Increasingly, the term "content is king" is used by those working in the web. And this expression is true that since the content is what leads search engines to you, to your website. If search engines are the ability to find you, then it means that your customers and prospects will be too. Therefore, it is more important to integrate a content strategy in your marketing communications strategy. It will be important to create compelling content and out from the crowd because there was a lot of competition on the web.
To do this, you will need to properly plan and build your content strategy. Here are nine steps to help you build your content strategy as it should.
1. Know your business
Well, you will say that you already know very well your business since you are working there for years. However, you need to ask questions such as:
• What are the actual values of the company?
• What is the personality of the brand? What specific human personality traits would you rate the brand to distinguish?
For example, according to the chair of research "Marks and values" of the IAE of Paris, the BMW brand defines personality as beautiful, sporty and refined.
• What is the conversion rate of your potential customers into sales?
• How do you position your brand in the market? Do you want to be an inspiring brand, an innovative brand, humorous brand, etc. ?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses? What would ensure that competition would prevail on you? What differentiates you and that would ensure that you would be the chosen brand?
If you ask yourself these questions, it will definitely help to better understand your business, your brand and thus be able to give you a guideline for creating relevant content that will represent your brand for sure.
To do this, you will need to properly plan and build your content strategy. Here are nine steps to help you build your content strategy as it should.
1. Know your business
Well, you will say that you already know very well your business since you are working there for years. However, you need to ask questions such as:
• What are the actual values of the company?
• What is the personality of the brand? What specific human personality traits would you rate the brand to distinguish?
For example, according to the chair of research "Marks and values" of the IAE of Paris, the BMW brand defines personality as beautiful, sporty and refined.
• What is the conversion rate of your potential customers into sales?
• How do you position your brand in the market? Do you want to be an inspiring brand, an innovative brand, humorous brand, etc. ?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses? What would ensure that competition would prevail on you? What differentiates you and that would ensure that you would be the chosen brand?
If you ask yourself these questions, it will definitely help to better understand your business, your brand and thus be able to give you a guideline for creating relevant content that will represent your brand for sure.
2. Define your goals
A step that is important is to know what is the ultimate goal behind your content strategy. It is certain that your first goal is likely to increase sales volume, turnover or market share, but having a specific target to your content strategy will make sure to have content convincing and quality, in addition to being consistent with your brand.
Examples of types of specific objectives:
• Brand awareness and brand building
• Conversion of prospects and commitment
• Customer Conversion
• Customer Service
• Loyalty and retention
• Cross-selling, Upsell (upmarket)
In short, if you are able to know what you want to accomplish with your content strategy, you'll be on the right track for sure.
3. Know your audience
It is essential to know its target audience in order to talk to them in the right way and with the right content. It is true that to know the age, sex, occupation is important, but we must also try to dig deeper than that. Indeed, it must at all costs be segmented and create personas in order to better understand the behavior of the target audience. Therefore, you need to do research to find out what the customer really wants. We want to know such things as:
• lifestyle
• The purchasing behavior
• The buying process
• Responsibilities
• Informational resources that the persona trust
• His expectations
• The magnets / her irritating
• His decision criteria
• The trigger event that will ensure that research a subject / content related to your business
• The persona he has a decisive role or not?
• Does A influencers? Who or what has an impact on his decision? Where influence is? What are they talking about? (Are they on facebook trying to share health tips, for example?)
content persona
So you can find out what relationship you will have with your customers and what content should be created to then be aligned with the expectations, needs and goals of your prospects. Your customers are the best people to tell you what you do. This is to see your business through the eyes of your customers or prospects then how to target people like them.
4. Tell your story
It is important to build a lasting relationship and trust with your audience and that is why we must tell them your story. Indeed, how was born your business? How did you do to get where you are? What makes you continue to put efforts in the company? We must tell them what you do in life and what experiences you have had. Thus, it will also allow you to find what are the pillars of your content and thus rely on it for all communications.
