6 Crucial Elements of a Content Strategy

Regardless if you’ve never created content before or have been doing content marketing for years, a content strategy will help you achieve marketing and sales goals more easily. An effective content strategy is clear, up to date, and original. It should also include the management of all your content while communicating your brand and expertise.

 

Ideally, there is content created for each stage of the buyer’s journey - awareness, evaluation, and decision - to move potential customers toward a desired action like a purchase or lead form submission. (The buyer’s journey for your business may have more stages, but these three stages generally work for most businesses.)

 

Ultimately, every piece of content that’s created should have an explicit purpose. Here are six key elements that should be considered when creating or updating your content strategy.

Who is your audience? Do you have multiple audiences? Your business may have more than one type of customer so your content strategy should cater to more than one type of site visitor. When you create content that is targeted to each audience, you’ll be able to engage all of your buyer personas instead of just one or two.

Creating content for the sake of content won’t win you any customers, which is why you should determine your audience’s problems so your content educates and guides them, thereby providing real value. Your content should reinforce the message that your product or service offers the solution.

A “unique selling point” tells customers what makes your offering better - or at least different from competitors. Content that has a strong USP can prove to potential customers why they should do business with you or listen to what you have to say.

Once you’ve defined your audience and determined their problems and your USP, next you'll need to decide which types of content to create. Granted, you’ll need to take into consideration what your resources allow, but make sure whichever content type you select is the best format to communicate your message.

Thanks to the internet, there are a variety of channels you can publish content. For example, you can publish content on your own blog, popular social networks like Facebook and Instagram, email, press release distribution service, and other sites like trade publications.

It’s crucial to know who's creating what content, where it'll be published, and when it's going live. This is particularly critical if your business produces a lot of content. Outlining content management will keep your content organized and team members accountable.

A content strategy should clearly explain how your business will create, publish, and manage content in order to achieve goals like educating customers, nurturing prospects, and closing sales. Having a strategy will strengthen your brand while creating new customer relationships and deepening existing ones. To create successful content, make sure to research your target audience and market so it will be relevant and valuable to customers.

Sales & Marketing Technologies is an Orlando-based digital marketing agency that helps businesses create content strategies that increase site traffic and conversions while elevating the brand’s image. From strategy and creation to tracking and audience monitoring, we’ll optimize your content marketing’s effectiveness to grow your business.

 

Call us today at 407-682-2222 or fill out the contact form below to schedule a free 30-minute call!