What is content strategy?

A content strategy is a plan in which you use content (audio, visual, and/or written) to achieve your business goals. A successful content strategy will attract your target audience at every stage of the funnel and keep them engaged even after a purchase. Whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve been using the same approach for a while, it never hurts to revisit your content strategy plan and make sure it’s up-to-date, innovative, and engaging for your prospects and customers – no matter when or how they intend to buy.

How to Create a Content Strategy Framework

1. Define your goal.

What’s your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan? Know your goals before you begin planning, and you’ll have an easier time determining what’s best for your strategy.

2. Conduct persona research.

To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content’s target audience — also known as your buyer persona. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content that they’ll want to read and convert on.

If you’re an experienced marketer, your target may have changed. Do you want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target audience? Revisiting your audience parameters by conducting market research each year is crucial to growing your audience.

3. Run a content audit.

Early on, most brands start with blog posts. If you want to venture out into different formats, you can run a content audit to assess your top-performing and lowest-performing content. Then, use that information to inform which direction you take next. 

If you’ve been in business for a while, you should review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year. Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals. Now is a great time to align your team’s goals with the rest of your organization’s goals.

Whatever stage you’re in, a content audit will help you determine what resonates best with your audience, identify gaps in your topic clusters, and brainstorm fresh content ideas.

4. Choose a content management system.

A few vital parts of content management include content creation, content publication, and content analytics. You want to invest in a CMS to create, manage, and track your content in an easy and sustainable way.

5. Determine which type of content you want to create.

There are a variety of options out there for content you can create, from written content like ebooks and blog posts to audio content like podcasts.

6. Brainstorm content ideas.

Now, it’s time to start coming up with ideas for your next content project. Here are some tools to get the juices flowing.

  • Feedly – The Feedly RSS feed is a wonderful way to track trendy topics in your industry and find content ideas at the same time.
  • BuzzSumo – This company offers a number of market research tools, one of which uses social media shares to determine if a piece of content is popular and well-liked.
  • BlogAbout – Get your mind gears going with IMPACT’s blog title generator. This tool shows you common headline formats with blanks where you can fill in the subject you have in mind.
  • CoSchedule Headline Analyzer – This tool analyzes headlines and titles and provides feedback on length, word choice, grammar, and keyword search volume.
  • HubSpot’s Website Grader – This is a great tool to use when you want to see where you’re at with your website and SEO efforts. With this tool, you can figure out how to make your website more SEO-friendly and discover areas of improvement.

7. Publish and manage your content.

Your marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you’ll create – it should also cover you’ll organize your content.

With the help of an editorial calendar, you’ll be on the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website. Then, create a social media content calendar to promote and manage your content on other sites.

Want to learn more about content marketing? Visit the Hub Spot website for more tools and download their Content Marketing Workbook. 

Source: Hub Spot