Developing a Content Strategy: Key Steps for Effective Planning

Content strategy focuses on content management pre-and post-publication. It ensures that each piece of content serves a purpose and meets your audience’s needs. Your content strategy should include creating detailed whitepapers, insightful blog posts, and LinkedIn content to showcase your expertise.

Conversely, a content marketing strategy is the process that focuses on using content specifically for marketing purposes (attract, engage, and retain the audience). Content strategy and content marketing strategy are often exchanged but are different. To create a content marketing strategy as a thought leader, you must produce SEO-optimized blog content to drive more organic search traffic to your site.

Indeed, content strategy directs your content marketing, so it is imperative. Want to know how to create a content strategy to achieve your business goals? Read until the end.

Understanding Your Target Audience

First, you need to develop means to understand your target audience and apply your knowledge of them to your content strategy. Every business has different reasons for studying its audience. 

But, in this case, you want to develop a content strategy to segment your audience, personalize content, create relevant content, connect with your audience, and get feedback. In the following lines, you will see how to create a buyer persona for your customers.

Conducting Audience Research

The first step is to research your audience, and there are several ways to do so. You can go through the traditional method of audience research, which is a mix of quantitative (surveys, analytics) and qualitative (interviews, focus groups) methods, or you can use any available social media content for social listening.

We have reached an age where almost any topic is being discussed online, meaning your potential customers have spoken about products similar to yours online. Look through Reddit, Quora, and even X (formerly Twitter) or conversations related to your niche and industry.

Understanding Customer Reviews Psychographics

What have your past customers said about your products or services? To create a successful content marketing plan, you need to be aware of your reviews, improve your offerings, and give your customers the type of content they want. 

If you are starting, you can look at reviews of your competitors to know what you should improve or leave out. Customers value good customer service, so you need to build a solution that helps them manage their customers’ feedback.

Building Buyer Personas

Researching is quite the most challenging part; it is the most boring for some. But now it’s time to build your buyer’s persona with the information you have gathered. A buyer persona is essential and effective because it gives you a close description of your target audience and helps you segment them if you target more than one group. 

Buyer personas can be drawn with different groupings like geography, demographics, pain points, goals, and psychographics. For example, if you are a real estate agent at Yaba, you will primarily target those located in Yaba or looking to move there. 

There, your segmentation is by geographical location. With the buyer persona, you can answer their age, occupation, location, education, gender, interest, daily activities, biggest challenges, and what makes them happy.

Once you can identify your buyer persona, you have what you need to create a good digital marketing strategy for growth. However, you should always come back to your buyer persona and modify it if you find a bigger pain point or challenge your customers are facing that you missed.

Buyer Persona
Person Name	Gwen Finery
Background(Job? Career path?)	Small business ownerUndergraduateSix-figure monthly businessLooking to expand reach
Demographics(Male or Female? Age? Income? Location?)	FemaleAge 20 -27Akoka
Identifiers	Is ambitious but does not have enough time to grow businessHas an assistant to handle business operation

Defining Your Brand Voice and Messaging

Your broad voice is the distinct personality trait that can help you stand out and communicate with your audience across different channels. Your voice is who you are and what you stand for. Think of how you eat, walk, talk, shake hands, and behave daily. 

That is who you are; only you can do it that way. So, tying that to your brand, your voice determines how your audience will see you. It combines what you say and how you say it (tone, style, and messaging).

The following are the remaining steps to defining your brand voice:

• Review Your Mission Statement: Your mission can help shape your brand voice. You cannot help others succeed and your brand voice is razz or sexy. It just doesn’t work. Find words that best describe your brand and use related words to sharpen your messaging.
  
• Audit Your Current Content & Messaging: You may not get your brand voice right at first, but going through your website, blog posts, social media posts, and print materials, you will find recurring themes that can help define your voice and messaging for good. Each piece of content you put out will determine not only your brand voice but the success of your content marketing.
  
• We’re This, Not That: To understand your brand, you must remove elements of negation by writing out what your brand isn’t. For example, we are confident and not rude; we are an e-commerce store, not a marketplace, and a tech company but not inventors.
  
