What is a Content Strategy?

Connection with your brand’s marketing audiences is dependent on the quality of the content you produce. Make the right rhetorical decisions—develop content that is relevant and relatable—and you make a lasting connection that will be the support structure of your brand. Fail to make the right rhetorical decisions, and your brand becomes a lame duck.

Content marketing strategy is at the core of this. It involves identifying your message, understanding your audience, the platforms available to you, and then to develop content that can be distributed to effectively connect your message and your audience.

Why Do You Need a Content Strategy?

Your content strategy is your voice—it’s how you reach multiple audiences to achieve business objectives you’ve defined. But before you can speak, you need to know what you’re trying to say. So what are your business objectives? This is a starting point—and the process shouldn’t be rushed because of the amount of energy required to create and implement a successful content marketing strategy.

Define your main objectives. These should have definitive goals that you can use to measure how successful your content structure was. Try to think of the back-end of the process: when all is said and done, what were you trying to achieve with your content strategy? Is it increased brand awareness? An increase in repeat customers? New leads to grow your business? Use these objectives as a way to start planning your content strategy.

Where To Start With Content Strategy

Define your message, think about your audience, and let that dictate the platforms you utilize and the content you create.

• Message

Your message should be a direct connection to your business objectives. Let’s say your objective is to have more engagement on your posts on social media. In this case, your content doesn’t necessarily need to be a direct social media post about your company, or product, but instead might just be engaging content that you believe would elicit a response, or a “like”, to your post. And if your goal is to get your audience to respond, the next question to ask yourself is: “What does my audience value?”

• Audience

Your audience might be looking for pragmatic information, they might be looking for silly, funny content, they might not know what they’re searching for… Your audience has limitless interests and the job of developing a content marketing strategy is to think about what your audience might be interested in and how you can relate that to your messaging. The more time you spend in the head of your audience, the more creative you’ll be in developing pieces of content to include in your plan.

• Platforms

As you’re thinking about audience, consider what points of contact might exist. Is it social media? That’s one avenue, but within this are different mediums that will resonate on different levels—more or less effectively. Maybe your best opportunity is to connect with potential customers on search engines; in that case, blogs need to become the cornerstone of your strategy. Is lead generation your prime directive? Invest in valuable premium content your audiences will be willing to trade an email address in order to access. Your audience is looking for authenticity, and by establishing yourself on multiple platforms, you increase the chances of connecting with multiple audiences.

What Is In a Content Strategy?

The nuts and bolts of content exist as blogs, whitepapers, social media posts, videos, images—a good content marketing strategy is complex in its ability to access multiple points of contact. Think of this in spectrum form: across the spectrum are different chances to connect with your audience to establish authenticity. Is it a series of Tweets your audience can come to rely on for engaging links? Is it a long whitepaper they know will provide them with primary content that will be helpful to them? Use the various mediums to connect.

A big part of a successful content strategy is knowing what prospects or customers are searching for when looking for your products or services. Second, is making sure you are getting in front of those users.

This is where DemandJump can help. You'll see exactly what your target audience is looking for, and most importanlty, exactly what content to create to rank in those results. Automated content outlines ensure that you are using the correct keywords, H1 and H2. You'll save time while creating better content- get started today!

Content Strategy Presentation

With the amount of energy required to create and distribute content to create your strategy, at some point you’re going to have to pitch this to others who haven’t been involved in the invention stages. These are your doubters. Why would they invest so much in something so nuanced, yet large in scope?

Here’s where your original business objectives come into play. You’re now on the back-end of the creative process and you need to be able to communicate how the creative work connects to practical results. Board members, investors, even CEOs will be involved in this process, and you need to communicate your vision with interactive, specific examples of the types of content you’ll produce, why you believe your audience will respond, and what overall affects this will have for your business.

The key here is to utilize a cross-channel analytics platform that will allow you to present clear evidence of the effectiveness of your content. Show how customers find your brand’s content, where they’re engaging on social media, how emails lead to increased lead generation. By offering a complete picture, you can strike that balance between nuance and ROI that any stakeholder will understand.

Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Content Strategy.

For the insights you’ll need to build your content strategy and communicate its value to the rest of your team, look no further than DemandJump. Our powerful consumer insights can fuel your content planning, and our cross-channel analytics make it easier than ever before to track your brand’s growth to every piece of your evolving content strategy. Sign up for a free trial today to see it in action.