5. Select the type of content that will be created
You will need to create content that will be based on the intersection of your goals and expectations of your customers. You will first select all the editorial line of your content.
What tone will you take in your communications? What are your values? What voice will you give your content? Always the tone, the voice, the personality you give your brand to be consistent with your essence and your specific goals. You will then be fully connected with your target customers.
Next, it is important to do an audit of your content or a list to see if he performed well in the past, it must be optimized for the web, if there had interactions over your content, etc. We also want to know who wrote it, where has he been published or distributed and what keywords are associated with this content. This may be content on your web site, your blog, your social media and also the content is out web, published articles, pamphlets, interviews, etc.
Then, following your research to find your personas, you will be able to know their interests and what types of content could join them optimally.
Here are some types of content that can be created:
• Photo
• Video
• Graphics
• Article
• Interview
• White Paper
• Case Study
• Email
• Competition
• Webinar
• Poll
• Ebook
Do not forget to go with that desire your target while standing out. You can, without problems, study what the competition is doing and try to differentiate yourself in the type of content as long as it joins your target.
6. Choose your distribution channels
You must choose the best delivery platforms for your content and the format in which it is published. It may be:
• Your website
• Your blog or blog on which brand works
• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.)
• Some newsletters
• Press releases
It may be that the way you realize that there are channels that do not work and do not join your targets or goals. It will then assess whether to continue, stop or start on a new platform. It is also possible that the channels through goals emerge since everyone has a different way of approaching customers.
7. While out on search engines
It is important to promote the content in order to be found by your audience. Thus, you should consider paid media, owned and acquired, such as:
• Social Media (Advertising and company page)
• SEM (paid Advertising on search engines such as Google and Bing)
• Display Ad (Google)
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Email Marketing
8. Choose a planning method
A very important step is where we planned this famous content. To do this, it is necessary to build an editorial calendar in order to have a schedule of publication. Thus it is easy to track your goals and stay organized.
In addition, by having an editorial calendar, you can keep an eye on the entire content that has been published and one that will be. In this way, content creation on the news, for example, has its place as one can see what content can be moved to another date. It will also let you know who created the content that sharing, what is created and shared, when, where and in what format. The editorial calendar can also help to know about what keywords the content has been set.
In short, it is an essential tool to have a global view of your content strategy.
9. Measure your actions
Finally, you will decide to use performance indicators in order to see if your content strategy works and how to line up the shot afterwards. So what works and what does not? What should we do to make it work next time? Thus you will be able to know the success of your content strategy. And it is important to remember that you need to optimize your strategy, and this continuously.
Here are some performance indicators to measure the success of the strategy developed content:
• Number of unique visits
• Geography - Where are your potential customers?
• Readership from the mobile
• Bounce Rate / Time on content
• Thermal Card or clicks card
• Number of page views
• Comments
• Social sharing (sharing on social media)
If you follow these 9 steps, it is certain that your content strategy will be on a roll and you will achieve your goals and, by extension, to reach the expectations of your potential customers.
What about you? Would you add a step in planning and creating a content strategy?
A step that is important is to know what is the ultimate goal behind your content strategy. It is certain that your first goal is likely to increase sales volume, turnover or market share, but having a specific target to your content strategy will make sure to have content convincing and quality, in addition to being consistent with your brand.
Examples of types of specific objectives:
• Brand awareness and brand building
• Conversion of prospects and commitment
• Customer Conversion
• Customer Service
• Loyalty and retention
• Cross-selling, Upsell (upmarket)
In short, if you are able to know what you want to accomplish with your content strategy, you'll be on the right track for sure.
3. Know your audience
It is essential to know its target audience in order to talk to them in the right way and with the right content. It is true that to know the age, sex, occupation is important, but we must also try to dig deeper than that. Indeed, it must at all costs be segmented and create personas in order to better understand the behavior of the target audience. Therefore, you need to do research to find out what the customer really wants. We want to know such things as:
• lifestyle
• The purchasing behavior
• The buying process
• Responsibilities
• Informational resources that the persona trust
• His expectations
• The magnets / her irritating
• His decision criteria
• The trigger event that will ensure that research a subject / content related to your business
• The persona he has a decisive role or not?
