Content marketing has become a necessary aspect of every brand’s marketing strategy, from the world’s most valuable brands to your local coffee shop.
Content marketing is essential because it helps you cut through the noise and build customer loyalty. When you continuously publish engaging, authentic, and cohesive content, it’ll help establish your brand more and more. You want to identify your uniqueness and ensure you communicate that to your consumers. But while content is essential, having a solid content strategy is even more vital.
What is a Content Strategy?
Content marketing is the content you put out, but your strategy is the blueprint that helps you get from the ideas phase to execution.
When you’re thinking about devising a strategy, you want to consider things such as:
- What audience do we want to speak to?
- What is the reason/purpose behind creating this content?
- What do we want to achieve by publishing this content?
- What are the key themes we want to address?
- What design styles will we use to ensure brand consistency?
- What channels will we use to publish content?
- What content will we create (blogs, social media posts, press releases, videos, podcasts, etc.)?
- How often will we be publishing content?
- Who is in charge of creating content?
While this may seem like a lot, answering these questions will help you understand the kind of content you want to create and a road map for how to get there.
Why Do I Need a Content Strategy?
Simply put, a content strategy helps you plan with your goals in mind so that the content you create is always aligned with your brand and its mission.
Without a content strategy, you’ll likely be producing disjointed, random content that probably focuses on trends rather than evergreen content. However, when you outline your goals, it allows you to come one step closer to reaching them with each piece of content you create.
On the other hand, you can often waste your time and go backwards in building brand loyalty without a clear mission. For example, you could be creating content for the wrong demographic or publishing content on the wrong platforms.
But, when you have a clear strategy, you can focus on creating content that only supports your goals.
A content strategy also helps you be cost-effective. Publishing content with no plan in mind is a shot in the dark because you don’t know what works or have an idea of your goals.
A content strategy helps you focus on the bigger picture and prevents you from getting caught up in content ideas that don’t support your mission.
Lastly, it would help if you had a content strategy because it’s exceptionally effective at conversions. When you know who your target audience is, the best ways to reach them, the key themes you know are effective, and more, you’ll be able to produce content that consistently converts.
The best part is that the more and more content you create, the better you’ll understand what works and what doesn’t, which will only strengthen your content strategy for the future.
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Email: catherine@catherinenikkel.com
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Catherine Nikkel is a content creator, ghostwriter and the founder of Mindful Media. She specializes in helping CEOs, entrepreneurs and influencers create copy that engages and converts. Her work has appeared in Forbes, Huffington Post, Yahoo!, Authority Magazine, FemFounder and more.
