What is a Good Content Strategy (and why it is important)
Appearing on the first page of Google search results is an excellent way to market your brand to your audience. While ads are one way to accomplish this goal, other effective options exist, and we recommend a good content strategy.
Essentially, your company should focus on producing high-quality content that engages with your audience and provides value, thereby growing your business organically. The aim isn’t to offer blogs or articles only for the marketing benefits but for their usefulness.
This article aims to present more information on good content strategy, why it’s important, and how to create one for your business. Let’s begin!
What is a Good Content Strategy?
Communication planning is the continuous process of achieving business goals and objectives via content as the primary option. In this definition, content implies any information of value that an audience in your niche may find relevant.
This type of marketing strategy is essential for businesses today as it is an effective way to attract potential customers outside the typical “push” advertising. Its efficacy is that customers discover your work and choose to engage with it, thereby leading to organic growth.
Besides acquiring new customers, producing qualitative outcomes positions you as an expert in your field since providing in-depth information indicates your proficiency. Essentially, the benefits presented by this marketing option are vast, making it worth exploring.
Reasons to Use Good Content Strategy
As previously mentioned, an online content strategy aims to build and improve your business by providing useful information to your audience. While opting for this method may feel unintuitive for businesses using paid advertising since it doesn’t instantly increase sales, its value is undeniable.
Essentially, people offer the same question regularly, and providing a straightforward and comprehensive answer helps keep your brand relevant in the competitive space.
Without further ado, here are some additional reasons why opting for a content strategy is a worthwhile decision:
- It causes other platforms to link to your website
- Your brand appears on search engines for specific search terms
- It helps build trust with people who will later become paying customers
- Provides you with more email subscribers for other marketing strategies
Remember that it requires long-term dedication to producing multiple high-quality pieces of information. People who learn of your website won’t purchase your offering immediately but continually interest your brand until they’re impressed, then proceed to buy from you.
The Importance of Good Content Strategy
The value presented by qualitative creative work is impossible to overemphasize as statistics from HubSpot Blog Research show that 56% of marketers who leverage blogging say it’s effective, and 10% say it generates the biggest return on investment.
Below are four convincing reasons to highlight why applying this marketing strategy in your business is worthwhile. These include:
Helps you Reach Business Objectives and Goals
While all marketing efforts bring you several steps closer to your corporate goals; however, the possibility of exerting misguided effort that wastes money, time, and energy is high in paid advertising.
On the other hand, creating value through videos, posts and blog is less risky as it helps you define your marketing goals and set priorities. Essentially, it allows you to plan your work and ensure a mission propels all marketing actions. With these factors in place, you’re guaranteed to see tangible results with every effort.
Helps Position you as an Authority
Great content marketing enables you to look for new avenues to create valuable assets for your audience. They open doors to new trends and hot topics, intending to attract people that enjoy such information.
This factor improves your brand’s reputation as it indicates to the reader that you’re a competent professional proficient in the craft.
Cuts Marketing Costs
Creating awareness and compelling people to patronize your business costs money, especially paid advertising. Additionally, it’s not uncommon for marketers to spend excessively on marketing projects with little funds left in the financial year.
Fortunately, good content marketing can rectify this problem as it costs less to implement, and the strategy ensures deducing how much is needed and open ways to save money.
The Content Converts
A good content strategy ultimately aims to convert potential customers to paying individuals via engaging and valuable information. However, to achieve this goal, the strategy must answer specific questions, which include:
- Who is your target audience?
- What information do they consume?
- What tone is best for addressing them?
- What style and format is best adapted to the type of creative I share?
Answering these questions lays the foundation for producing valuable information that positions your company as an authority and converts.
Steps to Create a Good Content Strategy
If the information above compels you to consider a content strategy for your business, this section will be your guide. Here are the necessary steps to take for implementing this marketing method:
Identify your Objectives
Every marketing strategy begins with identifying and clarifying what you wish to accomplish. For example, do you want more people to find your website, build stronger customer loyalty, increase sales, or anything of the sort?
Answering this question lets you know whether you’ll use elements like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Email marketing, or other options. SEO ensures you appear on the first page of search engines for more visibility, while email marketing keeps you connected with your subscribers.
Both options are consistent with the definition of content strategy, providing valuable information to customers to encourage patronage.
Ultimately, figuring out what you wish to accomplish with a good content strategy is essential for crafting the right plan that produces results.
Specify your Audience
To effectively provide qualitative information, you first need to understand your recipient(s) and what grabs their attention. Essentially, knowing your audience lets you understand the best medium, tone, terms, etc., for passing information to them.
To deduce the recipient of your content, we recommend looking at your current customer base. What do they look like? What are their interests? What do they have in common?
You can also schedule customer interviews and surveys to find out what type of formats they prefer, their reading habits, etc. Once acquired, you can compile this data to format a buyer persona, guiding how you communicate with your audience.
Calculate your Budget
Similar to any marketing plan, the extent of what you can achieve in content marketing depends on your budget. Also, while it possesses lesser direct costs than advertising, you need immense amounts of time to create and promote food content.
In addition to the financial aspect, you need to hire employees, freelancers, contractors, agencies, or a combination of each option. You can cut costs with free content marketing tools online or opt for the extra value that paid ones offer.
Ultimately, it’s best to calculate your budget as it decides how much you’ll be able to implement with your marketing plan.
Perform Research
Previously, we mentioned the importance of knowing your audience since it structures your content marketing strategy. There’s more research to perform with that covered, which is Keyword Research.
Keyword research forms the pillars that support Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing because it equips you with the correct terms your audience will insert in Google’s search bar.
Keyword research helps to answer questions like:
- What terminology do potential customers use when rendering about your industry?
- What topics are most relevant to people in your niche?
- What questions do they have that I can answer effectively?
Besides knowing what words and phrases connect with people in your industry, you also have a strong understanding of the content to produce. So it’s a necessity for building a great content strategy.
Create a Promotion Plan
Creating amazing content on your website is worthless if no one finds the piece, which isn’t impossible due to how much content is on the internet today. So essentially need a plan for people to find your content since they can’t discover it themselves.
You can begin by sharing a link to the page on social media, investing in paid advertising on platforms like Google and yahoo, and other options for getting your brand in front of people.
Other strategies could include partnering with some businesses to exchange content to communicate with each other’s audiences. Bloggers are also useful in this area as their influence in a particular communication can be your ticket to success.
Conclusion
Employing an excellent content strategy in your business requires a lot of work; nevertheless, it is an effective way to increase your website’s visibility, gain new customers, and position yourself as a leader in your industry.
Hopefully, the information in this article is sufficient to provide a basic understanding of this marketing strategy and guide your future actions on the topic. Good luck!
