Creating an effective content strategy for your business is one of the most critical steps on your way to developing a solid marketing strategy. In fact, content marketing is by far the most effective method of inbound marketing. The ROI of content marketing is so phenomenal that it produces, on average, 3 times the leads as paid advertising.

Content strategy simply refers to the planning, development, and management of content. Many people confuse content strategy with content marketing. What is content marketing? Well, the term is difficult to unpack. In fact, we’ve received so many questions about what content marketing actually is that we decided to dedicate an entire post to defining it.

For our purposes here, content marketing refers to the actual creation of marketing content that put your strategy into motion. Content marketing is the actual tactical execution of your marketing and might include:

• Actual writing or ‘creation’ of content

• Editing content

• Curating content

• Promoting content

• Content planning and scheduling

Marketing content for this can include things like blog posts, web site pages, ebooks, email campaigns, membership sign up, and more.

However content strategy refers to the overall direction or ‘vision’ of your marketing efforts i.e., “the plan”. It might include:

• Creating your vision & goals

• Performing audience research

• Identifying demographics

• Metrics & analytics

• Establishing voice, tone & style

• Governance or how your content will be updated, maintained & archived

A solid content strategy will ask who or what is your business currently? and then help you to carve out who you want to be. It will ask. . . “What does the current situation and competitive landscape look like?” and “What is your central desire or future business goals?” And then it will outline how to get you there.

Most importantly, a strategy document will emerge from your marketing strategy! This is the go-to reference to keep your content frequent, consistent, and in-line with your pre-defined brand, style & voice.

Define and know your audience

The first step in developing your content strategy is to figure out

            Who you’re talking to now  vs. who you want to be talking to.

You want to have strong knowledge about who likes you or your company and products or services. The more you know your audience the better you can serve them. You may want to start by stalking your current audience or customers. Yes, that’s right… we want you to actually do some Internet stalking! (It’s okay… nobody will ever know.) For more info about how stalk your audience like a pro see this article: “6 steps to Stalking your Audience.”

You want to research and learn as much about your audience as you can about the following:

Demographics:

• Age

• Gender

• Family (single, married, mother/father)

• Location

• Salary/Income bracket

• Education

• Interests & likes

Where they go online:

• What are their favorite websites to visit?

• Where do they shop?

• What blogs and news sites do they read

• Who influences them or who do they FOLLOW?

• What do they re-share

• How do they ‘talk’ online?

communication platforms of choice:

• Instagram?

• Pinterest

• Twitter?

• Snapchat?

• Facebook?

Brand:

• How do they want to be perceived?

• What are their goals… what are they trying to achieve?

• What drives them?

And most importantly…

• What problems do they need solved?

• What keeps them up at night?

• What are they scared of?

• What are their challenges?

• What do they need help with?

Establish Market Segments and Create Personas

Once you have researched your current audience or buyers you should then utilize that data to build your target market and create ‘sketches’ or profiles of key segments of that market. These artifacts are called personas.

For example, personas help one in understanding existing customers as well as identifying future and potential customers. They also help you to better understand your ‘ideal customer’ and even help you to avoid your ‘negative’ customer (you didn’t know you had those did you?).  Most importantly they help you to tailor or personalize your content and messaging to different groups.

When you create personas you give them a name and you provide key details about who they are and their buying and online behavior. You can create a typical customer persona named Jessica --a 30 something marketing professional who enjoys fashion blogging and likes to post or re-share fashion online-- all the way to an ideal persona named Jennifer -- a working mom of 2 who shops for herself and kids mostly online to save time.

Perform a Content Audit

The next step is to perform a content AUDIT. Yeah, it sounds really terrible but the basic steps are actually fairly easy to start. Here are the high levels of beginning a content audit (You can learn more by visiting another article on content audits):

1. Inventory existing content --- yes this means catalog all of the actual site URLS.

2. Organize and describe your pages of content. This includes, subject (i.e, selling, education, how to, technical), length and the tone of the piece(s). Also include relevance, ‘freshness’ and what if any it ‘features’ the content included –images, infographic, video...

3. Measure—learn how well each post or piece of content did. Identify goal metrics to monitor traffic, engagement, shares, conversions & more of this content.

4. Analyze the metrics for patterns and omissions.

Competitive Analysis

Once you have completed all this research and analysis for your own business you should then undertake that same endeavor for several of your key competitors. (Read more here about doing a thorough analysis on your competitors. For now start with the following:

• Identify 3-5 key competitors in your space

• Stalk you competitors – visits their Web site, sign up for their memberships and newsletters, study their communications, track their sales, and even BUY their products.

• Discover who their target market is and create buyer personas for them.

• Perform a gap analysis on their current content strategy vs. your current content strategy. What are they doing that is working that your not. What holes do you need to fill in your own plan. Conversely, how are you beating your competition? What are you excelling at.

Close the Gap

Finally, with your content audit and competitive analysis in-hand, it’s time to take action:

1. Compare your starting ‘vision’ of your business to the data that emerged from your content audit. Note ways to close the gap.

2. Compare your current situation to where your competitors are as well. Note the ways to close that gap too.

3. Set new content goals that you can measure and reasonably accomplish. Examples might be:

• Write more original content.

• Write the most in depth guide to _____(fill in the blank i.e, planning a wedding or starting your own business).

• Start a new account on another social media platform.

• Increase back links.

• Increase content posting.

Once you have done these 5 major steps it’s then time to commit it to paper and create some form of guideline or working reference for your business and employees to refer to – your strategy document.

Content strategy formats can be anything from a simple one page cheat sheet for a smaller micro business to a full 25 page report or an entire presentation/PowerPoint for a larger company.

Don’t worry about what it should be or how it should look or what it should include. And don’t feel intimidated by this process. There are also templates out there that you can use as a starting point to help you.

To use a cliché, the journey to 10k more followers begins with one tiny little post!

Discover how a content marketing consultant can help make content marketing look easy for you. Let VERGE guide you in your content marketing journey: