by Patrick Zuluaga, PMZ Marketing [Download Article]
What is content strategy?
Essentially content strategy is the planning, preparation and delivery of content information that is relevant and engaging for your target customers in all communication channels that they use to search and consume the information.
When you get the right message content to the right prospective customer at the right time you will achieve your desired business result!
Sounds simple enough however for your content information to be relevant and engaging for your target customers you must be able to ‘join the conversation that is happening in their own minds’ in a powerful emotive way guided by the AIDA technique.
Let us explore how you can develop and implement content strategy to help you grow your business.
How can you use content strategy to your business advantage?
There are three key content categories that your strategy must consider and deliver for your business to benefit, these are;
- Conversion offers – provide content that offers real compelling value with a clear and powerful ‘call to action’ to drive conversions from your engaged audience [Define conversations]
- Building awareness – provide information content that positions your business as the expert in your industry or niche. The content must be relevant and engaging for your target customers and must demonstrate your practical business expertise and ‘thought-leadership’ within your industry.
- Educational information – provide content that explains how your business is able to solve your target customer’s business issues and challenges. These can be in the form of trial use or demonstration systems, testimonials and/or case studies from your previous projects. A tip here is to determine your customers’ key ‘pain points’ in their businesses and to explain how the application of your products, services and/or solutions eliminates these pains and delivers the desired benefits for their own businesses.
Next we need to understand how a structured approach for these types of messages must be a part of your content strategy to successfully develop and deliver the information.
For each type of the information content that you have identified, apply the following 6 steps to maximise the potential marketing results for your business:
- Be clear on your desired business results – what is the purpose for your content. You must articulate these in terms of measureable marketing and business objectives or KPIs.
- Define who you are targeting with your content – prepare your ideal customer profile. This is the ideal person that exemplifies your best type of customer in your target market/s.
- Determine what is the key message that you will deliver in your content – this is the most crucial aspect of your content strategy. Your content must be relevant, compelling and engaging at an emotive level with your audience. Use your ideal customer profile to help you focus your content on achieving your defined purpose or business objective.
- Analyse how you will maximise your content’s potential results – determine your target customer’s purchasing cycle and the corresponding communication channels used by them to consume, engage and make a decision to purchase. Ensure that you utilised the various communication mediums including social media in the dissemination or promotion of your content.
- Make sure your content is searchable and visible – all the content that you publish for consumption and use by your target customers must be easily found by making these searchable and highly visible. Implement promotional campaigns and online marketing techniques that incorporate search engine optimisation for the applicable search keyword phrases used by your target customers in their quest for content that is important to their businesses.
- Make sure you can measure your content marketing results – you will have heard this before “You can't manage what you can't measure”. It is vital and critical for you to continually achieve better marketing results by measuring and tracking your campaigns against the desired objectives. For your content information that works well, determine why this is the case and implement improvements to ramp up your content marketing efforts. For your content that fails to deliver look at how it can be improved or take action to replace these by concentrating your efforts on your content strategy that works best.
In conclusion – good content strategy implementation nurtures your potential customers, retains your existing customers and grows your business with new and repeat sales.
