If you, like many other business owners, wish to build a strong online presence to help grow your brand, you would understand the importance of having a content strategy for online platforms.
It is now more important than ever to utilise online channels such as Instagram and Facebook to reach your target audiences, and achieve your marketing goals.
In order to do this, it is essential to have an effective, well-planned content strategy to set yourself up for success.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to build a strong content strategy that will help your business flourish:
1. Define Your Brand’s Objectives
Outlining your brand’s goals from the start will not only help guide any creative work, but also serves as a good checkpoint to ensure any content helps support desired messaging.
Do you want to increase brand awareness so you can potentially unlock new target audience segments? How can this impact website traffic and how you might want to invest in it? Maybe you want to put out more educational content to value-add to your target customer base.
These are all the sorts of questions we ask our marketing clients who we work with to design bespoke content plans.
Whatever these goals are, have them written down and prioritised in order of importance to you and your business.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Who are you speaking to? What time are they inclined to consume your content?
What formats or channels speak to them the most?
Answering these questions will help you understand your audience demographic more, allowing you to create content that is primed to speak to them. This can include common pain points and preferences, and help you to communicate with your target customers more effectively.
It is from this point that we help you capture prime content for publishing and advertising, having taken all the considerations that are unique to your brand in mind.
3. Conduct a Content Audit and Reverse Engineer
Review all the content you have put out there surrounding your brand to date, and use this as an opportunity to not only evaluate their quality, but also their relevance and performance. Doing so will help you identify gaps in content and points to improve on moving forward, and also help inform decisions regarding how much and where you should be investing your time and resources.
For example, if your target audience mostly comes from click-throughs to your website from your Instagram page, it might be worth reconsidering how much you are spending on building out that platform versus others ie. Facebook, Google Ads, etc.
We take all of this apart in our niche reverse engineering workflow, so we know exactly what works, and what does not.
4. Set Metrics of Success
If it cannot be measured, it cannot be managed.
Before executing your new content strategy, you want to make sure you have established the metrics of success you will use to measure how effective a piece of content is.
Examples of metrics of success include website traffic, engagement rate (ie. likes, comments, tags), conversion rates and more.
Having a good grasp of which metrics apply to your business and content rollout the most will help you in evaluating the success and replicating strengths, while continuously workshopping on weaknesses.
5. Plan Content Topics and Themes
Now that you’ve established which content angles work best for your target audience, you can plan out how you will address these topics over a course of time.
If user-generated content has historically gotten the most response, we know we can incorporate such media on a regular basis. Likewise if written, blog-type content works the best at converting potential leads, you know to double down on the articles on your website.
OUR TOP TIP: Use a keyword search tool (like Google or YouTube) to uncover popular search terms and trends in your niche to always stay one step ahead.
6. Execute and Leverage
Set aside time and ideas to create high quality content that will speak to your target audience. Providing value can come in many forms; from educating and entertaining to telling a personal story and inspiring.
From here, it is important to execute with consistency; stick to a reasonable, attainable frequency of publishing your content so you can look back and study performance over time.
Leverage on other digital channels by sharing the same post and re-populating the content on different platforms for maximum reach.
7. Measure and Improve
Once you have gotten into the rhythm of creating and publishing your content on a frequent basis, it is time to take a step back and evaluate the fruits of your labour.
We sit down with all of our marketing and content clients to walk through this, but if you are doing this yourself, using analytics tools such as Insights and Professional Dashboards help to provide data and feedback that you can use to inform future content pieces.
Did your audience click off 3 seconds into a piece? Maybe it’s time to try a different introduction with a stronger hook.
Low conversion rates? Maybe try incorporating a stronger Call to Action at the end of your promotion next time so customers visit your website.
Developing a content strategy that works the best for your brand takes time, effort, and consistency. Not only will a strong content strategy help you raise brand awareness, but it will continue to give back to your business by fostering a loyal customer base responsive to your offerings that will keep growing your brand in the years to come.
Looking for help with developing a content strategy?
Contact us to find out more.
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