Establishing a good content strategy

There is never a wrong time to analyse your content strategy. Some companies do not even have a content strategy, resulting in a disadvantage over competitors. When it comes to your content strategy, the content needs to remain appealing and refreshing for your current and prospective customers. How can you differentiate yourself by leveraging a content strategy? We will dive into this topic below.

What is a content strategy?

When it comes to your content strategy, your company objectives should be at the center stage. Content should be an enabler in reaching these goals. For example, a company objective could be to increase brand recognition. To reach this objective, you can set up your content strategy including social media, SEO, and brand awareness. As stated in the introduction, not all companies have a content strategy and lots of companies do not see a purpose in developing one. These companies indicate that they do not have the resources available to prioritise such a strategy. We believe otherwise: content is of utmost importance and high-quality content results in trustworthiness at your target audience and prospective customers.

Developing a content strategy roadmap

What do you need to take into account when developing a content strategy? The roadmap below explains how you can develop a strong content strategy from scratch.

1. The first step is crisp and clear: determine your objective. Why do you want to develop content, and who is your target audience? Think this through before you start following the strategic roadmap.
2. Once you have your objective clear, it is necessary to crystallise who your target audience is. If you do not define your target audience well enough, you cannot cater the content to their needs. To determine your audience, you can conduct a target audience analysis by conducting several interviews. The interviews can help you understand the challenges the audience faces and how you can help solve them. A strong content strategy helps to solve the challenge for two types of people: people who do not yet know what their challenge is, and people who are already using your solution to solve their challenges. Your content can help you convince prospective customers to start using your solution.
3. Who are you as a company? Every company has Unique Selling Points (USPs) in its DNA. As a company, you want to have a unique value proposition over your competitors. For example, imagine you are at a party and someone asks you: "What does the company you work for?". This question can help you to understand and define the unique value proposition.
4. What is the message you want to bring across? What needs to be at the center stage of your content and what should be the key message? The objective, target audience, and DNA need to blend together to become the center of your messaging. To work on this messaging you can apply the concept of storytelling, which is a method to write your company's message in a story. This can help you create a strong connection between your company and the target audience.
5. Content, videos, podcasts or an infographic? Determine which communication method you want to leverage to reach your target audience. Of course, this needs to align with your objective and the target audience.
6. Which channels can you use to post your content? This is an important step, as you need to explore where your target audience is active to target them effectively. The target audience analysis can help you determine which social media channels are being used by your target audience. You also need to make sure your website is visible in search engine results, ranking high on the keywords that matter to your target audience. Do not start all at once but post your content on a channel one by one.
7. Who? What? Where? How? Yes, these are tackled by the steps above. Now is the time to bring your learnings into practice. Another tip is to create a content calendar. You can use this calendar to schedule content and indicate when it needs to be written, designed, and posted. You can easily create a content calendar using one of the many free online tools.

Content marketing

A content strategy is part of content marketing. This area of marketing helps companies to generate new leads and website traffic. A strong content strategy is the foundation and is the first phase in the customer journey. When clients reach your company's website you increase your brand recognition, more leads, conversion, and more!