Developing a content strategy means crafting the content that your audience will interact with as they explore your brand and the solutions it offers. It gets its name from first understanding your business goals and later strategically deploying content to achieve these goals.

It’s the chocolate mint on the pillow of marketing—a little gift that adds intangible value.

This strategy is best used for goals that involve promotion, such as increasing brand awareness or site traffic. To achieve those goals, your content strategy may involve infographics on social media or writing website content that leverages SEOs by increasing your site’s attractiveness.

A content strategy should begin with your goals and build towards them. This is most useful when attracting new business or increasing customer satisfaction through high-quality content and informative posts about your brand and their questions about the industry.

While this is a week-long course in itself, this blog will go into a few of the concepts you should keep in mind when researching, developing, or implementing a content strategy for your business.

Researching

Wasting time on ineffective content is as wise as wasting condiments by spreading them on the counter. The questions you ask upfront should guide you to answers that set you up for optimal success. This is frustrating since there is no clear guide, but exciting insofar as you can look at your business and what it offers in a new light. Most importantly, establishing the “who” of your brand’s target audience will make crafting the right content a much simpler process.

A few questions to get you started on your research:

Who do you want to see your content? Their age, interests, lifestyle?
What problems do your products or services solve? Are they unique to a field or broad?
Speaking of unique, what makes you special? I mean, I know you are, but do they?
Where will your content be deployed? Videos or social media posts require different skills.

With these questions answered, you can begin to strategize. Get your chalkboards out; this might get messy.

Strategizing

Your strategy is most effective when it is laid out in the context of your goals. By knowing the kind of interaction you want out of your audience, you will have a better idea of what content to produce and how to best manage the workflow associated with production and scheduling.

Some tips to consider:

Goals, goals, goals. Yes, this bears repeating.
Conduct research on your ideal buyer. This is otherwise called your buyer persona.
Examine your current strategies and consider new methods for deploying them.

Utilize technology to help you cross-platform effectively.

Trawl the internet for more content ideas, or brainstorm with colleagues.

Manage your content through link updating, scheduling, or updating hashtags.

These tips, directed by your prior research, will help you not only develop the relevant content you need to reach your goals but help you conceptualize, deploy, and organize as your traffic grows.

How This Helps You Grow

Growth from content strategies can come from many different streams. Having more engaging content may increase user traffic on your site. Valuable and shareable content increases engagement, which makes your site algorithmically superior. Or, by hosting blogs or case studies relevant to your industry and your client’s needs, you can follow up your sales outreach with helpful articles that illustrate your understanding of client needs. In other words, a good content strategy offers a little bit of everything.

While this overview goes into the basics, the story is far from over. Until you start publishing your content, it hasn’t even begun.

Are you struggling to find the right words? Looking for a suitable medium for your message? Or are you just banging your head against the keyboard and hoping Instagram makes sense of it?

Megan Killion Consulting offers a thorough investigation into your goals and brand along with the expertise and knowledge necessary to create content that best serves your brand.

Contact me to get started on the strategies you need.