In simple terms, an effective Content Strategy is a plan which uses content ideation, creation, delivery, and governance to achieve a business goal.

Building a successful Content Strategy will not only convert browsers into buyers, but it will engage your audience with your brand at every stage of the process even after purchase. 

Read on to find out everything you need to know to create an effective Content Strategy for your brand.

Understanding your audience

Your target audience refers to a specific group of people who are most likely to want and benefit from your product or service. Finding your target audience will help you to speak directly to them and increase brand affinity, loyalty and ultimately, sales.

Universal content is never specific enough to provide value to anyone. Although every business wants to appeal to everyone, content performs best when it’s targeted towards one particular audience.

Identifying your audience
To know how to effectively reach your target audience, you must first know exactly who they are. There are several ways you can determine your target audience.

Existing customer analysis, market research, competitor analysis and looking into industry trends can help to identify your target audience. Once you have this data, you can start to break your audience down and get rough outline of who they are. Then, you can uncover their needs, feelings and motivations.

Understanding their needs and motivations
What do your audience want to accomplish? What’s standing in the way of their goals? As a brand, you can’t just tell customers about your offering and expect them to engage with you. Instead, let your audience know that you understand their pain points, emotions, and stressors. By removing yourself as the focus, you’ll become a trustworthy guide and resource for your audience.

Once you know your audience’s problems and how they feel, you can position your offering as a solution to their problem. But first, you need to know exactly who you’re talking to and how and where to reach them.

Creating an audience persona
An audience persona is a semi-fictional ‘person’ that embodies your target audience. It’s a concise summary of all the relevant information you can find about them. Sometimes your brand will have several audience personas.

Once you have a general idea of your audience, you can begin to piece together a specific persona. This persona will be informed by key information about your audience including:

• Their demographics – Including age, typical income and gender.
• Their psychographics – their values, opinions and interests.
• Their geographics – where they’re located and where they work in terms of city, town, country.
• Their behaviours and personality – which messages will resonate with them the most and motive them to follow a call to action?
• Their preferred method of communication – namely through social media, over the phone or in person.

Be specific. Your persona needs to be one individual with a defined set of characteristics. Once you know who this person is you can talk directly to them, in a way they’ll relate to, on a media platform they are familiar with.

Read on to find out everything you need to know to create an effective Content Strategy for your brand.

Goals and objectives

Defining your business goals
Ideally, your product or service should solve a problem for your customer while your content should help to educate your audience to identify said problem and position your brand as a solution.

As well as being entertaining and informative, your content should also have a business purpose. This purpose usually sits within one of the following goals:

Brand awareness

• Traffic increase
• Lead generation
• Customer conversion
• Customer loyalty
• Upselling

Each piece of content or series of content should work towards achieving your business goal. Once you define this, your content should become more purposeful.

Setting measurable objectives
Once you’ve set your goals, it’s time to evaluate how they’ll be measured. Measurable goals can be both quantitative in terms of productivity results, money saved or earned or qualitative such as client testimonials and surveys.

Aligning your content strategy with your business goals
Typically, your goals you set for your content will define the type of content you produce. Once you’ve defined your goals, you can start producing content to achieve your objectives.

Conducting a Content Audit

Evaluating your existing content
A content audit is the process of analysing and evaluating your content. This can help to reveal the strengths and weaknesses in your content strategy so your content plan can be adapted and improved to reach your chosen objectives.

Gathering the data you need for analysis can be a tricky and lengthy process. Using an audit tool such as Google Analytics or Content Square, can make the collection and interpretation of your data more digestible.

Depending on your goals, you can determine the success of your existing content in many ways including the following:

• SEO metrics such as organic traffic, backlinks, keyword rankings and dwell time.
• User behaviour metrics including pageviews, average session duration and bounce rate.
• Engagement metrics namely likes, shares, comments, or mentions.
• Sales metrics such as number of leads, conversion rates, and ROI.
• Identifying gaps in your content

Content Gap Analysis is the process of identifying gaps in your content. The easiest way to identify a gap in your content is to compare your current content performance with your desired content performance. If your performance is lacking and not reaching your goals, you may have a gap in your content.

To identify these gaps more research is needed. Reaching out to your current audience or undertaking further market research is an effective way to determine what your customers want. Using data-driven insights can also identify these gaps.

Determining what content works best for your audience
Use your existing content to find out what is already working well for you. Using Performance Metrics or Post Tracking Tools can help to make this easier. Repurposing and reusing content that has previously worked well into your current strategy should be a consideration for the future. In terms of pieces that aren’t performing as well as predicted, consider if these could be re-worked or tweaked to be more effective. Pieces of content that can’t be amended or would take too much resource should potentially be deleted or written out of your strategy. Again, reaching out to your audience or looking at your competitors is an effective way of uncovering what your customers are engaging with content-wise.

Once you have created a content strategy, the next step to bring this to fruition is to create a content plan. This is a plan outlines how you will execute your content strategy.