• Choose your voice: Select three or four of your most predominant traits to decide your voice. To simplify things, the table below should serve as a template for selecting your voice.

Finding your voice in the world with so much noise is essential. Consider factors like the message, style, language, or audience segment when deciding your voice. It’s your true authentic self; it’s up to you to define it—remember to share your brand voice document with your content team.

Brand Voice Trait	Description	Do	Don’ts
Confident	We want our copy to be unafraid and command action.	Give directions without mincing words	Rude or bully
Helpful	We genuinely want to help people	Reassure customers when they ace an issue	Sound overly polite
Witty	We want to add a touch of friendliness and personalization to our copy	Add humor to our copy but with care	Use too many jokes

Conducting a Content Audit of Your Existing Assets

A content audit is essential in developing a successful content strategy for your brand. At this stage, you are revising each piece of content assets to see how they have performed. It helps you understand what works and what should be discarded.

You can also find it if it aligns with your current goals:

• Start by gathering all your content in a single document ( you can use their links).
  
• Categorize it into channels like blog sections, social media posts, YouTube videos, etc.
  
• Assess based on the metrics in each channel. Use metrics like traffic, engagement, conversion rates, and SEO performance.

The content audit phase comes with surprises. A post you thought could not bring in traffic may top a performing post. You should keep your mind open when identifying high-performing content, underperforming content that needs optimization, and content gaps that create new opportunities.

Defining Your Content Goals and Objectives

Your content is the pillar of your content strategy, so you should define clear, measurable goals and objectives in order to be successful. For your content to perform well, outline your content goals and ensure they align with your marketing and business goals, i.e., brand awareness, generating leads, driving conversions, or improving customer loyalty.

A specific content objective could be to:

• Increasing your traffic by 90%.
• Bringing each piece of content at least 5% of the traffic.
• Achieving a particular number of downloads for a new e-book.
• Increasing engagement on social media by 1000%. 

Well-defined goals will help you create focused content that resonates with your target audience for increased conversion. Overall, a piece of content should have its own goal but, more importantly, lay out the steps to achieve them.

Identifying Content Topics and Themes

Since you know your audience better, crafting your content topics and themes should not be difficult. You understand your audience’s interests, pain points, and questions, so create different types of content to address them. Tie in your offering to show your audience that you understand them and even have a solution. To have steady topics, you should have content pillars. 

Content pillars are the backbone of your content, and each falls under a category. For example, The Bosses’ Kilishi’s content pillar is viral, engaging, informative, interactive, and promotional. You can also make yours like this or choose based on your brand. 

Use keyword research, social media listening, and competitor analysis to uncover popular, trendy, and relevant topics. The aim is to establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry by consistently providing valuable and insightful content that meets your audience’s needs and interests.

Developing a Content Calendar and Schedule

Planning a content calendar will be difficult if you have missed all the previous steps. Your content calendar is a strategic tool that helps plan, organize, and schedule your content publication across different platforms. It ensures your content flow is constant, deadlines to content production, and helps manage your content team’s workload. 

A good content calendar includes details like the topic, content format, explanation, target audience, responsible team member, and publication date. This helps maintain a steady stream of content and align content with seasonal trends, marketing campaigns, and business goals.

Creating a Content Distribution Plan

Your content will only reach your target audience with a well-thought-out distribution plan. That’s where content strategy comes in. It should outline where and how you will share your content, whether through your website, email newsletters, social media, or third-party sites. 

Choosing the channels your audience is most active on is essential to maximize reach and engagement. Initially, your content distribution plan should be part of the content plan. On the content plan, you will decide the different formats your content might need to be adapted into for each channel. A robust distribution plan will boost your visibility and drive traffic back to your site.

Deciding on Content Formats and Types

Your choice of formats and types of content is essential, but trying all the different formats is not a bad idea. However, if you’re starting, it is best to focus your efforts on creating the content format that is most well-received by your audience and industry.

Your audience may prefer to read long-form articles, have short attention spans, like straightforward content, or watch videos. However, it is more complicated to decide this because each person likes different things. Some people don’t know what they want until you present it, so trying other content formats is excellent. 

