueprint will facilitate you to strategize your content in such a way that your core values, philosophy, and principles are going to be reflected through it. The content of your business is often used as a tool to present your story that your target audience will resonate with and can gravitate towards. Therefore, a brand blueprint will play a pivotal role in your content strategy.
A brand blueprint should contain 2 aspects of your business.
A. Style and Aesthetic
B. Story and concepts
The style aspect will include the logo for your business, the graphic style, color palette, font design, etc. it also can be regarded as the visual representation of your business.
The other aspect is the core values of your product or services, the tone used, the personality you’re associating with your brand, and the various approach to dealing with problems.
Inconsistency with either of those aspects can greatly harm your business. Therefore, while making a content marketing plan ensure to have a brand blueprint ready. this may give your brand a unique identity as well as help you stay consistent overall!!
4. have you ever decided on the KPIs?
When we plan any goal, it’s recommended to plan SMART goals, which expand to:
S — Specific
M — Measurable
A — Achievable/Attainable
R — Relevant
T — Time-bound.
If goals are set without defining the measuring mechanism, one cannot understand if we are ready to achieve the goals we have set.
Setting a measuring mechanism isn’t just essential to understand if we have reached our desired destination or not. It also gives us data about what, how, and where improvements are often made. This data will then help us understand the tweaks we will make to our SEO content strategy and social media content strategy.
Here’s a general overview of what areas you ought to set your KPIs or Key-performance indicators:
A. For Brand awareness and content consumption:
Every business must know where its brand stands in its awareness. Do people realize your brand? Is it reaching new people?
This can be measured by KPIs like website or social media page visits, views on your posts and videos, impressions, the time they spend on your content and therefore the new followers you have gained. These KPIs will vary from business to Business. So, discover the ones most suitable for you.
B. to work out engagement:
Now that you simply are more aware of your brand awareness, the subsequent step is to analyze how many people engage with it and in what form.
KPIs like comments, shares, saves, clickthrough rate, and clicking on links or forwards of emails are good to live to understand whether people engage with your content or not.
Engaging together with your content is also a sign that your current strategy works and planting clever CTAs will lead to more engagement!!
C. to test how many people your content can retain:
Being able to retain your audience is one of the biggest indicators of a successful content strategy. These metrics showcase what proportion of your audience visits again and stays longer in front of your content.
This gives a pointer to whether your strategy is heading in the right direction or not. a number of these metrics include a percentage of new v/s returning audience, bounce rate, unsubscribing from your email list, unfollows on social media handles, etc.
D. For leads:
Lead generation is one of the main goals of content strategy. So having data thereon always helps to understand whether or not a marketing plan is able to perform or not. So having KPIs to live the performance on lead generation is a must.
The KPIs for this will be new subscribers to your newsletter, new contacts in your email list, downloads of your lead magnets and freebies, etc. Any KPI which will help you to track leads in your buyer’s journey and funnel should be considered!!
5. have you ever fixed the Content Pillars?
Content pillars are the overarching categories that your content falls into. But why are they important? it’s because they give a skeleton to your content strategy. Sometimes having multiple options ahead of you can make you confused. the top result would be that you got all jumbled up and cannot make an effective marketing plan. Therefore, deciding on the content pillars gives you a robust base to build your SEO and social media content strategy!!
Make sure to Keep only 3–4 categories as your content pillar.
These content pillars are often divided on the basis of various themes. for instance, you’ll keep the content pillars of your social media content strategy as:
* 3 reels, 2 carousels, 1 long video or,
* 3 reels of high-value tips or hacks, 2 reels about tools/resources, 1 promotional reel of your product
* 4 reels with high-value content, 1 carousel with valuable information, 1 meme.
* 3 carousels with valuable content, 3 memes
While for other mediums you’ll segregate the pillars as:
1 high-value blog, 1 YouTube video, and 1 newsletter per week.
The content pillars should be constructed around the kind of content you want to push through your content strategy. Is it more of the video content you would like to push? Make videos your main pillar. Is it the meme-marketing strategy you would like to use? Keep memes as your main pillar!!
This way knowing what your content pillars are will make the process of strategizing a content plan easier!!
Note: don’t forget to repurpose your content!! Repurposing is the gold mine of never-ending content!!
6. have you ever done a Competitor’s Analysis?
A competitor’s Analysis may be a cheat code to success. Why? Because you already will the info on what things work, what doesn’t, and the way you can add your own twist on them to make it even more effective.
So just attempt to go through your competitor’s strategy and analyze it.
- What is their content strategy doing? Is it working for them?
- Are you doing the items that are working for them?
- What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- How is the audience reacting to their content?
- Are they using other marketing strategies?
- What are the items they don’t consider doing? Why?
- How is their site doing? what’s their domain authority?
- What is their SEO strategy?
- How is their traffic? What keywords are they targeting?
Try to jot down answers to all of these questions. jot any other questions you feel must be added.
Check if there are any case studies available for your niche. This way, simultaneously attempt to analyze their position along with yours.
Remember: Our goal isn’t to repeat their strategy. Analyze their strategies and put a twist of your own on them.
Another useful hack is to travel through their customer’s feedback and queries. you would possibly find some useful information that will help you!!
7. What Tools and resources are required?
Tools and resources form one of the most important aspects of any content creation process. Therefore, before you begin planning the content strategy, it’s necessary for you to ascertain what tools and resources you currently have and what tools you will need.
There are many paid also as free tools available for you at every step of your strategizing process. So do shortlist the tools and resources you are feeling you must have!!
Choosing the proper is as equally important as making engaging content. If you’ve got the most high-quality content but you are publishing it on the wrong channel you are likely to not achieve your goals. So before making a content strategy ask yourself:
- What are the channels and platforms available?
- What quiet content is promoted on it? Video? Textual? Visual?
- What is the algorithm or the inner workings of that platform?
- On what channel and platforms do my customers usually hang out?
- What quiet content do they consume on that platform?
- Asking all of those questions will help you find the right platform and
- create the content that generates leads, engagement, and buzz for you!!
