6 Reasons Why You Need a Content Strategy.

A content strategy is a critical factor regarding business performance. Content strategies enable businesses to define their marketing goals and plan their work to ensure that every effort is goal-driven. 

According to Neil Patel, 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day, and if an SEO guru says content marketing is a must-have strategy for every business, we best believe him!

What is a Content Strategy?

First things first, content strategy and content marketing are two different things. A content strategy uses content to convey your business goals and showcase your products or services without sounding salesy.

Let’s say, one of your goals is to increase brand equity to acquire customer loyalty, and ultimately generate leads. To achieve this, you can consider implementing a content strategy that focuses on brand differentiation and using SE0 as a means to drive traffic to your business. Through tailored and optimized content, your audience can tell whether your brand is inferior or superior to another. 

Bill Gates was surely not fooling around in 1996 when he said: ” Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet….” 

A content strategy is not a ‘could have’ and business owners need to understand that delivering high-quality content to meet business needs can support businesses in building trust amidst new readers/viewers and, conclusively, succeed in the long run.  

You need to identify why you need a content strategy before implementing one. 

Here are some questions to consider:

• What do we want to achieve through content creation?
• Why are we creating this short-form or long-form content piece?
• Have we identified our audience?
• What are the solicited reactions and actions?
• Whether or not will we promote our content? 
• How will published content be promoted?
• How will our content reach our audience?
• What are the types of content that we will create?
• Where and when will we publish our content?
• Who will create the content?
• And how will we maintain consistency (brand voice and tone) across all channels?

Content marketing is now a huge thing, yet, most marketers do not fully grasp the importance of planning, structure, and documentation. Documenting your content strategy is one fail proof approach to guarantee that your work delivers tangible results.

Here are 7 reasons why you need to consider a content strategy: 

Helps you Identify Goals 

A content strategy will remind your team why your business exists in the first place. Since content creation is part of your marketing tactics, it should help achieve your vision. Therefore, you need to communicate your business goals to all parts of your company to ensure that you’re curating content that matches your target market. 

For instance, using long-tail keywords can yield better results than short competitive keywords. Being cognizant of the ultimate goals of your content creation ensures that your time and efforts are not being wasted.

Content strategies structure your marketing goals and define priorities.

Tracking Progress Becomes Easier 

Content strategy is only worth implementing if you have identified your goals and recognized the metrics. Metrics make it more manageable to align the people and systems involved with your goals. 

According to Bright Edge, these are the 4 ways to define your content success:

1. Determining whether your content can be easily found through site visitors, CTR, clicks, and impressions. 
2. Ensuring that your content is engaging. Considering time on page and bounce rate are a good start.
3. Connecting your content strategy to every stage of the funnel to maximize customer retention.
4. Checking whether your content is worthy to be shared.

Metrics should be set and tracked according to the results you seek to achieve and the platforms being used. This might be redundant, but your metrics have to be adjusted as per your short-term and long-term goals. An effective content strategy requires metrics to be analyzed to gauge your quarterly results. 

Helps you Identify New Possibilities

Content creation is a lot about engagement, one of the reasons to create content is to increase brand loyalty. A strong content strategy takes into account events, new topics, news, and trends to keep up with their audience. These are elements that should be injected into the creation plan and therefore, content strategies need to be somewhat flexible to alter content when required. For instance, if your site is about raising awareness regarding refugees, you need to be on the lookout for relevant and up-to-date news to keep your audience hooked. 

Consider including avenues for news to refresh your story ideas. Without coordination, your strategy is likely to suffer from poor organization.

Content Strategies are a Cheaper Advertising Alternative

Careful planning is one of the ways to ensure that you’re not overspending when curating and distributing content. The issue is that marketers often tend to disregard the financial aspect of content strategies, and later on, have to bear the outcomes of inadequate funds.

 A good content strategy defines not only the metrics but also takes heed of the costs incurred in content marketing. Identifying alternatives and lessening costs should be one of the priorities of marketers.

Content strategies should focus on delivering goal-driven, consistent content that attracts a clearly defined audience and in turn, leads to sales. A lack of planning might solely undermine your overall marketing strategy.

Strategies Boost up Productivity

We all know how hard it gets to boost up your team’s motivation. This is why you need a documented content strategy that helps in keeping track of progress, results, and errors, thus, making it easier for your team to deliver result-driven content instead of indulging in trials and errors. Documented content strategies increase your team’s productivity and ensure that they are accountable for their content delivery. 

By documenting your strategy, your team can keep up with what needs to be repurposed, what, and what needs to be posted and update their content calendar accordingly. 

It also makes it clearer for everyone to recognize their roles and keep up with the flow. Once everyone is aware of your expectations, it is easier to set performance metrics and provide guidelines which, in turn, increase productivity. 

Turning Leads to Sales 

Content creation can not only enhance brand awareness, but it can help acquire loyalty. Engagement and loyalty are key factors to turn your audience into leads and consequently, sales. Apart from excellent customer service, content is one of the essentials to convert your leads on an ongoing basis. 

As we’ve mentioned earlier, the consistency of your brand tone and voice determines your credibility and your audience. By identifying your target audience, you can finalize the right tone, style, and format of your content. These are crucial steps that cannot be skipped when designing your content strategy.  

A good content strategy provides a clear vision of what it seeks to achieve, and which promotional channels to leverage. Every element mentioned above, are the guidelines for your team and all parts of your business.

Conclusion

A solid content strategy underpins a fully functioning content marketing structure within an organization. Without a well-planned strategy, it is harder to keep track of your goals. 

Content strategies make tracking progress, reducing costs, improving productivity, generating leads more manageable. They are critical in producing a positive image of your brand. The key is to generate content that targets a specific audience, and do so consistently. 

Now that you have understood why you need a content strategy, it’s time to implement yours using our tips!