You’ve probably heard the phrase “Content is King” no doubt many times. While this is true to an extent, it needs to be clarified by another statement, namely “Content needs Context”.
Through years of training and consulting with clients at SocialB, we’ve been privileged to help many discover context for their content. Also, in doing so the content has become more effective with their audiences.
In this blog, we’ll look at how we can discover that context in developing a marketing strategy.
Contents
Align Business Goals with Content Objectives
A key context for your content should be aligning it to what your business is trying to achieve.
Sadly a lot of content is created, on websites or as social posts for example, without any relevance to the business goals of the organisation.
So what is your business currently focussed on?
- Generating awareness of your products or services?
- Positioning your brand as thought leaders within your sector or industry?
- Creating leads?
- Creating more sales?
- Building a loyal community of your customers?
Once you know what your business is currently trying to achieve, then the objectives for your content can be aligned to this and move in the same direction.
Understand Your Audiences
Your content also needs context with your audiences. When you have your content objectives aligned to business goals, understanding your audience or “who is this for?”is the next step.
Don’t be lulled into the trap that your content is for anyone and everyone. Just because huge audiences are now on digital channels, doesn’t mean that the 4.6 billion internet users or 4.2 billion active social media users are your audiences.
In fact, niching your audience down by creating personas helps you discover both who your products and services are aimed at and therefore who your content is created for.
There are loads of great tools that can help us understand our audiences and in particular where they hang out and what they are talking about. Listening on social media is also a great strategy, discovering the channels your audience is on and what they are talking about.
Tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Answer the Public, Ubersuggest and Spark Toro will give you an insight into the keywords and phrases that your audiences are using that you can then also use within your content. You can also use these tools for content ideas.
Google Search Console, once connected to your website will report on the terms people are actually making in search queries, including the number of clicks made from that search to your website.
Spark Toro is also a fantastic tool for researching other opportunities for sharing your content, namely popular podcasts, blogs and YouTube channels. These channels already have existing audiences and the channel owner could be willing to feature you, your business, products or services.
Audit your Content
It’s always worth checking to see what content you already have. Are there articles, images, infographics or videos that can be reused or further adapted for your digital content?
We recently trained with a delegate from a training company who during the course suddenly released her organisation had an extensive collection of videos captured during training sessions which could easily be repurposed for digital platforms.
Auditing your content against your plan will also reveal what needs to be created and when it’s needed for.
Create your content plan
A content plan is a vital cog in ensuring your content marketing strategy is a success. It’s a three-month roadmap of what’s going to be posted when on what digital channels, against your audiences and objectives.
You could create a simple day-by-day plan in Excel which would work however, our own Digital Marketing Strategy Template which we use with our clients is also available.
Ready, Fire, Aim,
You might be thinking I’ve got the order wrong in the heading above, but I recently heard Bidfood’s CEO Andrew Selley mention this in a presentation he was giving on business development and thought that’s a great takeaway for digital content as well.
As you develop your strategy, understand how your content aligns with business objectives, research your key audiences and create content that’s relevant to them, don’t think that your content has to be perfect. For me “Ready, Fire, Aim” is a fantastic stance to adopt, getting the best content you can create out there quickly and then adjusting the aim i.e. reviewing what worked and what didn’t, learning about the best contexts for your content.
