Every successful brand has a solid content strategy. Read that again.
In my early years as a freelance writer, some clients would hire me for one-off projects, like an 800-word blog post for SEO purposes, and call it a day.
What these clients ignored is that it takes more than an 800-word post to become relevant or rank high on the search engine results page (SERP).
So in today’s blog, you’ll learn about content strategy, its role in marketing, and how businesses can benefit from it.
What Is Content Strategy?
Businesses use content to create effective interactions between their products and customers.
We use the term content strategy to refer to the ongoing planning, creation, delivery, and maintenance of helpful and relevant content on a given topic.
In other words, content strategy is the map that a marketing team uses to guide their content down a path that will allow them to:
- Increase sales.
- Provide solutions.
- Raise brand awareness.
- Build authority.
Typically, businesses without a content strategy waste resources and time on content that may not:
- Resonate with the readers.
- Reach the target audience.
- Be profitable.
A content strategy prevents you from creating underperforming content and wasting money. It allows you to define the type of content that works best for your business and gives you the freedom to try new strategies and techniques.
A content strategy helps you define:
- Your why. What are your goals? Who is the content for? How will it benefit your business? Why are you creating that type of content?
- The creative process. Who will own, brainstorm, create, publish, and maintain the content?
- The channels and style guide you’ll use. Where will you publish this information? What tone and style are you aiming for? How will you format, tag, and structure the content?
- The final user experience. How can you publish the content in a way that is consistent with the overall user experience?
Steps To Create a Content Strategy
Typically, content strategies have four stages: planning, creation, maintenance, and removal. Together, they allow marketing teams to:
- Identify the type of content their audience needs.
- Conduct successful brainstorming sessions.
- Create and set a style guide and schedule that fit the brand.
- Monitor existing content to ensure its accuracy and relevance.
- Accurately measure content success.
- Remove content that is underperforming or irrelevant.
These stages are also known as the content lifecycle. Once a piece of content reaches the maintenance stage, it moves back to the first stage because it takes some planning, creation, and management to update it until it is removed.
Planning
Planning is the first step in creating a content strategy, and it starts with defining the type of content you want to publish and why. That’s what we call a content strategy statement.
The next step is to conduct a content audit or inventory to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your current content strategy. A content audit or inventory can help you determine:
- Whether you need to edit the existing content to align it with current goals.
- Gaps in your current content strategy (if any).
- New ways to improve the interaction between your audience and your products through content.
In other words, this phase helps you identify your team’s current and future efforts to achieve your content marketing goals. It also measures how well your content is performing, identifies new opportunities, and determines who on your team is best suited to handle all content-related tasks.
Creation
Creation, the second stage, is about brainstorming and creating content that aligns with your goals, your brand’s voice, and your audience’s preferences.
A common mistake some businesses make is to separate content from marketing and design when they all go hand-in-hand.
Remember, you can’t plan a solid marketing strategy with excellent UX design if content isn’t part of the equation.
In other words, the creation phase helps you structure and apply detailed guidelines for how your content team will create and distribute that content. This includes style guides, publishing checklists and standards, and legal clauses.
Maintenance
Ongoing monitoring is critical to getting the most out of your content. The maintenance phase is about deciding how often you’ll review existing content and what you’ll do when content needs to be updated.
You don’t have to do all of these things in this order, but doing them all will make the process easier:
- Establish a convenient time interval for reviewing content. Many businesses use 2-, 3-, and 6-month intervals to review old content and identify gaps.
- Create a maintenance checklist. This makes it easier to format, edit, write, and remove content.
- Decide who will be responsible for maintenance. Who’s best suited to review your content, identify opportunities, and write content according to your checklist?
Removal
When content no longer serves your brand, it becomes irrelevant and underperforming.
This brings us to the final stage of a content strategy: removal. Content that no longer defines your brand or solves a problem for your audience falls into this category, and in most cases, deleting it is the best option.
But before you do, there are several factors to consider, including:
- SEO performance.
- The person in charge of approving the removal and the person doing it.
- Whether or not you plan to maintain an archive.
- A redirecting plan.
- The consequences of removing content that has performed well in the past.
A Word on Implementing a Content Strategy
Having a content strategy is critical to reaping the many benefits of content creation. However, if done poorly, it’s a waste of time and will hurt your business and your audience.
A content strategy will help you keep things organized and minimize wasted resources. Plus, it doesn’t have to be long or complicated; just focus on creating something that works for you.