One of the most important things to understand about a content strategy or branding strategy for your business is that this is not something you can execute without a great deal of thought being involved.
In the fast-paced, modern day world of the Internet, consistency is king. It’s not enough to put up the occasional blog post on your website. You need to have a steady stream of content ready to go. You need to know what you’re publishing, exactly when it will be posted, and by the time that even happens you should already be working on “the next big thing.”
That’s not a point that you can get to without pre-planning and careful consideration of what your audience wants to hear and how they want to hear it – which is exactly what your content strategy is all about.
Build a Better Content Strategy, Build a Better Brand
As is true with so many other aspects of your marketing, the right content strategy always begins by coming to a deeper understanding of the people you’re actually speaking to.
That means making an effort to learn as much about your target audience as possible. But remember – that audience is naturally going to change and evolve over time. If the last time you did any type of real audience analysis was a year ago, things may be totally different in the present day. The COVID-19 pandemic taught us this, as consumer buying behaviors changed wildly – practically overnight.
Think about who your “ideal customer” actually is. What does this person like? What do they dislike? What do they like about your brand? The answers to questions like these need to inform a lot of the decisions you’ll be making from this point forward.
Not only that, but once you know who your potential best customer is, you can figure out where they’re spending the majority of their time online. Usually, their age will dictate this portion of your research. Younger people tend to spend a lot of time on the faster paced social media sites like Twitter, Snapchat and even TikTok. Older individuals are usually found on places like Facebook.
Regardless, once you know where they are, you can begin to pay attention to the types of conversations that people are already having – thus giving you an opportunity to contribute to them in a meaningful way.
After your customer research is completed (for the time being), you can get to work on the actual content creation portion of your journey. Not only should you write blog posts (or create a presentation, or a compelling piece of visual collateral like an Infographic, etc.) about the topics they care about, but you also need to conduct keyword research as well.
Keyword research can accomplish a few different things for your branding strategy, all at the exact same time. First, it can help generate ideas about what specifically you should be creating based on the topics that are hot at the moment. Secondly, it can also tell you which of those keywords are highly competitive and which ones aren’t. You can certainly target the former, but the latter represents a terrific opportunity to rank highly in a way that will also capture the attention of your target audience.
At that point, you and your team need to sit down and create the type of content that people actually want to read. Come up with a list of viable topics – as many as you’re able to right now. Then, have people get to work on creating them Or, have an AI article writer create your first drafts for you automatically.
Generally speaking, it’s best to let the topic itself dictate the format that the finished piece will take. Has some breaking news story happened in the industry that people want to know more about? That’s likely perfect for a blog post where you can really dive deep and give your unique perspective. Do you want to publish something with a lot of statistics or numbers to show what your business went through when creating its latest products and services? That’s more appropriate for an Infographic, as the format lends itself to taking ideas like this and visualizing them in a way that virtually anyone can understand.
You should also vary up the type of content you’re creating as a part of your strategy as much as possible. Don’t just publish text-based content. Publish presentations, videos – anything that you’re capable of creating. A tool like Visme or Canva can be invaluable to that end because it comes with pre-built templates for a lot of these formats that can save you and your colleagues a great deal of time.
Once you’ve gotten to this point, the good news is that a large part of the hard work has already been done. Now, you just need to settle on a publishing schedule. You don’t necessarily need to post something new online every single day, but you should do it at least a few times a week. Likewise, you should try to publish at the exact same time – especially if you’re going to be doing so to social media or your own website.
This is important because it essentially trains people to check in on you every so often because they don’t want to miss something they may be interested in. If you publish erratically, it gives them less of an incentive to do this and traffic will almost certainly suffer.
In the end, remember that a content strategy is not something you “do once and forget about.” Once you’re on a publishing schedule, you need to stick with it. You’ll need to once again research your audience every few months to make sure you still understand them. You’ll need to constantly be coming up with topics to write about. It’s a lot of work, yes – but it’s also one investment that will more than pay for itself by way of audience engagement alone.
