How to Develop a Winning Content Strategy?

An excellent content marketing strategy is the backbone of a winning digital marketing plan. It can do wonders in your website traffic, create brand awareness and generate quality leads for sales growth. Be it connecting with your target audience at an interpersonal level, showing your offerings, building brand image or winning the SEO goals, content drives them all. How can you develop a winning content strategy that helps you achieve these objectives?

Defining Objectives/Goals!

“Start with the end”, which means have a clear picture in mind about what you expect from your content strategy. What will your content help you achieve and how? Your content should be based on your business objectives like brand awareness, lead generation, converting users, attracting past customers, solves customer’s problems, improve search engines rankings, etc. Ask a few questions to yourself, like, “What customer grievances are you trying to address?”, What are your short and long-term goals? How will content marketing help you achieve those goals? Answering this question will clarify your objectives and help you see the roadmap of the strategy.

Define Audience!

Once you have your objectives defined, the next step is determining who your sole readers are. Defining your target audience and knowing your buyer persona gives you a direction to frame your content, that is more relevant and adds value to their lives. What are their interests, what are their problems, what do they search for more…, etc Analyse this data minutely by creating generalized criteria and segregate the users according to their personas. 

Content Ideas!

Once you have the above objectives sorted, you will have a blueprint of the content you need to create to attract your target audience to your page. Brainstorm the topics that your target audience search for. It need not be limited to your industry. You can take help from tools available that can provide you with unique ideas. For example, HubSpot’s Website Grader, BlogAbout, Feedly, BuzzSumo, Blog Post Headline Analyzer, are some tools that can help you with fresh content ideas. 

Analyse competition!

Knowing your competition is necessary if you want to outplay them and excel in your game. Analyse their content, the topics they choose and the keywords that they use to rank their site on SEOs. It will also give you insights into the amount of extra effort you need to put into your strategy. As it is rightly said, “look for what your competitors do, but more importantly, look for what they don’t do”. Their blunder can be your strength, that is you can fill in the gaps and excel at the user-value game.

Create consistent Content!

Producing one great piece of content and stopping won’t get your goals. Being consistent with content production is necessary to take your audience to the next level of the sales funnel. Your content needs to solve their problems. It’s important not to stop with just first creative. Continue producing impactful content that will help you build assets. Testimonials and convincing videos count as great content to connect with users. Creating a content calendar will help you keep track of your past creatives, the upcoming content, performance analysis…etc.  

SEO and Keyword Research!

SEO techniques make your page visible in search engines. This is important as it helps you reach a larger base audience and increase organic clicks. Pages that rank on the first page of search engines have high chances of getting the maximum reachability and hence more audience. The use of keywords is the most efficient way of getting your page to rank high on search engines. Brainstorm keywords that are relevant to your business and place them tactfully in your creatives. You can take the help of a content marketing services agency that can plan a perfect SEO strategy per your business.

Promotion Platforms!

Once you have your content ready, you should decide about the platforms you will tell your story on. Find platforms where the majority of your target audience are present. Multichannel marketing is trending where content is promoted on a variety of platforms. Email marketing, social media, snackable content, display ads etc. are some digital marketing platforms you can promote your content on. Choose a platform where the probability of finding your target is the most. For example, if you are a B2B business, LinkedIn is your prime channel of focus if your focus is on the audience of younger age group, Instagram/Facebook is your ideal platform and so on.

Great content marketing won’t just happen itself. It is beyond a terrific blog or an engaging video. It also depends on factors like the subject of the content, platforms it is promoted on, type of content, SEO strategy and more. If you want to take your business to success, effective use of content & content marketing services can be your most potent weapon.