The diverse content types, such as blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts, and social media posts, cater to different preferences and stages of the buyer’s journey. For instance, blogs are great for SEO and providing in-depth information, while videos can be more engaging and shareable. The decision on content formats should be based on your audience’s consumption habits, the nature of the message, and your content objectives.

Determining Your Content Promotion Tactics

Many people mistake content distribution for content promotion. Both aren’t the same. They may be intertwined, but they are two separate terms. One involves only publishing content, while the other involves actively pushing your content so that more people will see it. 

For example, posting an article under the Blog Post section of your website and on Twitter is content distribution. At the same time, strategies like giveaways and ads promote your content. 

Some tactics for promotion can include the following:

• Organic methods like SEO and social media sharing;
• Paid advertising (e.g., PPC, social media ads);
• Email marketing;
• Using influencer marketing.

The right mix of promotion tactics depends on your content goals, target audience, and budget. Effective promotion can increase content visibility and drive engagement, website traffic, and conversions.

Assigning Roles and Responsibilities for Content Creation and Distribution

A successful content strategy requires a team with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. This includes content creators (writers, videographers), editors, SEO specialists, social media managers, and analytics experts. Again, the content plan should consist of who does what. 

It’s about assigning specific tasks to ensure efficiency and accountability, whether creating content, optimizing it for search engines, distributing it across channels, or measuring its performance. 

Regular team meetings will keep everyone aligned with the important goals, facilitate collaboration, and ensure a cohesive content output. Members should also be able to ask questions and make suggestions.

Setting Content Performance Metrics and Measuring Success

Is a content strategy effective? How do you know your content strategy has been working without measuring metrics? Just like you have KPIs for your business, you should have one for your content, such as website traffic, engagement rates, lead generation, conversion rates, and social shares.

You had set a content goal earlier. Now, it is time to measure them. Tracking these metrics lets you know how you have been performing and improve accordingly.

You can gain insights into your performance even on a tight budget through tools like Google Analytics, website analytics, and content management systems. Continuously measuring and analyzing your content metric helps optimize your strategy for better results.

Incorporating SEO Best Practices into Your Content Strategy

Nowadays, it’s not only search engines that use SEO. Social media sites like Pinterest and Instagram now use SEO to run their content. Therefore, keyword optimization has become more critical than ever, leaving millions competing for the top spot. For search engines like Google, you should include relevant keywords in your content’s headings, titles, and meta descriptions.

Also, ensure your site is responsive and has fast loading times. These two are essential in keeping visitors on your page. Remember, use schema markup to help search engines understand your content better. 

At the center of SEO is quality content; always provide valuable content, and use internal linking within your content to make customers spend a longer time on your site and increase your chances for rankings. 

Social media platforms like Instagram now allow businesses to tank for keywords. Therefore, including the correct keyword on your profile and content will help you get found faster. Using location tags and relevant categories will also go a long way.

Staying Up-to-date with Content Marketing Trends and Best Practices

Staying updated with SEO trends and algorithm updates is the top tier because search engine optimization constantly evolves. Implementing these best practices will improve your content’s visibility, drive organic traffic, and contribute to achieving your content strategy objectives.

On the one hand, content strategy determines how your content is, and on the other hand, content marketing determines how many people will see your content. Content marketing remains a dynamic space where content creators and marketers have upped their games so much that poor-quality videos and poorly written articles are a big turn-off. So it is important you have a system for staying up-to-date and remaining competitive.

A few methods for staying up to date with content marketing include:

• Reading the latest blogs.
  
• Spending some hours researching Instagram videos.
  
• Keeping up with emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, is now shaping content creation and distribution.
  
• Attend webinars and conferences and participate in professional networks to discuss the latest topics.

Content marketing significantly shifted from only blog posts to blog posts, social media content, and video posts. Users went from watching straight-to-the-point and slightly engaging videos to dynamic videos with action every few seconds.

To keep up with trends, you should watch top-performing content. Some blog posts even include the number of views, likes, and comments their posts get to show their relevance and encourage the newcomer to concentrate when reading. Blog posts also have the share icon, where readers can share anything that caught their attention on social media.