You can create a content plan manually with a spreadsheet or use a Project Management Tool. How you choose to create your content plan depends on your goals, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach however there are minimum requirements that you should aim to meet. For each piece of content ensure to include at least:

• The title of each piece
• A rough outline of the content
• The format including where it will be published and the rough length of the piece
• Who will be writing the content
• The publication dates
• The keywords that need to be included
• A status of the progress of the piece

Each piece of content will need more information depending on where it will be published. For example, if you’re posting on social media, you should also include:

• Caption copy
• Image or video file (including length of video)
• Hashtags
• Link
• The publish date & time including the time zone
• Tagged users and their handles

Your plan can be as detailed as you need it to be however creating a detailed plan will be helpful later when it comes to creating a brief for the content.

Developing a content calendar
A content calendar is a formalised schedule of when you will be ideating, producing, and publishing your content. They help to keep track of the progress of each piece of content you plan to publish.

Content calendars can be produced manually or with the help of a content calendar tool. Again, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Deciding on your content ideas, publication frequency and publication dates are key before you action a content calendar. Scheduling every part of the content creation from ideation to publication is also key to ensure the content is created effectively.

Brainstorming content ideas
To ensure you’re coming up with ideas that meet the needs of each piece of content, it is useful to first have a clear purpose in mind. What do you want to achieve with each piece? What is the most effective way to reach you audience? What is the most interesting theme surrounding the topic you’re focusing on?

To make brainstorming sessions more effective, why not try a group session? Set a timer and come up with as many ideas as you can at once then take the strongest ideas to develop. Always sense check your ideas to ensure they fully answer the brief. Ideation is a skill so the more you practise, the easier it will get. There are also ideation tools available to help you to think differently if ideas become a little stagnant.

Prioritizing content topics based on audience needs
Consider again the aim of the piece. Is your idea meeting the criteria it needs to engage your audience? Does it provide a clear solution to your audience’s problem? Is it interesting as well as informative? Once you have set a clear intention based on audience insight, you can begin to craft your content.

Crafting quality content

Once you know who you’re talking to, on which platform and the focus of each piece of content, the next step is to define how you will talk to your audience.

Writing for your audience

To fully engage with your audience, you not only need to talk to them, but you need to talk to them in a relatable way. The way you sound to your customers can change the way they feel about your brand. For example, if you want to be seen as a thought leader, consider a more formal, informative tone.

Your tone of voice should align with your branding and your brand purpose. How you sound should remain consistent across each touch point of your branding however it may differ slightly from platform to platform. For example, blogs and other long-form pieces may take a more instructional tone whereas social media posts might sound more informal and conversational. Make sure that every piece of content is written in your brand voice and will resonate with your customers in the desired way.

Creating visually appealing content

People eat with their eyes. And by this, we mean people will engage more with content that looks good. This doesn’t mean you need to beautifully design each piece of content although it should always look appealing. Visually appealing content is both nicer to look at and easier to digest. Arranging your content into a formatted layout is essential to a successful piece of content.

Incorporating SEO best practices

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is key to bringing people to your content. With so much competition, an effective SEO strategy can separate you from the rest.

There are a few simple things you can incorporate into your content creation to ensure it ranks as highly as it can including:

• Choosing the right URL – in terms of your website, your domain name should include your business’s name and one or two keywords that are relevant to your business.
• Using anchor text – this is the clickable text on a hyperlink. If used effectively, this text should improve the user experience when navigating your content.
• Undertake keyword research – websites and content can’t rank if you aren’t targeting keywords. There are Keyword Research Tools out there to help with this.
• Optimise your use of keywords in headings and subheadings – each piece of your content should have the correct text hierarchy. Using titles and subheadings containing a keyword will be easily recognised by search engines scanning your content.
• Optimise all images – to ensure your pages load as quickly as possible, optimise all images and make sure they’re as small as possible while retaining their quality.

Measuring success

Setting KPIs
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are measurable performance metrics. Whatever your goals, setting attainable KPIs will help you to see where your brand’s strengths and weaknesses lie.

In a nutshell, the most common KPIs are:

• Revenue growth.
• Revenue per client.
• Profit margin.
• Client retention rate.
• Customer satisfaction.
  
  

Tracking and analysing performance
Tracking and analysing the performance of your content strategy can help you to further identify your content’s strengths and areas you may need to re-think.

Data we suggest you keep an eye on includes:

• Traffic – in terms of users, pageviews and unique page views. This data will show you how many people are visiting your channels and more specifically, the content in particular.
• Sales and conversions – if you use content to, for example, generate sales or encourage sign ups, this is information you need to collect to see what’s working most effectively.
• Engagement – getting traffic to your content is one thing but getting people to actually engage with it is another. How long people view your content and how much they view at a given time is useful data for uncovering where your audience are spending their time interacting with your content.
• SEO performance – measuring the amount of traffic your content gets from searching as well as your SERP (search engine results page) ranking will help you to measure the success of your SEO strategy.

Adjusting your content based on results
Once you have gathered and analysed key data, you can begin to make adjustments to your content strategy. How can you develop the things that are working well? Can you tweak your strategy to help your worst-performing content improve? Which patterns do you see in the data you have collected? Continuously gather and analyse your data to see what you can improve.