8 Practical and Easy Steps To Develop Your Content Strategy

Ok, you have developed content that you strongly feel would sit well with your audience, and you were able to generate a good following, but what’s next?

Creating content that achieves key business goals requires a comprehensive content strategy. 

This is what will maintain consistency in promoting your brand and engaging your audience in the short and long term.

The goal of content strategy is to plan the content at a higher level. Conversely, content marketing is content creation, publication, and promotion.

A content strategy is your brand’s plan to generate traffic, leads, engagement, sales, and other business outcomes.

Content strategy development is incomplete without SEO because it helps you identify how people search and boosts your content.

You can go through our blog on content ideas and understand the importance of consistency in your posts and content material.

Why Content Strategy Is Important

An effective content strategy can increase a company’s marketing ROI and help them perform better.

Let’s look at some fresh ideas for incorporating into your plan if you need some help.

This post aims to dig into the definition of content strategy, why your business must have a content marketing plan, and how to create one. 

Content Strategy: Why Marketers Need One

Using content marketing, business owners can prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of new leads and website traffic.

Even if you write one blog post that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, an ebook or free tool will keep generating leads long after you publish the post.

You could try out sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content to generate revenue if you have a reliable traffic source and leads from your evergreen content.

Moreover, your content will not only attract prospects but will also educate them and generate brand awareness.

The following eight tips will help you create a content strategy that works.

Identify and clarify your goals.

What are you hoping to accomplish with your content marketing plan? What motivates you to create content and a content marketing strategy?

It will be easier to determine what’s best for your strategy if you clearly understand your goals.

Develop personas through research.

It’s essential to clearly define your target audience, also known as your buyer persona, before developing your content plan.

This is especially crucial for those just starting out in marketing or those new to the field. The more relevant and valuable the content you create for your target audience, the more likely they will engage with it and convert.

Experienced marketers may find that their target has changed over time. 

Are you looking for new target markets or want to expand your current ones? 

Are you interested in keeping the same target audience? A vital step in growing your audience is to review your audience parameters – at least once a year – through market research.

Perform a content audit.

In the early stages of a brand’s life, blog posts are usually the first thing they publish. 

A content audit can assess your top-performing and lowest-performing content if you want to branch out into different formats. You can then decide what direction to take based on that information.

Looking at your content marketing efforts in the past year should be a priority for businesses that have been around for a while.

Make a list of what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new targets. Your team’s goals need to be aligned with your organization’s goals at this point.

You will be able to identify gaps in your topic clusters, find out what resonates most with your audience, and brainstorm fresh content ideas with a content audit.

Decide which content management system to use.

Content creation, publication, and analytics are all vital components of content management.

Having an easy-to-use and sustainable content management system is essential.

An excellent CMS allows you to publish, plan, and measure all your results from one location.

Most content management systems are built around WordPress, and you can add WordPress plugins to add free web forms, live chat, CRM access, email marketing, and analytics, for example.

Decide what kind of content you want to create.

A wide range of content can be created, including written content such as video explainers, product reviews, ebooks, blog posts, and audio content such as podcasts.

Planning on various content types can help break the monotony in the delivery of your content, so your audience will expect something new and different, as well as prevent them from getting bored or finding your content predictable.

Identify potential content topics.

Time to get creative with your next content project.

Here are a few online tools to get you started.

HubSpot’s Website Grader

This tool is excellent to use if you’re interested in seeing where your website and SEO efforts stand.

A Website Grader report gives you a detailed explanation of how your website performs in several key areas.

This tool will help you discover areas where your website can improve and how to make it more SEO-friendly.

BuzzSumo

Are you looking for content ideas and popular content? 

The resource provides various market research tools, one of which measures popularity and engagement via social media shares.

This information would help you sort out the best content ideas if you were to create content about these topics.

Feedly

Feedly is an excellent resource if you’re looking for content ideas and want to track trendy topics in your industry.

Using the software’s AI tool, you tell it which topics you want to learn about.

It will be easier to find new content ideas now that you don’t have to spend hours scouring the internet. By contrast, you can browse your curated news list, which includes news sites, newsletters, and social media posts. 

BlogAbout

Let the blog title generator get your creative juices flowing.

 This tool is similar to playing Mad Libs, except it displays standard headline formats with blanks for you to fill in with your subject.

It helps you place your general ideas in contexts that appeal to your target audience. In addition, the “Notebook” feature in BlogAbout allows you to save topic ideas you like for future use.

These are just a few of the many online resources available. In addition, you may find other tools that could help you customize your content planning and ideas to help you maintain that consistency and achieve your content marketing goals.

Quality assurance 

Now that you have an excellent content concept, that’s only a portion of the strategy. You must also let your content stand out online in terms of visual quality and appeal. 

Remember that there are billions of content published online so catching and enticing your audience’s attention is critical to the success of your content strategy and marketing efforts.

Will it be visually enticing? Are the videos edited for quality and appeal? Are the images sharp, distinct, and high resolution? 

Suppose you feel your video content quality needs a bit more touching up. In that case, you can hire professional video editors to help you produce great quality videos for posting or professional photo editors to give your images the star quality for online posting.

Publish and manage your content.

Content creation is only part of your marketing plan – you must also plan how your content will be organized.

By creating an editorial calendar, you can ensure your website contains a diverse and well-balanced content library. In addition, create a social media calendar to ensure your social media content is promoted and managed on other sites.

Check out our blog on social media marketing and the importance of having a content strategy to go with it.