Approaching content marketing strategically saves you a lot of work. But what does a good content strategy look like? We have compiled the most important tips – and show which stages of the process are almost always neglected.
Table of Contents
What Makes a Content Strategy?
Most companies need help to grow successfully with content marketing. But that’s not because content marketing won’t work. Instead, many need a sustainable content strategy. Only about 8 to 16 percent of companies – depending on whether you look at B2C or B2B companies – devote more than 30 percent of their marketing budget to content marketing. A survey by Statista shows this. However, more than two-thirds of companies publish new content every week. The numbers show that content and content marketing still need to be in proportion in many places.
A content strategy can help. It ensures that content ends up appropriately on the website or social networks. Instead, as part of the marketing concept, it enables cross-channel and cross-departmental work. The content strategy allows content to be coordinated with one another so that it unfolds its full effect. This is what makes content marketing successful.
Requirements For Your Content Strategy
Before you get started, you need to meet a few requirements. These requirements are already part of your content strategy but are always upstream. They will help you later in the development of your content.
Set Goals
The first primary requirement for a content strategy is, of course, a goal. In most cases, this should be the strengthening of the brand or image. Statista states this is precisely the primary goal for 88 percent of companies. New customer acquisition (84 percent) and customer retention (74 percent) take second and third place.
The goal often goes hand in hand with the big company goal but can also differ. Especially for niche, still relatively unknown topics, it is worth formulating the goal of drawing attention to your content. On the other hand, many companies need to remember that content can also perform. Content can also be used to win leads and customers.
Target Audience and Channels
In addition to the goal, you must know which target group you want to reach via which channels. Why is that important? It has implications for the type of content you create later in your content strategy. You will likely attract a young target group via short videos on TikTok. In contrast, older target groups can be easily reached via SEO and informative texts on the website or even in magazines. Therefore, You should determine the target group and the channels before the content strategy.
Here We Go! The Most Critical Steps of The Content Strategy
Are the conditions in place? This lays the foundation for your content strategy. This consists of a content audit at the beginning, the definition of the content formats, the preparation of the content in terms of the content experience, and, finally, the automation. The last step depends on your goal. If you want to collect leads or win customers in particular, this point is essential and can ultimately determine the success or failure of the strategy.
Conduct a content audit.
A content audit ensures the analysis of the status quo and keyword research for the comparison. Why is that important? Before you start creating new content, you need to get this overview. What has worked well so far? Can I possibly recycle existing content and embed it in the new content strategy?
The best way to do this is to collect the interaction data from Google Analytics and the Search Console, as well as other metrics such as visibility, word length, media type, and age of the content. You use keyword research for the comparison. See if the existing content is helpful for your most important keywords – you should keep this content.
Identify content formats
The next step is to think about suitable formats. As a rule, you can distinguish between four types of content:
- Informative content
- Product-oriented content
- Social Content
- Other Content
It is best to assign your formats to precisely these types – this way, everything remains transparent. Incidentally, it doesn’t matter what content you will later write specifically. In this content strategy step, you only think about what is possible and what you want. Do you want more informative content because you have much in-house knowledge? Or do you want to reach out on social media through creative and viral content?
The decision-making process could look like this: Do you want to publish informative content to improve your expert status? Appropriate formats would be guidebooks, how-to videos, eBooks, and studies. On the other hand, is it important to you to write content related to your products because you keep getting customer feedback that the products could be easier to understand? Then you think about formats such as product demos, FAQs, and use cases for your products.
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