In today’s digital-first landscape, standing out online is more important than ever. And with the content marketing industry rapidly changing, that is becoming increasingly difficult. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are making content generation much quicker, but that doesn’t always result in quality.
In today’s blog, we’ll discuss the importance of having a solid website content strategy and its core components. We’ll also give you eight steps for building your own content strategy.
What Is A Content Strategy And Why Do You Need One?
A website content strategy is a plan for how you’ll create, deliver, distribute, and maintain content to meet organizational goals. It serves as the roadmap for your entire online presence, ensuring that the content you create contributes to your broader objectives.
Having a content strategy in place for your organization is crucial for a few reasons:
A content strategy creates consistency in your organization’s messaging:
If your content isn’t growing a steady audience or doesn’t accurately represent your organization, you’re likely facing a consistency issue. Creating a content strategy can help align your content with your organization’s overall mission and ensure that your tone of voice and branding guidelines are solid.
A content strategy paves the way for effective lead generation:
Creating targeted content can help guide visitors throughout the buyer’s journey, turning casual viewers into loyal customers.
A content strategy builds credibility and gives you a competitive advantage:
Publishing high-quality, relevant content for your audience helps establish your brand as a trusted information source in your industry.
Core Components Of A Website Content Strategy
A successful web content strategy doesn’t just involve website copy or blogs. It should encapsulate a myriad of different content types to engage every segment of your target market and speak to your audience through each stage of the buyer’s journey.
While a content creation strategy will look slightly different for each unique organization, here are eight core components that should be considered:
- Web copy that reflects your organization’s messaging
- Blog posts for in-depth information and search engine optimization (SEO)
- Illustrations that support the content on your site
- Infographics to present complex data in an easily digestible format
- Downloadable content to provide your audience with valuable insights
- Videos for visual learners and engagement
- Webinars to foster community and authenticity
- Supporting campaigns via social and email to increase engagement
8 Steps To Build A Winning Content Strategy
Now that we’ve established the core components of what should be included in a content strategy, it’s time to learn how to build one.
Perform thorough market and keyword research:
Far too often, organizations try to create a content strategy without first performing thorough market and keyword research. It’s essential to have a clear idea of how your competitors approach their website content. However, take your research findings with a grain of salt — not every content strategy will work for every company, so consider your competitors’ activities a starting block, not a template.
Evaluate your existing content:
After you’ve completed your market and keyword research, it’s time to turn inward and look at your existing content. Take a look at what’s working (and what’s not) to get a better understanding of what you want to accomplish with your content strategy.
Implement SMART goals:
Once you’ve completed market research, it’s time to start looking at your organizational goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Having SMART goals in place helps ensure that your content strategy is aligned with your business’s overall objectives.
Create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP):
Another core component of a solid content strategy is creating an ideal customer profile (ICP). An ICP is an in-depth, hypothetical description of the audience type that would benefit most from your service or product. A well-thought-out ICP includes demographics, firmographics, and psychographics.
Establish performance analytics:
Establish metrics and implement key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the success of your content strategy. These could include website traffic, engagement rates, keyword rankings, or conversion rates.
Produce your content:
After you’ve established how you’ll determine the success of your content, it’s time for the fun part — creating the content.
Distribute:
Once your content is created, you’re ready to distribute it across channels.
Repeat!
Creating a high-quality content strategy isn’t a one-and-done project. Set aside time to regularly review analytics and KPIs from your campaign to evaluate what needs to be adjusted.
Let us help take your content strategy to the next level.
At 434 Marketing, our in-house team of content writers, editors, and designers have years of experience in over a dozen verticals. Whether you’re looking for long-form, short-form, graphic-heavy, or anything in between, we do it all. Every project begins with a consultation, where we take the time to deeply understand your organization and your goals. Let us help you create a successful content strategy to take your business to the next level.
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Brianna Arnold holds the role of Content Manager at 434 Marketing. As part of the 434 team, Brianna brings with her a career of experience in the agency world. She is responsible for ensuring client goals are achieved with measurable success. Brianna's digital marketing experience spans a myriad of skills,..
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