Are you producing great content but not getting the response you want from your audience? In this article Fablr’s digital marketing agony aunt, Jodie Beardmore, explains what a content strategy is and why you need one.
Content marketing is the content that you produce to add value to your brand and show how your services can benefit potential customers. Great content is a beautiful thing, but great content without a good content strategy is often a wasted effort. Here are a few handy tips to help you formulate your own content strategy and make sure that your content is seen by the right people.
Know your target audience
Think about why you’re posting that content in the first place and then consider who your target audience is and how your service offering fits that audience. You can start by creating a set of persona’s – different potential clients that may need your expertise and use your services. Think about the kinds of industries these clients work in, what their interests are, and what types of content would draw them in.
Mix things up a bit
You don’t want to just talk about the services that you offer – you also want to be able to be able to demonstrate your expertise. Keep an eye on what’s trending in your industry, share relevant articles that are applicable to your business, and support that with your own knowledge by posting case studies and blog posts.
Use the tools
You should use web tools like Answer The Public and Google Trends to find out what sort of things people are searching for in your sector. If there’s a surge in search around a particular topic related to your sector then it might be a great time to whip up a quick blog post or social post on that subject. It’s also really useful to keep an eye on your competitors’ blogs and social channels to see what content they’re producing. What are they posting about and what are their most successful pieces of content? What didn’t work for them? You can learn a lot from other’s successes and failures.
Keep an eye on the prize
When you’re writing content you should keep the end goal or conversion in mind. While it may seem obvious, clearly defining what you want to achieve with your content before you start writing it is a very useful exercise. It also means that you aren’t producing content just for the sake of it.
These goals could be as simple as getting a client to contact you or to sign up for your mailing list, or as complex as getting them to engage on a specific subject or make an enquiry about a certain service offering. Think about what would encourage clients to reach that end goal. For instance, if you’ve posted an article that is relevant to a pain point that a customer has they may be encouraged to turn to you for help fixing that problem. Or an article could be the start of a series of useful content pieces that will encourage your users to sign up to your newsletter or return to your site at some point in future for more content. Increasing your site’s “stickiness” in this way is a great step toward converting a user into a client or customer.
Track, analyse, and validate
One thing that is really important but often falls by the wayside is metrics and analytics. Tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar should be really important parts of your content strategy. Google Analytics and Hotjar allow you to see which of your social media platforms is bringing in the most traffic, what content users are engaging with the most, which pages are causing people to “bounce”, and how your users are progressing through your site from one piece of content to the next. You will also be able to see how your goals are performing using Google Analytics. This tool lets you break down goals into different target objectives and attach value to these conversions. Each conversion can also be attributed to specific campaigns, social channels, and even demographics.
Bringing it together
Using the steps that I have summarised in this article you should be able to create a content strategy that will give you a better insight into how your content can really work for you. Why take a look at how Fablr manages content campaigns by checking out our services page? Alternatively, send me an email at hello@fablr.co.uk and we can chat about how we can help you deliver punchy content that gets your organisation the traction it really deserves.