Content Strategies Success

Did I give you the right title here for this section? Content strategies? Aren't we talking about content marketing strategies? Sure we are, but we need to highlight the key difference between “content strategies” and “content marketing.”

Here are the three terms explained by the team at Moz.com.

1. Content strategy – internal guidelines and governance.
2. Content marketing strategy – our vision, our goals, audience research, developing content ideas.
3. Content marketing – Our editorial calendar, content creation and promotion

So let us focus, since few of us are writing on behalf of an editorial team or a large marketing company, on our own content marketing strategy, our goals, our vision, etc.

Vision – Where are you headed?

Which direction will your vision take you?

We need to ask questions of ourselves as an analytic review of what we are aiming to achieve with our content creation. Who is my audience? What do I want them to do with the content? How could I develop information streams that are more likely to appeal to the demographic I am aiming to reach?

Audience – Who are they?

What demographic am I hoping to reach? One of my niche websites is about Samsung smartphone technology. I am writing content to reach the 25-55 range of people, those who use technology at work, at home and when out and about. I want to keep it readable for all age groups so that requires a certain style of writing. Have we thought what social media channels are they into? Are they an Instagram, Twitter or Facebook crowd? Details like this will help us prepare content that will be more effective in building product authority and, in time, product conversions. More about that later.

Content Audit – A What?

A content audit is not a marketing strategy, it is part of an effective content strategy. Why do we need to do an audit? Well, just like a life audit helps us examine our health and lifestyle goals, so a content audit can assist us in analyzing past content and marry it up with current goals we have. So here’s what we can do:

1. Revisit past blogs and review pages. This is something I have done a few times in recent months. The articles and blogs I wrote 12 months ago all have room for a recall and a rewrite, tweaking some of the expressions used and making sure it is relevant to my audience. What shall we analyze during this revisit? Here is what experienced marketers recommend:

• The Topic – What posts are my visitors responding to more eagerly? Does this post sell or educate? What that your original purpose when writing it?
• Length of the post/page – There are a variety of schools of thought about length. Should it be under 1000 words or over? Do my readers prefer long, detailed pieces or short and sweet, to the point, few expansive details type articles?
• Humor – Is that what you want to provide? Are you aiming for a serious professional, a light-hearted cutesy style or something in between?
• Relevance – Is this post or page review relevant to the niche I hope to build? Will that be easy for my readers to see? On my technology website, I write articles about Android Apps. Since Samsung smartphones use Android as the operating system, and so many people use apps on their phones, so many of my readers have found the articles very helpful in their personal lives.
• Up-to-Date – As one writer said on this subject, “some content lasts forever, and some most definitely won’t.”
• Content Components – What do I mean by content components? Audit these features of your article: Videos, imagery, proper SEO markup, alt tags, meta description, headings, etc.

Setting Content Goals

So you have developed your vision, you know the audience and the audit is complete. What now? Set content goals. Now remember, we are discussing content here not Google page rankings. Hence our goals should be something like, “I want to embed 4 how-to videos about Samsung Smartphones by the end of June.” Write that down and schedule it. Short and long-term goals, aligned with both your audit and your vision, will enable you to have a real purpose when you sit down to write that killer content. Later, we will discuss scheduling content writing in greater detail.

What's next? Recognising the role of marketing funnels in our content writing strategies. Let's proceed.