• Does A influencers? Who or what has an impact on his decision? Where influence is? What are they talking about? (Are they on facebook trying to share health tips, for example?)
content persona
So you can find out what relationship you will have with your customers and what content should be created to then be aligned with the expectations, needs and goals of your prospects. Your customers are the best people to tell you what you do. This is to see your business through the eyes of your customers or prospects then how to target people like them.
4. Tell your story
It is important to build a lasting relationship and trust with your audience and that is why we must tell them your story. Indeed, how was born your business? How did you do to get where you are? What makes you continue to put efforts in the company? We must tell them what you do in life and what experiences you have had. Thus, it will also allow you to find what are the pillars of your content and thus rely on it for all communications.
5. Select the type of content that will be created
You will need to create content that will be based on the intersection of your goals and expectations of your customers. You will first select all the editorial line of your content.
What tone will you take in your communications? What are your values? What voice will you give your content? Always the tone, the voice, the personality you give your brand to be consistent with your essence and your specific goals. You will then be fully connected with your target customers.
Next, it is important to do an audit of your content or a list to see if he performed well in the past, it must be optimized for the web, if there had interactions over your content, etc. We also want to know who wrote it, where has he been published or distributed and what keywords are associated with this content. This may be content on your web site, your blog, your social media and also the content is out web, published articles, pamphlets, interviews, etc.
Then, following your research to find your personas, you will be able to know their interests and what types of content could join them optimally.
Here are some types of content that can be created:
• Photo
• Video
• Graphics
• Article
• Interview
• White Paper
• Case Study
• Competition
• Webinar
• Poll
• Ebook
Do not forget to go with that desire your target while standing out. You can, without problems, study what the competition is doing and try to differentiate yourself in the type of content as long as it joins your target.
6. Choose your distribution channels
You must choose the best delivery platforms for your content and the format in which it is published. It may be:
• Your website
• Your blog or blog on which brand works
• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.)
• Some newsletters
• Press releases
It may be that the way you realize that there are channels that do not work and do not join your targets or goals. It will then assess whether to continue, stop or start on a new platform. It is also possible that the channels through goals emerge since everyone has a different way of approaching customers.
7. While out on search engines
It is important to promote the content in order to be found by your audience. Thus, you should consider paid media, owned and acquired, such as:
• Social Media (Advertising and company page)
• SEM (paid Advertising on search engines such as Google and Bing)
• Display Ad (Google)
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Email Marketing
8. Choose a planning method
A very important step is where we planned this famous content. To do this, it is necessary to build an editorial calendar in order to have a schedule of publication. Thus it is easy to track your goals and stay organized.
In addition, by having an editorial calendar, you can keep an eye on the entire content that has been published and one that will be. In this way, content creation on the news, for example, has its place as one can see what content can be moved to another date. It will also let you know who created the content that sharing, what is created and shared, when, where and in what format. The editorial calendar can also help to know about what keywords the content has been set.
In short, it is an essential tool to have a global view of your content strategy.
9. Measure your actions
Finally, you will decide to use performance indicators in order to see if your content strategy works and how to line up the shot afterwards. So what works and what does not? What should we do to make it work next time? Thus you will be able to know the success of your content strategy. And it is important to remember that you need to optimize your strategy, and this continuously.
Here are some performance indicators to measure the success of the strategy developed content:
• Number of unique visits
• Geography - Where are your potential customers?
• Readership from the mobile
• Bounce Rate / Time on content
• Thermal Card or clicks card
• Number of page views
• Comments
• Social sharing (sharing on social media)
If you follow these 9 steps, it is certain that your content strategy will be on a roll and you will achieve your goals and, by extension, to reach the expectations of your potential customers.
What about you? Would you add a step in planning and creating a content strategy?