Here’s a question for you.
You’ve got your own website. You know it’s crucial for the success and development of your business – but how much thought and attention have you really given to the type of content that’s on there?
We know that more people will research and evaluate the products and services of a company online, as the web becomes increasingly dominant as an information and sales channel.
With this in mind, the content you create and publish is something you have to take seriously if you want your business to succeed.
It has to achieve two things: Firstly it must support your key business objectives, and secondly it must support your users/audience/customers needs and interests.
You’re now a publisher
If you have a website it means you’re a publisher. This may come as a shock to you. The idea of creating and publishing content might not be something you feel comfortable with or capable of doing.
Whether you want to create your own online content or hire a professional writer, you need to have a content strategy in place. There’s no point writing the occasional blog post, facebook update or tweet if you don’t have an overall plan of what it is you hope to achieve with your content.
I wanted to look at how you can begin putting together a basic content strategy that will help in achieving your business goals and meet the needs of your customers and audience.
So Lets start at the beginning.
What is a strategy?
A strategy is essentially a general description of the plan or approach you intend to take to achieve your goals. You have a series of steps you’re going to take which are going to take you from where you currently are to where you want to be.
1. What’s your mission and vision?
Try and think about what it is you’re trying to create with your overall business. Then think about how the content you’re going to create will help in achieving that mission and vision.
How would you like your business to look like in 6 months time? A year, or three years from now?
Admittedly not everyone will enjoy sitting around thinking about their overall vision – some people are naturally more action driven and will want to start creating something immediately.
I wouldn’t advise rushing into creating content, but whether you’re a thinker or a doer you need to have some idea in place of your overall vision and mission.
2. Do your research
There’s a number of areas in which you can carry out relevant research to help your content strategy.
Research your audience
Who are your audience? Are you reaching and engaging with them? If not why not? How will you achieve this?
How are you performing?
Research and analysis will help you identify how well you’ve been performing. Ask yourself the question: What are your current strengths and weaknesses? How is your content contributing to this?
What are you doing well, what could you do better? What sort of feedback have you been getting from your customers and website visitors? Do you have any stats to measure your overall performance?
Don’t forget to use tools like Google Analytics to analyse the performance of your existing content.
3. What are your objectives?
Once you’ve completed your research or audit, ask yourself what it is you want to achieve with your business. How will your online content help you achieve your business goals?
You can start to focus on the specific objectives you want to work on. Examples of common objectives can include:
- Attracting more visitors to your website
- Building brand awareness
- Increase your online presence
- Increasing sales/subscriptions
- Positioning yourself as a thought leader
- Retaining more site visitors
- developing greater audience engagement
- Sharing your expertise
- Solving customer problems
- Building an online community
4. What strategy are you going to use to achieve your objectives?
Your strategy is the route you’re going to take to reach your objectives. Here’s some of the questions you should be asking.
5. What content are you going to create?
Is it going to be:
- blog posts
- case studies
- a white paper
- e-books
- twitter and Facebook updates
- contributions to online conversations
- comment and curating other people’s content
6. When are you going to deliver your content?
Are you going to deliver your content on a daily, weekly or monthly basis?
It’s easy to feel a lot of pressure to produce a constant flow of new content. That’s why you need to plan and organise your time to decide when you’re going to produce your content.
A great way to help you do this is by creating an editorial calender. Anyone from a publishing background will be familiar with an editorial calender, but if you’re not – it’s not something you should be overly daunted by.
An editorial calendar is like maintaining a diary for content creation. A diary which tells you what content to create, the topics to cover, but most importantly when to create it.
Look at using a tool like Google Calendar or a spreadsheet so you can write down your content plans. Try to plan as far in advance as possible when it comes to creating relevant content for your business.
7. Why are you creating this content?
Look back at your objectives to help you here. What are you trying to achieve with your content. Examples might include:
- Educate your customers/audience about your products and services
- Help solve their problems.
- Entertain and inform
- Provide industry news and insight
- Tell your business/brand story
Remember to remind yourself why your audience would actually want or need your content.
Finally, don’t forget to include your ‘call to action’. What is it you want your readers/customers to do. Whatever it is, it has to support your business purposes and objectives.
8. How are you going to distribute your content?
This question will depend on your audience and the research you’ve conducted to discover how your audience likes to find and consume your content.
Is your content going to be distributed in a blog, online articles, twitter and facebook updates, e-books whitepapers? And don’t forget not all content has to be text based. You’ve also got, video, slideshows, podcasts, infographics.
9. Where will your audience find your content?
Going back to your research, you need to have a clear picture of who your audience is. You have to understand how they use the web and where they like to hang out.
This should help you establish where to place your content – but remember you can’t be everywhere on the web.
Make a decision on where you think you’re going to have the biggest impact. Will it be on your website, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Don’t just use a platform for the sake of it because you feel you should have a presence there.
10. Measurement
The content on your website will often form the first impression people will have of you and your business. This is why you need to measure and evaluate your content on an ongoing basis.
Use analytical tools like Google Analytics to track how people are using and responding to your content. Are your key goal and objectives being met?
11. Maintenance
Once you’ve delivered your content and put it out online, you can’t sit back and think that’s the end of the process. Your content will need maintaining for accuracy, consistency and relevance to your audience.
There’s a lot there to take in and think about when it comes to creating your content strategy. Everyone will have their own ideas, and what works for one person, will not necessarily work for another – but the biggest mistake you can make is to publish content without any strategy or clear purpose on what it is you want to achieve.
Related articles