A content strategy acts as the framework that you use to direct your efforts when creating content. This includes the blogs you write for your brand, your social media posts, as well videos, podcasts or image quotes — anything and everything that has to do with content!

These strategies need to translate who you are as a business, why consumers should choose you, what value you can offer them and what makes your content stand out. It’s also important that you remember your main objective, which is to achieve your business goals.

Developing a killer content strategy is much easier than you might think. In fact, it’s almost like playing checkers! So let’s look at the ‘how to’ — you’ll see, it’s child’s play!

Ready to start playing? Let’s do this:

Step 1: Set the goal like setting up a board game

Similarly to when you prepare a board game to play, you need to prepare and set up the content strategy before you start ‘playing’ it.

First, you need to clearly define your target audience and set your business goals. Start by thinking of your ideal customer. You can consider questions like:
  • What are their needs?
  • What is their age, gender and location?
  • Do they have other demographics that would be worth your while to identify?
Next, determine your goals. This might be to generate leads, convert sales or increase brand awareness. The idea is to know from the start what you want to achieve, as this directs the way in which you set out to achieve these set goals. After all, you want to make your content strategy planning effective and more geared towards success, right?

As soon as you have completed this, you will need to look at the content that you have available. Think of this as setting up the pieces on the board that you are going to use for each player — you need to know how many different play pieces you have ‘to use in the game’.

Your content audit needs to look at the different types of content pieces you have, the topics it discusses, the size and format. Once you have collected and analysed this information, you can compile a document that lists all these criteria.

You will then use this document to examine which pieces align with your goals or not — keeping the ones that do and discarding the ones that don’t.

Step 2: Choose the right players for your content

By ‘players’, we mean the distribution of your selected types of content. Let’s dig a little deeper:

Content distribution is a vital part of your strategy — without it, you cannot reach your audience. That being said, you need to carefully consider (and research), what types of content works best, what platforms are ideal and what times garner the most engagement. Remember, not everything will work for every brand.

This relates to everything from blogs, podcasts, videos, social media content, white papers, opinion pieces and press releases. The most important thing to remember is to emphasise your brand’s originality and authority within your industry through your content (and how you deliver it).

Now, it comes to the creative part — actually creating the content! But even during this process, you need to stick to the strategy you created. This means that you need to be consistent, timely and unique with your creative efforts.

Step 3: Measure your strategy

After making your way across the board game, you need to add up the score from all the various players, right? The same goes for your content strategy.

So what is considered ‘measuring’? Preparing and analysing analytics, of course! In order to develop the best content strategy, you need to see that what you implemented is actually working. If it is, you know what to build on. If it’s a disaster, you know what isn’t working and you can revise your plan.

In order to obtain analytics that you can act upon (not vanity metrics), you can answers questions like:
  • How many downloads were there of your white paper?
  • How many likes, shares or comments did you receive on your social media posts?
  • How many people listened to your podcast, or how many views did you receive on your brand’s YouTube channel?
Ask yourself these questions and take notes so that you can report back on it to stakeholders or team members.

On-platform analytics tools can help you understand when your audience is most active, what time of the day you get the most reach and even where these individuals are located. Taking a closer look at this information will also help you determine if you reached your end goal.

Remember to ask yourself if you reached your intended audience and if your efforts elicited the desired results. If not, it is time to change the rules of the game and make your own. Don’t be afraid to try something new!

Are you ready to craft your killer content strategy with a little inspiration from your inner child? Be sure to let us know in the comments below.

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Now that you know how to develop an amazing content strategy, why not find out more about How content speaks to your brand.
*Image courtesy of Canva