Content strategy – what is it and how to create it?

What is content strategy?

All these activities are designed to introduce potential customers to your company’s offer and encourage engagement, ultimately leading to conversions. Planning a content strategy requires marketers or content marketing agencies to carry out various different actions over time.

Various content strategies

A well-thought-out and well-planned content strategy can bring tangible benefits to your brand. Therefore, it has specific goals:

Building customer relationships

Publishing content through various communication channels helps to maintain a constant relationship with customers, who are more willing to engage with the company as a result. Additionally, recipients can derive real value from following your brand – they receive clear information about products or services, giving them the opportunity to make more informed choices and understand what they truly need.

Responsible content strategy building creates a company as an industry expert and this builds trust among customers who value a reliable seller offering them quality products and services.

Lead generation

Thanks to the use of content strategy, a company has a chance to generate leads, which means collecting contact information from people who may become their customers in the future. Lead magnets – “premium” content such as special podcasts or e-books – offered to recipients after sharing their data, prove to be particularly useful in this context.

Monitoring changes in the market

A constant monitoring of how the market changes and shapes is an essential part of every content strategy in order to regularly respond to the needs and preferences of the audience.

Content strategy – key elements

Content strategy involves planning ahead, well beyond the next week. If you approach the subject seriously and don’t want to wonder in a month or two what else to write about, follow the established plan.

What should be taken care of when creating a content strategy?

Competition analysis

First and foremost, you need to determine what resources are necessary to achieve the benefits of planned content activities. Information about the competition’s actions should be gathered before investing time and money into project implementation.

Otherwise, it may turn out that you are investing in content that will not bring the expected profit. Why? Well, finding a market niche nowadays is almost impossible, which means that you probably have competition. And not just any competition, but one that is constantly growing, publishing more and more content, and investing resources in optimizing their website.

It will be difficult to outperform a company that has been on the market for many years, but it is not impossible. However, it will require time, a good development strategy, and… money.

Target group

The key element of an effective content strategy is defining the target audience to whom you will direct your message. When determining the target group, Google Analytics can be a helpful tool where you will find useful data about users:

• gender and age;
• interests;
• language and location.

Precise identification of the target group will allow you to match the language of communication and the channels of transmission that your audience uses. Why is all this necessary? To reach the customer more easily. Otherwise, you will address a fashion-interested teenager differently than a doctor looking for equipment for their office.

Channels of communication

When creating a content strategy, it is worth determining in which channels your brand will be present and how often you are able to publish content.

The most important content distribution channels are:

• company website and blog – substantive knowledge from industry specialists is currently highly desired;
• social media – company profiles on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or Twitter will allow for precise targeting of the chosen target group with the message;
• newsletter – regularly sent emails can build positive relationships between the brand and customers, and contribute to increased sales.

Determining communication channels will facilitate the preparation of a publication calendar and also allow for the planning of tasks within the company, as each employee specializes in something different.

Method of communication

The next step consists of determining the form of communication. It can be:

• podcasts;
• infographics;
• blog articles;
• tutorials;
• e-books;
• sponsored texts;
• webinars;
• interviews;
• emails;
• social media posts;
• contests;
• case studies.

The choice of communication form depends on the established personas but blindly following current trends is not advisable. Consider the nature of your activities and check if the proposed communication form is consistent with it.

Publication calendar

Planning requires maintaining a publication calendar. You can adjust the content to events or occasions. It may be helpful to track the calendar of unusual holidays, which can also serve as a source of inspiration for your content.

Content audit

All the actions you take have a specific goal. Occasionally, it is necessary to conduct a content audit to verify and assess to what extent these actions align with expectations. Thanks to this, you are able to measure the effects of your work and determine the further direction of development.

Perhaps you will need to revisit something, make some improvements, or give up on something. You won’t find out until you conduct a content audit.

Keywords

In order to optimize content for SEO, it is necessary to choose appropriate keywords related to the industry and the products/services being sold. The actions related to positioning aim to facilitate potential customers in reaching your website. It is important to take into account the needs and questions of customers who enter content into the search engine. These are important steps to increase traffic to the website and, consequently, achieve higher sales results.