5 steps to building your content strategy
The role of content marketing should be to showcase thought leadership, build trust and engage them. This calls for high quality content that addresses all their questions across the various stages of the buyer life cycle. This can feel overwhelming, however if you have a good content strategy — your job is half done!
A content strategy acts as a blueprint to guide you across the entire process from content creation to promotion. In this article, I’m going to walk you through five steps to creating an effective content strategy:
1. Concept
2. Timeline
3. Workflow
4. Review
5. Organize and promote
1. Concept
Before you begin creating your content, research to identify the concept you want to focus on- these could be through reports available online or frequent questions your target audience may have. Ensure you have conceptualized content for the entire buyer journey of awareness, consideration and decision.
In the awareness stage, give your customers educational material that can help them clearly understand, frame, and give a shape to their business challenge. How to blogs, whitepapers & videos can be good options.
In the consideration stage, create content that positions you as an expert for the business challenge they are trying to address. Demo videos, case studies, can be good resources here .
In the decision stage provide them content such as free trials, consultations, and articles that provide education on your products or services.
2. Timeline
You need to have a clear timeline on how you plan to publish your content. But do maintain some flexibility to be agile. Clearly align your timelines with the goals for the quarter- is it lead generation? Brand awareness? Etc. Map out what content you need basis these goals and have them ready on time to publish. This will give you visibility into the resources needed to complete this on time.
3. Workflow
Defining a workflow ensures you know the various steps involved in the entire process and who is the assigned owner for each task. A typical content creation workflow could include: creating wireframe or outline, research, creating first draft, review & edits, finalise draft, complete design, approve & publish. Be aware of what issues you encounter & document them so that you incorporate it into the workflow for future.
4. Review
This is a very crucial part of your content marketing process. Clear brief should be given on what the reviewer needs to look into, eg: point of view, date, language, flow etc. Ensure that the content changes are maintained in track change mode and you have plugged in the necessary SEO keywords to ensure better search rankings. Clear timelines need to be given for review process. It would be a good idea to create a content or communication style guide to create & review content systematically.
5. Organize and promote
Once your content is ready, organize it as per the buyer journey and timelines and take it forward for promotions. Ensure you have clearly defined the channels identified for promotion and have the custom content created to suit the specific channel. You can also create a repository of content for re purposing.
Its important to remember that content strategy is an evolving process. Content should always be in line with the business goals for the quarter. Keep a watch on the latest industry trends, best practices and incorporate them into your content strategy on a periodic basis. A content marketing expert can help you build and execute an effective content strategy.
