What is meant by Content Strategy?
Having a solid content strategy is an important part of any effective digital marketing plan. So what are examples of content strategies? To start, let’s consider what is meant by ‘content’. In the simplest sense, content refers to the subject matter of online material, including videos, blogs, social media posts and articles. Therefore, a content strategy is the process for determining the role content will play in achieving your digital marketing goals.
The ‘value exchange’
As people are bombarded by thousands of messages online, daily, it’s extremely hard to stand out – to have your brand, product, or offer get noticed. It comes down to attention. Capturing and maintaining someone’s attention online is more difficult than ever. To do so, people need to be rewarded for their attention. This is the value exchange.
Examples include brands you follow in social media. The more successful brands gain large numbers of followers that are more engaged (through likes, shares, and comments) because they publish content their customers enjoy. The content may be things that make you laugh, that entertain you, inform you or make you feel good about yourself. And, in among that enjoyable content may be occasional offers or new products to check out.
Other examples include companies that publish blogs on topics that interest their audience. In fact, you’re reading this blog because you found it either on the CM2 Media website or one of our social channels and you saw potential value in learning more about what a strategy is and what it might be able to do for you. If you find the article helpful and learn something from it, you may think CM2 Media knows their stuff and be willing to consider hiring them or recommending them to others. That’s the value exchange. (Marshall McLuhan would be proud).
Considerations in determining your strategy
Determining the approach you take to developing a strategy involves a few basic steps:
- Define your goals. – Are you looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, convert users, change perceptions or improve search ranking results? Once you have clearly defined your goals, you need to determine if a content strategy is the right solution and, if so, what is the right type of strategy to pursue.
- Who is your target audience? – Who are the people you want to elicit a response from? What do you know about them? What kind of content or information is important to them? This is important to define the type of information your audience will find useful as well as where to publish it so they can find it
- What problem can you solve for your audience(s)? – Ideally, your product or service solves a problem your audience has. Similarly, your content should offer insights or knowledge your audience can use that relates to the category in which you work.
- What content types will you focus on? – Whether it’s a blog, a video, or an article, choose the format or content type that best suits the material you’re covering or the audience you’re addressing.
- What channels will you publish your content in? – Lastly, where will you publish the content you’ve created? Channels can include owned properties, such as your website or blog, or your social media pages, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter.
SEO considerations
An added benefit of integrating a strategy into your digital marketing activities is the impact this has on your SEO performance. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to the degree to which your website is optimized to help search engines, like Google, find you online. Regularly updated, original pieces, such as blogs and video can help improve your website’s SEO. Further, information that is published in social media that links back to your website, will also improve the search-ability of your website.
Want to learn more?
It’s difficult to overstate the potential benefits of having a solid strategy as part of your digital marketing efforts. Offering people value through information and insights they need in exchange for their interest and attention just makes sense.
If you’d like to learn more about what a strategy can do for your own marketing efforts, reach out. We love chatting ideas and welcome the opportunity to explore strategies to meet your business needs.
Follow us on Instagram or LinkedIn. We look forward to hearing from you about your strategy needs. We are located in Burlington, Ontario.