5 Tips for Building a Content Strategy That Works
Is it your job to come up with a content marketing strategy that’s going to boost awareness of your brand whilst generating more revenue? Sometimes that can feel like a big task, so we’ve put together this article that will help you to understand the core principles, and learn some tips that can help you build a strong, future-proof content marketing strategy.
Setting short-term vs long-term goals
First up, you need to understand the goal before you can plan the route to get there. So, what are the short-term and long-term goals of your content marketing strategy going to be?
If you’re a start-up brand, an initial short-term goal might be to build up an audience of 1,000 people on your LinkedIn page. A longer term goal might be to raise awareness of the niche your brand sits in by having a community of people on your email newsletter, or to raise the traffic to your website by 25%.
In general, short-term goals are the small stepping stones that are needed to propel your brand forward and that make up the pathway to your long-term goal. The long-term goals of your content marketing strategy are the milestones and achievements that move your brand pretty significantly forwards i.e working with a significant number of clients, signing up bigger enterprise customers or taking your service overseas too.
When you understand what you’re working towards, you’ll make better choices about the content that will help you achieve that faster.
Reacting to trends - should you bother?
You see a new tiktok trend going round, a new joke circulating twitter or a content format taking LinkedIn by storm - should you take the focus off creating evergreen content to jump on a trend?
There’s something to be said for getting involved in a larger social conversation, and your brand doesn’t always need to be the one talking. Listening to what your audience is currently engaged with and adapting your content marketing to give them what they’re looking for can be a great idea.
Re-evaluating how far your brand’s tone of voice can go to include social trends is quite important in a time where people are looking for brands they relate to, and are used to skipping past literally hundreds of ads a day. Including humour and an authentic human tone of voice in your brand’s content strategy could be refreshing to your audience and see you drive up better engagement levels.
Understanding the impact of design
The design of the content your brand is publishing is not something that should be taken lightly, and in a lot of cases it could be the difference between success and failure. Take for example the difference in effort it takes to read through a list of statistics, compared to seeing it visually displayed in an infographic.
In order to create content that gets noticed, it’s best to have professionals bring your content to life with expertly executed graphic design. That way, when your audience have a choice between two ebooks on the same topic, they’re more likely to choose yours.
Not only does professional graphic design help to generate more views of the content your team is working hard to create, it’s also doing another really important job - that of making your brand more trustworthy.
Just like how we shop for everything from food, drinks, phones and trainers - brands matter and the more professional it looks the more we tend to trust that we’re going to get the value we want out of it.
How can I create evergreen content?
Another core part of a great content marketing strategy is evergreen content.
Evergreen content basically just refers to content that will stay valuable way into the future too. Taking time to produce high quality content around things like demonstrations of your product, testimonials from customers or to answer the most common challenges your prospective customers face is a good way to go about generating this evergreen content.
Spending time creating this content means that over time, you’re building a library of content that customers can find organically and relate to both now and in the future. It’s a way of ensuring that the effort you put in now continues to pay off.
Repurposing content
Another way to get more from your content strategy is to repurpose the existing content you've already worked hard to produce. When you've already created lots of evergreen content around relevant topics, increase the reach of your message by repurposing the content. All that repurposing the content really means is to find a new way to present the information. So for example, an existing blog that generates a high amount of traffic could be repurposed by taking the main points and creating other formats of it like a social media post, an infographic or even a podcast episode.
When you learn to repurpose content like a pro, you'll find that you can produce higher volumes of great quality content easier.
