How to Build a Content Strategy
"Content is King" – this common saying holds even more weight in marketing. The content you create represents your brand and should be engaging, shareable, and purpose-driven to achieve a positive outcome. A successful content strategy involves answering a few essential questions:
Who is my audience?
Why am I creating content?
What is the key takeaway I want my audience to have?
What are the desired outcomes?
These questions are fundamental to building a strategy that drives customer engagement. Marketers understand a good content strategy is important to building engagement with your customers. In practice, this is the hardest code to crack. Searching for ideas on how to identify and implement a successful content strategy can be overwhelming - there are so many differing tactics and theories. When thinking about how to build your strategy, the following are helpful idea starters toward building engaging content.
Calendars are Critical
A content calendar is crucial but often overlooked. It provides a roadmap to stay organized, identifies key moments, and ensures your content has the opportunity to break through the noise. Have you ever thought, “I have an amazing content idea that needs to be shared with the world.” A calendar will help you stay on task and identify the right time and place to share your content. Planning can also allow time to spark new ideas. Creating and maintaining a content calendar supports the ever important principle of working smarter, not harder, helping you plan, saving time and uncovering new opportunities for relevance.
Get Focused on Your Target
This is another opportunity to address a simple concept that most of us get wrong. It’s crucial to understand who your target audience is and what drives them to consume content—are they seeking purpose or distraction?
We want to reach the audience most likely to engage and take action to deliver intended outcomes. When thinking about content creation, you need to factor these potentially competing behaviors into your strategy.
Additionally, your target audience and your actual audience may be two different groups – so, it’s essential to strike a balance between expanding your reach and staying true to your brand identity. Imagine launching a new product under your existing brand. Your brand identity may be tied to one audience segment, but your new product is delving into an entirely new audience. How do you create a content strategy that doesn’t alienate your existing customers while also expanding your net to bring a newer segment?
Having a clear understanding of the audience you are trying to reach is foundational. There can be multiple streams of content creation that may appeal to a variety of audiences. However, if you can’t address the exact audience you want to reach with this specific content, you are effectively serving everyone and no one at the same time.
Define the Purpose
Before creating content, ask the big questions: Why do you want to create content? What problem are you trying to solve? What opportunity are you trying to capitalize upon?
If you can’t answer these questions, it’s time to hit the pause and reset button on your content strategy. While simple in theory, answering these questions upfront will lead to idea generation, critical thinking around the type of content you want to create, how and where to distribute it, and support brand guardrails that will continue to refine your content roadmap.
Focus on One Key Takeaway
“I want my customer to buy my stuff, but I want them to think I’m funny, and I want them to keep coming back and buying more of my stuff, and I want them to like me, and I want them to know where my store is located, and I want them to know that I’m having a sale and I want them to know that my stuff is on trend, and I want them to have an emotional connection to my message and I want them to be inspired by my brand and I want them to tell their friends how cool my brand is and again I want them to like me.”
I know, right? That’s a lot to expect from a single piece or content. If it was that easy to get a customer to feel those feelings and act - unicorns really would exist!
As a practical matter, taking the time to understand and focus on a single takeaway has a stronger potential to create stickiness with customers because the message is simple, effective and memorable. Additionally, you don’t have to solve all things in one piece of content. Think bigger!
Having a clear strategy gives you an opportunity to create a library of content that can be shared over time to reinforce your core messages and create brand stickiness for your business. Give them something to remember: a singular message can get your customers to like you and come back for more because you kept it simple and created a meaningful connection with your audience.
Set Clear Outcomes - Don’t Forget the Data
Identify the desired outcomes for each piece of content. What action do you want your audience to take? Be prepared to adapt based on results—analysis and flexibility are key. While creativity and risk-taking are encouraged, understanding what works ensures your content strategy evolves with your goals. Clearly defining desired outcomes will help shape your content strategy.
With content platforms changing in the blink of an eye, not to mention the emergence of incorporating AI into content creation, having a clear understanding of what results you want to achieve is crucial. Don’t forget analysis matters and should be incorporated into your overall strategy.
Being open and flexible to modifying your content based on analysis is all part of the outcome discussion. This shouldn’t deter you from being bold, being creative or taking risks but it’s important to be ready to pivot if your campaign isn’t working. Your content isn't all or nothing – which means you can expand on a post down the road, repost or cascade new content at any time.
Content is King - There has never been a time when this statement is truer, it’s not a new or revolutionary idea but it is how businesses are developing strategies to expand their reach and pushing forward into new media platforms. The world is launching new platforms, influencers, content super stars, and finding new ways to communicate with audiences to meet them where they consume content most and it all starts with a strong strategy.