Optimize Your Content Strategy to Accomplish More with Less
The content strategy is a comprehensive set of plans, from identifying your goals, to the step-by-step guide to accomplish the goals and the metrics you will use to benchmark results. Along the way this will also include data and research that will enable you take better decisions.
Setting Goals
The foundation of a good content marketing strategy is having well-defined goals. Without setting goals, it will be very difficult to come up with actionable steps and a clear direction for your strategy. Further, the assessment of any tactics or tools used will be too vague to extract insights.
Do not give in to the temptation to aim for everything. Sometimes less is more, and in this case having a focus on a set of goals will channel all your efforts into reaching them. Spreading your efforts will fail to create significant impact for your audience. It’s best to choose up to 3 goals and reach them, before switching your focus.
Here is a list of common goals you might choose to include in your top three.
- Improve brand awareness.
- Establish your brand or introduce a new product.
- Nurture your current following.
- Re-engage a cold audience.
- Acquire more customers.
- Grow your network of affiliates.
- Increase the average value or lifetime value of a customer.
- Increase repeat sales from previous customers.
- Expand into new markets or products.
- Increase press mentions or referral traffic.
- Recruit better talent.
- Identify new trends for customer needs.
Content Types
The internet offers plenty of possibilities to create content. With social media and technology improvement, there is a wide spectrum of types of content to choose from. What your business chooses depends on available resources, the type of the product and who is your target audience. The popular content types are:
- Blog posts on your website
- Social media posts
- Videos
- Email newsletters
- Podcasts
- White papers or reports
- Infographics/images
- Webinars Live streaming
Often you will see companies invest resources in several of these and re-purposing the same content for different places with the aim to reach a larger audience. Just like with the goal setting, less is more, at least in the beginning. It’s better to identify what channel might be more responsive to your content and gain traction there. With some inertia, you can consider moving to all of the content mediums you have identified as appropriate for your business activity.
Another practical tip is to create a publishing schedule and keep up with it. Having distinct and consistent content will boost your brand perception in the eyes of your audience and the search engines.
It is easier to focus on a narrower set of objectives and find an inflection point, rather than thinning your efforts into everything. Use a leaner approach in the beginning to get a foothold and from then on
