Regardless of your experience with content marketing, regularly revisiting and updating your strategy is essential to keep it innovative and engaging. A strong content strategy involves planning, creating, publishing, managing, and governing content to attract and engage your audience while achieving business goals. A content strategy covers your brand, tone, promotion, and repurposing.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to be smart with content strategy.
Know where you’re heading to
Set SMART content goals aligned with your marketing and company objectives. Examples may include increasing organic blog traffic by 10% in the next quarter, here you’ll see that a goal should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timebound.
Know who you are talking to
To build a successful content strategy, you need to understand your audience deeply simply creating a buyer persona. This semi-fictional character represents your ideal target audience and helps tailor your content to address their needs, pain points, and desires. Knowing your audience well allows you to craft content that resonates and feels personal, even if you can’t reach each individual directly.
Know where you are in your buyer’s journey
The buyer’s journey involves three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. Just as you would diagnose and choose a remedy for a problem like a car breakdown—identifying the issue (e.g., flat tire), considering solutions (e.g., calling a tow truck or changing the tire yourself), and deciding on the best option—prospects follow a similar path. Tailor your content to address each stage of their journey.
Know what you’re doing right and what you can improve
At HARTMAN, we do brand audits that involve reviewing and organizing our brand’s existing content to align with a new strategy. This process helps identify if content needs improving or if there are gaps to address, ensuring that the content meets our target persona’s needs and journey stage.
Know which platform to use
Choose the right content format based on what your buyer persona prefers, whether it’s a blog post, video, graphic, or something else. You can use different formats for different pieces of content but aim for consistency. If a format doesn’t work due to resource constraints, consider alternatives that better fit your situation. Content creation involves selecting the appropriate format and using the right tools for publishing and promotion.