Content Strategy

What is Content Strategy?

A content strategy is about vision planning. This planning will guide the development of future content that meets your business and online marketing goals. Content strategy is not about the actual content that you create but instead focuses on how any content you create will grow your business. 

We can help you develop a comprehensive content strategy. This strategy will provide direction for future content and ensure that content aligns with your company goals. Once you have a content strategy in place you'll be able to focus on copywriting. 

4 Steps to Developing a Content Strategy

1. Evaluate Existing Content

In order to develop a new strategy it is helpful to know what you have to start with and grow from. Your existing content may not reflect the goals of a new strategy so an inventory of existing content is essential. This inventory will help direct you when it comes time to make changes. Once you've inventoried your content, the next step is to look at your analytics and see how effective the existing content is. 

We can help you inventory your content using our automated tools. This process can be very time consuming if you have a large number of pages in your website. Once we've inventoried your content, we'll help you analyze your existing content to determine what works towards your business goals and what needs to be rewritten. 

2. Investigate the Competition

It’s important to know what your competition does well and what they don’t. Completing a competitive analysis will help determine what might work and what definitely won’t. This analysis isn’t about copying the competition but learning from them. It’s very important to remember that copying another company could damage your brand irreparably. 

We’ll help you analyze your competitors and use the information we gather to tell you what they are doing that works and what doesn’t. We’ll use that information to help us draw some conclusions and develop your content strategy.

3. Analyze and Draw Conclusions

This is an important step of developing a content strategy. You’ll look at your existing content and what your competitors are doing to draw some conclusions. These conclusions might include the following:

• Longer articles drive more traffic to my website.
• Articles with “why” in the title are shared more often on social media than those without. 
• A specific topic in an outreach email had more clicks then any of the others. 

Some of these conclusions may seem obvious but you now have data to back up those conclusions. Once you’ve drawn these conclusions you can use the information to develop your new content strategy. 

4. Develop the Strategy

In this step you’ll pull together everything that you learned when you evaluated your existing content, investigated the competition, and analyze the information gathered. Your content strategy will include the following:

• Goals – What is the goal for your content? Do you want to get more website traffic, more social media interaction?
• Metrics – How you will you measure the success of your strategy? These metrics may come from analytics, social media insights or email marketing software. 
• Topics – What topics should you focus on? This will be based on what topics will help you meet your goals. 
• Content Types – What types of content will you produce? This might be website content, email marketing, social media posts, videos, or audio podcasts. 
• Schedule – When and how often will you produce new content? This isn’t about what the content will be but instead focuses on how often you’ll be producing new content.
• Rules to follow – Are there rules that your content should always follow? Are there steps that you won’t remember in 6 months? These rules might include “the article title should be 7-10 words” or “each article should have at least 3 links”.