5 Steps to Building an Awesome Content Strategy

Businesses that want to increase their brand awareness and reach a larger audience try to create compelling content in hope that it will help promote growth. However, most businesses are failing to see the massive benefits that successful content marketing can bring to them because they don’t have an effective strategy. So they produce various content formats, only to have low social media engagement shares, low email conversations rates, and little to no ROI.

Businesses can start seeing massive improvement in content creation and marketing by building a hard working team to take control of the production process. This group of creative professionals will have to follow a working five-part content strategy that they can easily practice and repeat:

1. Planning
2. Creation
3. Publish
4. Distribute
5. Analyze

Planning

At this early stage of the content strategy, your creative team begins to identify their target audience and the types of content that will appeal to them the most. In a previous post, I explained certain characteristics and traits your team should consider when trying to determine your audience. After figuring out your audience members, your team need to plan out their content goals before content production. They can tackle this task by creating an editorial calendar. This tool allows your team to plan out content weeks in advance. Here are things to consider while putting the calendar together:

• Author or Editor
• Title
• Content Type
• Category
• Keywords and Tags
• Call to Action
• Status
• Post Date

Creation

At this stage, your team starts developing engaging content that effectively represents your brand. As your team identifies goals for each content, create an attractive style guide. A style guide includes guidelines on how content will be visually designed to represent your brand’s voice and tone. Here are various content formats to choose from:

Text

• Blog posts/Articles
• Whitepapers
• Ebooks
• Email Newsletters
• Social media posts

Audio

• Podcast
• Music
• Radio Broadcast

Visuals

• Videos
• Infographics
• Pictures
• Webinars
• Interviews

Publish

At this stage, your team decides which online publishing tools or platforms to circulate the content.

Video and Pictures

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Vine
• Periscope
• Meerkat
• Pinterest
• Flickr
• Instagram

Distribute

At this stage, your team decides which social platforms to use to promote their content. Here are networks to consider when distributing content:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Instagram

Remember to create a consistent presence or style guide on all of your social media platforms. This will help increase brand awareness and social engagement. You want your target audience to recognize your brand every time they interact with it.

Analyze

At this stage, your team checks on its analytics data and reports to measure the performance of their content. This is an important stage because analytics can help show what content is receiving positive feedback and what content needs more improvement. Here are resources and metrics you should consider when tracking your analytics:

• Google Analytics: This is a free resource tool that allows users to see their websites online activity like bounce rates, visitor behavior, and visitor demographics.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): These are measurements that your team uses to judge content performance like page views, comments, and email conversion rates.
• Social Engagement Metrics: These are the metrics from your social media platforms like followers, likes, favorites, and retweets.

This practical content strategy is never ending because businesses need to be up to date to the constantly changing content world. Your team has to create, test, and measure content daily to raise awareness and potential customers to your business. Use this five part content strategy to successfully build your business and be an authority in your industry!