A solid content strategy allows you to provide the value of your expertise in a way that gently guides your target audience towards becoming customers. It is a great way of positioning yourself as an authority within your industry and placing yourself in the centre of the right discussions. Here are a few ways to lay down the foundations for a successful content strategy.

Start by setting clear goals

Start with what you would like for your content strategy to achieve. Your content is only going to be perceived as valuable by your website visitors if it’s created with a clearly defined goal. Different pieces of content will have different objectives depending on what part of the sales funnel they are meant for and what subcategory of your audience they are targeting.

Outlining the purpose of the content before you start putting words on paper will save you a lot of time, have much more of an impact and allow you to track the results of the campaign in a more accurate way.

Know who you’re trying to reach

Thoroughly research and segment your audience in order to understand what formats and styles they are most likely to be receptive to. Fully understanding the demographic categories of your website visitors allows you to work out how they are likely to interact with your offering and how you can use your content to guide them further along into the sales funnel. You want to make sure that you are reaching decision makers, speaking their language and taking into account what value they are looking to get out of your content.

Pick the right medium(s)

When you hear “content strategy” you are most likely to think of things like blogs and whitepapers. While those formats are perfect for conveying some types of information, they don’t work for every topic and every audience. It is really important that you tailor the format to the subject matter, platform and audience you are looking to reach.

It’s also important to remember that some mediums tend to be more engaging than others, so opting for images and videos, while a bit more time consuming to produce, may yield better results, especially if you’re targeting potential clients that are still in the awareness stage.

Create a schedule

Your content strategy is not really going to be a strategy if you’re not mapping out the process and ensuring that you’re posting on a consistent basis. Having a central hub of all the content pieces that you would like to release in a specific time frame helps you stay on top of all the different platforms you are posting across. It also ensures that you cover a wide range of topics through a wide range of mediums and that you avoid repetition.

A content calendar also allows you to see your content as a bigger picture and convey a coherent message throughout your posting.

Know what you’re tracking and monitoring

Like any other marketing effort, the end goal of your marketing strategy is to get your audience to convert. In order to make the most out of your content, you have to outline what path you are hoping your website visitors will take. By mapping out and tracking the steps from interest to a conversion, you can control and optimise every element of the process and further incentivise your audience every step of the way. This means that you need to track the sources of traffic, their journey throughout the website, as well as various conversions you are looking to nudge them towards, be it an enquiry email, brochure download, or phone call.

At Rooster Marketing we work closely with businesses to devise engaging and effective creative content strategies. See our own articles or speak to a member of our marketing and content marketing agency today.