
Pictured: Content marketing strategy
A digital content marketing strategy will drastically improve the effectiveness and performance of digital content and communications. We’ve created content marketing strategies for a wide range of brands, and their agencies.
Depending on the client, we assist with the entire strategy, or particular areas where help is needed.
Q) What is content strategy?
A) “Getting the right content to the right user at the right time through strategic planning of content creation, delivery, and governance.”, says the Content Strategy Alliance.
Q) Why might your organisation want a content strategy?
A) Because you need customers, an increased number of leads, you wish to to transform your customer service… many reasons.
Content strategy example
A content strategy can be divided into five stages; analysis, insight, objective, tactics and measurement:
Objective
- It’s a good idea to clearly document the objective: what does the client want the content to do?
Situation analysis
- Research into the sector.
- Talking to the client to discover their objectives – and who they want to target.
- Outline the people they wish to reach, and outline the paths to purchase the client’s target audience may use (talking to actual customers is also recommended!)
- Analysis of the client’s existing content, website, social, seo etc (gives us a benchmark)
- Benchmarking the client’s content against their competitors (usually three)
- Analysis of what target customers are actually expressing and thinking, using social listening tools and search engine data (to discover intent).
Insight
- Sift the information, look at it from different angles, and analyse it further until we discover gaps and insights.
- This research will show us how customers articulate their desires for products and services, and whether the client is addressing the needs of their potential customers.
Tactics
- We can then draw up a plan for the content to be created, for each persona, at each part of the sales funnel.
- We can suggest themes for content that will work well, or offer headline ideas… or be as detailed as is needed.
Measurement
- We also have to ensure that the content’s performance is measurable – so that we can refine the process, and gauge success.
The importance of research and analysis
Content marketing strategies are relatively easy to create. However, they often under-perform because they lack insight –
usually with too much focus on company objectives, and too little focus on helping customers reach their objectives.
The “secret” is aligning the company’s communications with customer needs and behaviour.
As leadership expert John C. Maxwell has written: “people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand”.
Which means we need to research and understand customer needs and behaviour.
Without decent analysis and insight, the creation of lots of new, unsuitable content, for no good reason, is all too common.
See also
Strategy services