Whether you’re a start-up company or a multi-billion-dollar organization, having a clearly defined content strategy is going to make a huge impact on your company’s brand identity, growth, and profitability.
Let’s take a look at five key areas your organization needs to focus on to get on the right track.
1. Content Planning
Without a map (or these days, GPS), most of us would still be wandering around looking for our kids’ high school games. Your content strategy is no different… it needs a plan – a direction. The plan itself should be organized into what some refer to as an “editorial calendar.” I, however, prefer the term “content calendar” because I think it’s more accurate. An editorial calendar, by common definition, refers to the deadlines advertisers need to adhere to in order to book advertising in publications.
Creating a centralized content calendar is important for organizations because it allows teams to have a single source where they can get an overview of the topics to be developed, the format of the content, who is responsible for development and approval, distribution channels, statuses, deadlines, and intended audiences/personas.
2. Content Creation
When creating content for your organization, you should always be writing with a clearly established goal and audience in mind. Never write with the sole purpose of ranking for search engines. Here are some guidelines for creating great content:
Set Clearly Defined Goals
The goals you create for your content should relate directly to the needs of your company and be SMART goals. The acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. If you want to be successful in your content strategy, try not to leave any of these out. No SMATs or MARTs allowed!
Let’s use this particular content piece as an example:
Goal: To increase website traffic.
- Specific: The content team will produce one original blog post per week of between 500 and 1500 words. Blog posts will be distributed on social media channels including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to drive more traffic to our website.
- Measurable: We are seeking a 10% increase in website traffic.
- Attainable: Based on existing website traffic and staff resources, this goal should be attainable.
- Relevant: The goal is relevant to the needs of the business.
- Time-bound: It will take three months to generate this traffic increase.
Say it with me… Q-U-A-L-I-T-Y
Next, the content itself should be of high quality. What do I mean by high quality? Well…. for one thing, I mean original. It should be written with a clear focus on the needs or questions of your audience at a particular stage of the buyers’ journey and should have a distinctive voice and point of view. It should also either inform, incite an action, entertain, or evoke an emotion. Better yet, do all four!
Don’t Neglect the Headline/Grabber
Continuing on the topic of content creation is the all-important headline or what my former CEO used to call “the grabber.” This crucial element is often looked at as an afterthought by some, but let’s face it, if people don’t find your headline stimulating, they certainly won’t be reading your article. When considering a headline for your article, you should aim to include the focused keyword(s) for your content in order to be picked up by search engines. Try using a headline analyzer site to help you hone in on your grabber. This article’s headline got a score of 74. Not bad.
Conduct Keyword Research
You probably have a good idea about the topics you want to write about, but understanding the search volume and ranking factors of these keywords can’t be overlooked. Also, by doing a little upfront research, you may find that there are synonymous terms that have a higher search volume and lower competition than the one(s) you were initially considering using.
Another important thing to note is not to underestimate the value of using long-tail keywords. With the increased use of mobile devices and voice search, this trend isn’t going away anytime soon, like ever.
3. Content Delivery
In this context, I’m referring to the delivery channels for the content you are creating. How will you know what to create if you don’t know the channels it’s going to be published on?
Where you intend to publish the content is a pretty important consideration when deciding what to create as you may want to adjust your approach depending on the channel (e.g., Facebook is considered more “social” and LinkedIn is considered more “business-oriented”). You also need to keep in mind any platform restrictions – like Twitter’s character limitations, for example.
4. Content Management
In a 2018 Content Management & Strategy Survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, 72% of content professionals say they’re challenged with managing content strategically. Even I can do this simple math. That means only 28% percent of marketing professionals think they’ve got it down. Crazy, right?
Being a marketer these days seems like it requires a Ph.D. Modern marketers need to understand their audience, business, and how to position their organization, products, and services. They need to know how to write value propositions, understand and monitor the competitive landscape, be data analysts, AND develop content that will compel people to take action. They also need to be proficient in about 50 different software programs to get those messages out to the right people at the right time on the right device. It’s exhausting!
Let me simplify this as much as I can. All this content you’re creating needs to be managed and it’s going to be managed by technology. But let’s not forget that people manage the technology. Finding the right combination of technologies (marketing stack), building a technically proficient marketing workforce, and putting the right processes in place will be key factors to your content’s performance.
5. Content Governance
This is an entire blog article unto itself and an area that, again, is often neglected by firms. The amount of governance a company devotes to content depends a lot on the bandwidth of the teams within the organization.
Here are some basics you should minimally include in your content governance strategy:
- Establish editorial guidelines: This ensures the content being created adheres to certain brand standards concerning voice, tone, templates, style, language, vocabulary, jargon, words not to use, formatting, imagery, etc. Putting clearly defined guidelines in place will keep your branding consistent.
- Define ownership and roles: Identify people in the organization who are allowed to produce and edit content and assign accountability for approvals to publish content.
- Create a taxonomy: As your library of content grows it will become harder to manage. Begin creating a clear taxonomy now in order to identify, name, classify, order, describe, and tag your content.
- Create quality content: Ensure content is usable, of high quality, accurate, optimized for SEO, and has proper metadata.
There’s no question that establishing a clearly defined content strategy takes a concentrated effort and dedication to quality. It’s only through the commitment of creating targeted, meaningful, sustainable content that you will see results that drive engagement with audiences at all stages of the buyer’s journey.
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