N O T E: T H I S I S S A M P L E C O N T E N T
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Content Strategy
According to the Content Marketing Institute 35% of marketers who have a documented content strategy are more effective in all aspects of content marketing than those who have not. Five essential elements of content strategy are:
Goals: why are you producing content?
Having clear goals is crucial to produce content that will generate business result, as they impact every aspect of your content production cycle. Goals help your organization attract new visitors to move content leads into customers and most importantly establish brand awareness. Goals must be trackable and measurable. Multimedia is a great way to attract visitors, but products like ebooks are best suited for turning readers into leads and moving them into a customer realm. Ensuring AU has designed a call to action for critical goal that make connections with other content pieces in your library is key to achieving a particular goal. Core Messages: what is your content about?
Ideally core message should be a unique statement that embeds the essence of your business and sets you apart from your competitors. This is something that will have to find its way into every piece of content pushed out–from AU’s homepage tagline to the welcome email you send to a new students or employees. The reason? There’s a lot of noise out there and the only way to get mindshare is delivering a clear and consistent message to your audience, no matter the channel, the subject and the type of content you are producing. Core messing should be embedded in between the lies, subtle but strong aligning with a central theme. Identify Audience: who are you producing content for?
This can’t be stressed enough: content strategies should not be about bragging on your product, but about knowing your users and solving their problems. Once the company messaging is aligned, you will need to clearly identify your audience. Your audience identification will define the way you communicate, including the tone and language (technical, professional, friendly, etc.), and will affect the distribution channels and content types you wind up using. For this purpose, one of the most effective methods comes from the combination of audience identification and customer’s journey framework. The journey varies from company to company, but it’s possible to identify 3 mains stages:
Audience identification and journey are something you’ll always need to be updating and refining and being directly in touch with your customers, is the most effective way you can collect reliable information about them and their journey.
Content Production: how are your producing content?
Based on the elements talked about above (Goals > Core message > Audience Identification), you can decide what content you want to produce, and assign a specific goal to each content type.
Production is where the rubber meets the road.
Deciding on content types takes patience and testing. While graphics and blog posts generate new traffic ebooks are an effective way to collect visitor’s information and help them take the next step in the journey. It should not be a shock that all of this production needs a team, priority schedules and workflows to make it successful. Capturing all of this requires tools that everyone can be comfortable with and transverse all skill and knowledge levels.
Distribution: how will you reach your audience?
50% of randomly selected posts received 8 shares or less 75% of these posts received 39 shares or less 75% of these posts achieved zero referring domain links
Why is this happening?
Content is not relevant: brands publish content that doesn’t resonate with their target audience, which results in partial or total lack of engagement.
Content is not found: with more and more content being published every day, getting your content in front of your readers requires investing heavy in distribution.
Crafting detailed audience IDs will help you create relevant content. But to make sure your content gets in front of your target audience you need a distribution plan.
That’s what the last section of your strategy should be about. AU has to be all in on customer engagement. Based on your target customers reading habits (the answer to the question “what media they consume”), define:
The social channels you’ll use to distribute your content and how often you’ll post on each channel
Which influencers you’ll get in touch with to get your content re-shared (you can read more about influencer talking about for you here)
Which formats (slides, infographics, and videos) you’ll use to repurpose your content
Which paid channels will you use to drive traffic to your main pieces of content (such as ebook, guides, white papers and the likes)
Content production today is at an all-time high and the only way to stand out from the crowd is by being strategic about it. Keep in mind that you don’t need to do it all at the same time. You can build and perfect a great strategy over time: start producing and creating processes and frameworks that work for you along the way.