Your website is there to reach new customers and inform them of your products and service. So, just how do you do this effectively? That’s where a good content strategy comes into play.

A content strategy is your plan on how to effectively engage your target audience and maintain your loyal customers. Research has shown that having a clearly defined content strategy enables you to deploy content marketing strategies more effectively on social media, budget correctly for content marketing and generally be more effective at drawing new clients and growing your business, regardless of the size of your business.

What is a Content Strategy?

A content strategy is your practical plan on how and why you will produce content for your website. Here, you will take a look at all the content that will ever be on your website for customers to see and interact with and tailor it to their specific needs and expectations. If you work with a plan, your content will tie together as a coherent picture instead of being somewhat of an odd-sock drawer. This will keep your loyal customers engaged and hopefully draw new ones as you go along.

If done well, a content strategy will assist in improving and streamlining your business as well, since you will be taking a hard, honest look at your customers and their expectations, identifying areas where you can improve, areas to expand into and areas that should be left alone. In the end, all of this will work together effectively to increase your bottom line and improve customer satisfaction.

Some aspects that will inevitably be included in a good content strategy are:

• The type of content you need and why you need it

• Content structure

• How users will find your content

• Roadmap to launching

• Content maintenance strategy

This will help you plan content that meets your customers’ current needs while remaining evergreen.

How to Develop a Content Strategy

While the details of your content strategy depend on your business type and target audience, the governing principles for developing a bullet proof content strategy remains constant.

• Audit your content
  Start with taking stock of your current content. This will enable you to have a big picture view of your content and whether or not it is meeting your objectives. Here, you must examine each bit of content and categorise it according to whether it adds value to your customers and organisation, must be consolidated, rewritten or scrapped and whether it has information gaps to be filled. Now, you have a clear starting point from which to work.

• Set your goals
  Formulate your goals so that they are meaningful, measurable, and time-bound and that they are things your content can reasonably accomplish. For example “create and publish the most comprehensive guide to wedding dress fabrics available on the Internet by the end of Q2”

• Risks. Are you taking any?

• Success. What does this look like?

• Do this in collaboration with your team and, if necessary, some main stakeholders. This will give you a clear picture of the challenges faced by your team and also allow them the opportunity for creative or practical input.

In Closing

A good content strategy improves your brand’s image and effectively engages costumers, growing your business in the process. For assistance in developing an effective content strategy, contact us today.