How To Develop A Content Strategy: A Step-by-step Guide

It considers factors such as industry, audience, and business goals. He also includes tips and advice for avoiding common pitfalls that can arise during the content strategy process. Based on your findings, identify areas for improvement and optimize your content accordingly.

Prioritize Topics

For example, at MarketMuse, we want to reach content teams, SEO teams, and digital marketers. Building a high-performing content strategy requires careful consideration of your team composition, processes, and tools. Start by assembling a diverse, skilled content team aligned with your goals and execution plan.

While no two content strategies are the same, there are unifying principles every creator can follow to start building theirs. So, try to build it with tools you like and plan with your strengths and weaknesses in mind. You should also encourage your audience to share photos, videos, or stories using your products or run social media campaigns with branded hashtags to collect UGC. But generally, to create a thought leadership-led content strategy, you should conduct original research or provide data-driven insights. Creating content is only the beginning; understanding its performance is crucial. Establish a framework to measure content performance against specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Your goal might be to get a certain percentage increase in relevant traffic from search engines. The audience could be young individuals who want to lose weight and/or stay fit. The content types may include blog posts and videos relating to workout plans and diet. Creating a set of archetypal people to represent your target customers can be a https://manta.com/c/m1x0pbq/axtora-corp very in-depth process or a basic sketch. Mike King’s comprehensive guide to personas can be of help here, as well as Kyra Kuik and Harriet Cummings’ look at audience research. You can start with basic demographic and behavioral information, but it’s important to supplement that by understanding what is going through your audience’s minds.

Audit Your Content Library

Include your content strategy in a more comprehensive marketing strategy, and it should align with your business goals. Content strategy is important because it ensures that content is created to support business goals. As stated, a content strategy shouldn’t be created in a vacuum.

Content tactics may change, but the strategy should stay the same over time. Understanding your target audience is vital because it enables you to create content that truly resonates with them and drives meaningful engagement. By knowing their pain points, interests, and content consumption habits, you can tailor your content to meet their specific needs and preferences. During the audit, analyze metrics such as page views, bounce rates, time on page, and conversion rates.

• After an audit, create your SEO topic clusters, and decide if you need net-new or to refresh existing content.
• If you have a younger audience that likes quick content, you may opt for TikTok and Instagram.
• Gaps may be obvious, where there is no content on a given subject, or they may be instances where the existing content isn’t great and there’s an opportunity to create something better.
• The following instructions offer a step-by-step guide to help you to develop your content strategy.

At the end of your campaign, quarter, and annual cycles, you can’t even evaluate your success because you never had a strategy to begin with. A good content marketing strategy doesn’t end with creating and promoting content. It’s also important to continuously measure the impact of your strategy.

Canva is a unicorn startup valued at over $3.2 billion (link). Much of that growth has been due to a stellar content strategy and search engine rankings. They get over 7 million visitors per month from organic rankings alone. Without a content development strategy, achieving any business goals you’ve decided upon will be hard.

Strategic content optimization involves adapting to these changes, refining your keyword strategy, updating information, and enhancing user experience. Moreover, it requires a platform-specific approach, tailoring content to the unique attributes and audience expectations of each channel. By incorporating a systematic optimization process into your strategy, you transform your content from static assets into agile, evolving resources.

This is especially important for those who are new to marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content that they’ll want to read and convert on. Look at high-level business goals, notes from meetings, and notes from your team, then do some solo research to make sure your goals have staying power. On a similar note, content clusters are a series of interconnected posts that target all aspects of a particular topic in detail. Topic clusters help establish brand authority and target consumers spread across multiple stages of your marketing funnel. An editorial calendar looks at the bigger picture, giving a broad overview of the themes your content should cover within a specific time period.

But the onus is creating comprehensive, credible, high-quality content. Strategy leads to execution – or the beginning of the content lifecycle. Create your editorial calendar based on seasonality, product releases, and campaigns.

Then, view any of your competitors’ latest content in detail by clicking one of their domains under the relevant content type. Getting a thorough understanding of who your audience is (backgrounds, desires, etc.) helps you determine what content to create and where it should live. Once you’ve got a strong foundation, a great next step is to watch some of our content strategy, SEO, and AI-focused webinars to get some tactical tips. Now that you understand what content strategy is and what it needs to accomplish, you’re probably wondering how to put it into practice.