The Ultimate Guide to Build a Content Strategy

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Digital content strategy includes the process of diagnosing, planning, creating, marketing and measuring the strategies proposed for the entire content of a website.

It is a cyclical process that leads to the development of the editorial content for any web based marketing campaign.

Content is typically based on text and data, but is not limited to these media types.

Since video and other visual media prove to be a very important part of a content strategy, you should consider creating and using graphic and video media as much as possible.

A content strategy is the cornerstone of Inbound Marketing and for most success brands, video is the preferred form of content marketing.

The process of the Digital Content Strategy goes through a series of steps:

Diagnose the Current Situation of the Web Business

You cannot come up with content strategies if you don’t know what the current situation of your business is. You have to define many factors before starting. This is important because you must come up with content that would benefit your business. Here are the main points you should be able to define:

Check the line of business objectives

The content strategy should serve to achieve the objectives of digital marketing, which in turn should help achieve marketing objectives. So, it is important that both of these objectives are clear from the beginning.

Define the buyer

Defining your audience is key.

For that, the best strategy is to define the buyer before anything else.

Defining the buyer consists of the imaginary creation of the person or people you have defined as your target audience.

Among the data that you must manage are:

• Imaginary name
• Gender
• Average age
• Concrete tastes
• Social network that they use the most
• Type of information consumed and predominant content format

Content Strategy Plan

This includes the general planning of the most appropriate content that accompanies the strategy and its action plan. 

Some businesses, such as Offer Factor, develop the content plan for the blog, social media, videos, podcast, advertisements, etc.

 

These plans should clarify the objective pursued when creating content for a particular platform.

Marketing objectives and content formats to achieve them

The objectives of digital content must obey the business objectives first, then the marketing objectives and finally the communication ones (branding).

According to Hubspot, content that achieves greater visibility tends to prioritize the most successful companies that follow the inbound marketing methodology.

These include blogs, SEO Articles and the interactive content that is used to market on social networks and by email.

These are followed by videos, webinars, online tools, product demonstrations (such as catalogs) and finally freemium tests.

In the same way, when selecting the type of content for your inbound marketing strategy, remember the 70/20/10 rule.

According to this rule, you should focus 70% of your time and money on content that works and is quick to perform, such as blog posts, essential pages of your website and content on social networks. 

The other 20% of your effort should be dedicated to generate exceptional content of greater value such as downloadable products (guides, ebooks, and reports), infographics, videos, webinars, courses, contests, events.

And finally, invest 10% of your effort in experimenting and learning through trial and error.

 

Action plan

The action plan includes the strategy, the tactics and the calendar to follow. For example:

If the goal is: increase audience

The strategy would be: create a course by email marketing

The tactics would be:

• Implement an auto responder and activate it on the date x
• Make the course program in 15 days
• Make a call to action that directs the post to interact in 2 days
• Promote the course with a banner on the blog for 1 month

As you see, the tactics must have their date, which you pass to the calendar and fulfill it.

Content Creation

The process of creating content is different for each case, for example:

• Blog posts that are the most popular, require a selection of appropriate topics, the architecture of the posts, the type of post that works best, curation of content, apply techniques of web writing for the audience, copywriting techniques and of SEO writing
• The content for each web page is also part of the strategic content of every website. These must meet a strategic format for your content
• The content for social networks is a strategic part in any website. The first thing is to design your plan and content calendar
• Creating a lead magnet is another essential content of any web. The lead magnet can be of different format such as ebooks, courses by email, guides, templates, whitepaper and any content that you wish to give to your audience
• Consider using popular content marketing tools to assist your content creation process

Marketing of Content

Once the content has been created, it is time to market it using the theory of content marketing. 

The main means of promotion that people use to interact are social networks and email.

Advertising and SEO strategies are also part of this phase.

Finally, this phase seeks to redefine the buyer and modify the product or service to the real needs of customers.

Final Proposals for the New Analysis of the Content Strategy

1. Measure the content strategy applied

This is one of the advantages of digital medium, it is always possible to measure what you do, thanks to the analytics of your website and social networks.

2. Reuse digital content

Creating new content constantly of quality requires a great job. Content can be reused by creating new point of views or transforming them into new formats.

3. Ask a web copywriter for help with the content strategy

Always maintain a good relationship between the investment of time in planning, the creation of content and the retribution of it in sales.

Writing is a beautiful art, but it always takes a lot of time.

Hire a web copywriter to help you with this task, so you continue to have quality content at a fair price.

Content is a way of communicating with your customers. Imagine opening up a website without content — how else would you know what the website is about?

It gives a direction and understanding of what a website is about, whether it sells products or provides some kind of service.