Content: Strategy, Creation, and Analysis

The new mantra in the marketing world seems to be “content, content, content.” If you want to drive traffic and generate leads, you need content, they’ll tell you. And it’s true. But it’s only part of the equation.

First Step: Content Strategy

Creating content is a huge part of driving traffic to your site and products. Unfortunately, creating content that is irrelevant, untimely, or confusing could have the exact opposite effect that you’re looking for, (on top of being a drain on your time and resources). That’s why it’s paramount to have a content strategy.

Developing a content strategy involves many moving parts. You have to consider your audience and their needs, your brand and its voice, optimizing for search engines and social media, and how all of these pieces (and others) play into your capacity. It can seem daunting at first, but most people have more content on hand than they realize, and with an effective strategy in place, it becomes much less intimidating.

Planning Content Families

After mapping out the needs of your audience, and your brand’s voice, you can begin to plan for what content needs to be developed. It’s important to focus on content–what content does your audience need from you? We’ll determine the families of content we need, and how we can build authority around those topics. Once we determine the content needs, we can start to think about appropriate formats, promotional campaigns, and other delivery methods.

Delivering Content

A huge piece of developing a content strategy pertains to implementation and delivery of the content. This aspect is often put on the back-burner, because, well, it’s the last part that actually “happens.” It’s important to plan for how your content is going to be delivered, where it will be housed, and how it can be made evergreen if you plan to make the most return on investment (ROI) for your content.

Content can be optimized for various uses and platforms, often with relatively easy tweaks. Making those tweaks can be the difference between driving content to the first page of Google or not–between generating a valuable lead, or letting it pass by.

Step Two: Creating Content

Once your strategy is in place, and you have a plan to make the most of what you produce, you can start pumping out that content! Now is the time to repurpose all of the great content you have–internal communications, past emails, photos, testimonials–and put back to work. Use the knowledge already in your community or organization, and leverage that for more quick content. Just make sure that you’re sticking to your content strategy, and remembering your SEO best practices.

Creating content can be as simple as writing up a short tweet, or as involved as producing a documentary. Depending on your needs and capacity, you may need to outsource a significant portion of your content creation. If that’s the case, make sure that your entire content strategy is discussed before anyone begins developing content for you.

Step Three: Testing and Analysis

Finally, you will want to analyze your content and delivery, and revise as necessary. All of the stages of your content plan should be aimed at laddering up to your key performance indicators. Keeping track of where your leads are coming from–what sort of content, and what delivery–will help you further hone the specifics of your content strategy.

Aligning Content with Context and Time

When analyzing your content, you’ll want to focus specifically on what content is being delivered, how it’s being delivered, and when your audience is engaging with it–content, context, and timing. Tracking these indicators is only the beginning. Next you have to determine what’s working, and what’s going to help you reach your key performance indicators. What you learn may lead you to adjusting the time of your social postings, changing the triggers for your automated emails, revising the calls-to-action on your blog posts, or even creating a completely new piece of content.

Testing Effectively

Analyzing what you do is important, but if you want to determine specific steps to take, it’s important to create deliberate tests. Delivering a piece of content in two different ways, and studying what works better is known as an A-B test, and is paramount to learning how your audience interacts with your content.

There are many best practices to A-B testing, but the most important is to only adjust one feature of your content (whether it be a blog, email, social ad etc.), so that you can determine exactly what is causing the difference in engagement. (Tip: launch your A-B test at the same time, or the timing will be an extra variable!)

Get to it!

Now you have the basic idea for developing a content strategy, and some of the common pitfalls to avoid. Now for the hardest part… getting started! Remember, there are plenty of people to reach out to for help. Feel free to drop us a line in the contact form!