Hey, all you cool business owners and digital marketing professionals ?, happy end of 2020! This year has been filled with LOTS of pivoting…to say the least. Did you adjust your content strategy yet? Did you even have one in place before all of this started? Not to fear if you fall in either of those categories because it’s never too late to adjust and create a meaningful and strong content strategy for your brand!
For starters, let me answer the question, “What even is a content strategy?”
Good question! A content strategy is something that is WRITTEN OUT and serves as a strategic roadmap for ALL your digital marketing efforts.
We often hear how important “strong content” is to grow our brand through digital marketing efforts, but it’s forgotten that content is useless in doing so, unless it has a mapped out and planned purpose.
Make sense? Okay, cool. Now, let’s get to the fun part… How to create a content strategy that slays the game.
There are 4 major steps for creating a strong strategy for your brand, that we went ahead and listed below.
STEP 1: Create Buyer Personas
First off, in order for your content to effectively target your ideal customer(s), you must envision them, so you then know how to reach them. Good marketers know that customer and the customer’s needs always come first. When you map out who your customer is, you can better meet their needs, by providing relevant and valuable content to them. Click here to download our free buyer persona template.
STEP 2: Create a Customer Journey
Secondly, map out the journey it will take for a customer to purchase your product and become a loyal advocate by creating a customer journey roadmap. Generally speaking, you’ll probably have about 5 stages in your customer journey roadmap. Those stages being, awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy. For each of these stages in your customer journey, you’ll want to create about 5 to 6 touchpoints your brand can offer through your digital marketing efforts, to help guide them down the customer journey road to success.
STEP 3: Content Audit
This is step is crucial and oftentimes skipped completely. Once you have created your buyer persona and road mapped out the journey they will take, you want to run an audit. This will not only be an evaluation of your competitor and how they are targeting your audience, but also an evaluation of the collateral you have previously produced. What worked and what didn’t? How can you adjust your marketing efforts to give value to your ideal consumer? What platforms should you put your efforts into? How can you repurpose content that was successful and make it fresh for your audience?
STEP 4: Creating Your Content
Now to the fun part, mapping it all out. You’ll want to set a general framework of the content you plan to produce for the year. Why? So you can ensure that ALL of your digital marketing efforts are working together cohesively to funnel consumers. Determine what types of materials you want to focus on and the platforms you will use to communicate it. PRO TIP: For every content idea you come up with, make sure you ask yourself what is the marketing purpose behind this? If you can’t easily answer that question, then it’s probably not worth your energy, resources, and efforts. You want to create content that is intentional and has a purpose. Creating content in mass quantity, that lacks strong purpose-driven efforts, is how your content because stale. And, let’s be honest, it can be draining in many different ways.
A few tools we use for our content and our client’s include: Canva, Plann, and Asana!Look for help to maximize your strategy going into this new wave of business? Fill out our Work With Us form to schedule a discovery call!
