Craft a content strategy with these five questions

Craft a content strategy with these five questions

If you’ve been reading our blog up until now, you’ll have seen a lot about content marketing, content measurement and customer insight through content, but not a lot about devising strategy.

Whether you’re a seasoned content marketer or a first-timer, it’s always useful to go back to basics and establish first principles for a measurable and engaging content marketing program. To do this you need a content strategy.

A content strategy provides the foundation upon which you can apply your ever-changing marketing objectives. By going through these five questions, you should be able to formulate a rock solid content strategy:

1. WHAT ARE YOUR BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

The first step to developing content strategy is to work out what you’re trying to achieve.

Your objectives may fall under one or more of these categories:

• Improve customer engagement – Objectives designed to help you connect more effectively with your customers.


• Increase number of conversions – Objectives designed to drive your customers to a business metric (a sale, a download, a sign-up, etc)


• Operational Efficiency – Objectives designed to address things like cost or sales effectiveness.

2. WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE OR IDEAL CUSTOMER?

The next step is to consider your audience.

To meet your objectives, think about who you need to reach: Is it all customers or a specific subset? How much do you know about these people?

It helps to create a profile so you understand your target’s motivations and needs. Here are some useful data-points to consider when building a customer/audience profile:

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  Demographics – What are your audience’s age, income level, education and cultural background? These can influence your messages and choice of device.

  
  


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  Purchase history – What have your customers bought historically? What can you infer about their lifestyle needs and interests from these purchases?

  
  


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  Social data – What is your audience talking about online?

  
  

We ultimately recommend using insight derived from your audience’s content consumption to inform your content strategy, but as a place to start demographic data, purchase history and social data are excellent sources.

3) WHAT TYPES OF CONTENT WILL YOU USE?

Whilst it’s probably too early in the process to develop actual content (unless you’re reading this retroactively having already started a content marketing program!), knowing what type of assets are available is important because it will impact what technology you use to support your content strategy.

The building blocks of digital content are images, video and text. However, don’t get too comfortable thinking you can get away with a weekly blog and a few youtube videos – there are at least 101 types of content you can choose from!

4) HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT TIMING

The idea of “timing” can apply to many aspects of content marketing, this might include content length, message timing and update frequency:

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  Length of content – We’re in the ‘Age of Distraction’; consumers are time-poor, attention-short and increasingly busy. To that effect, think about the different times your audience might consume your content (at the office, during a lunchbreak, at home, on the train?) and make sure different content assets are available to meet these contexts.

  
  


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  Message timing – Another consideration is time of day and/or day of the week. If your customers shop differently or purchase different products based on specific days or time periods, you may want to consider automating your content marketing to deliver messages during precise time or day slots.

  
  


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  Update frequency – How often you update your content will depend on your objectives and audience. If you are intending to personalize the content on your site or in marketing communications, content will change as the data changes.

  
  

5) HOW WILL YOU MEASURE THE IMPACT OF YOUR CONTENT?

Measurement is important for two reasons. Firstly, it helps you demonstrate success, which is typically needed to secure ongoing funding for your content marketing initiative. Secondly, it helps understand which content is resonating and which content needs refining to improve future digital initiatives.

Depending on your objectives, your measurements may be quantitative or qualitative:

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  Quantitative Measurement – Measuring return on investment is typically used with business objectives related to operational efficiency, because there are cost savings or increased sales involved. Not only do you measure if the objective was met, such as increased sales lift, you also measure the return on your investment over a specific time period.

  
  


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  Qualitative Measurement – This might entail measuring against non-commercial objectives, enabling you to prove campaign impact when it’s not possible or feasible to tie it directly to sales. This might be through showing how content marketing increased brand awareness, improving your NET promoter score, retaining loyalty program members, or increasing social media engagement.

  
  

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll be well placed to get cracking with your content marketing.

It’s also helpful to remember that once you have your initial content marketing program underway, you can use Content Intelligence to learn from your audience’s content consumption and optimize your content strategy accordingly.

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