An Initial Guide to Content Marketing. How To Create A Compelling Content Strategy?

Now that you know what content marketing is and how it helps growing your business in so many tangible and intangible ways, that’s the time you learn the ways of crafting a compelling content strategy. To help you learn that, I’ve added this blogpost explaining content strategy in detail in this initial guide to content writing.

Dive in to burst your curiosity.

What Is Content Strategy?

The two terms i.e. content strategy and content marketing are often interchanged and are considered as synonyms. However, this isn’t the truth. There is a great difference between them and that needs to be understood before you steadily catch up with content marketing. Content marketing is what you do while content strategy is how you do it. This is the difference. While content marketing includes the curation of blog posts, social media calendars, ad copies, etc., content strategy is the determination of what audience your blog posts, social media calendars, and ad copies would target, what goals and visions they aim to achieve, and what are the expected outcomes in the end.

Content strategy is all about the insiders like for how and why your content is being curated, what are the visions and missions associated with. While content marketing is all about the actual curation and execution of your content strategy.

For instance. You run a makeup website Your content strategist determines that your customers are losing the trust in your brand. It would be the responsibility of the content marketer to come up with an idea to build the trust again, such as posting an interview of your CEO sharing his struggles throughout the journey.

To create a content strategy, you first need to know where your content stands at the moment.

First, Know Your Audience.

Outline what people you are targeting and make an update according to the recent trends. For instance, the targeted potential audience for your makeup brand is women aged between 25 to 40. With a change in recent trends, girls below 25 are also likely to use makeup. Thus, you can make an update here. Shift your audience range to 25 till 40. Also, you can add men in your demographics and introduce some makeup products for men.

Now Is the Time to Audit and Evaluate Your Existing Content.

Dugout everything you have been posting for all the while. Organize it in different categories. You can do that based on –

Length.

Shorter, lengthier, mediocre. Also, note that which of your content gets more engagement.

Tone.

Is it professional? Funny, sarcastic, to the point, cheesy or filled with jargon, etc. Make sure to evaluate which of them gets more engagement.

Relevance.

Make a scale of relevancy as a high, low, medium. Now add the content with most relevancy to your business, defining your products and services into the scale of high and put others respectively.

Datedness.

Make a scale from evergreen to dead and something in between. Put the content that’s most likely to stay for all the years under evergreen and others respectively.

Features.

Now categorize your content based on their featuring medium. Are these videos, imageries, infographics, or blog posts, etc. Also, evaluate which of these featuring mediums get the most engagement.

As each of your content features has been audited now, you can easily put up with a brand-new content strategy while keeping in mind the current trends. You will have to pinpoint the following aspects for a new content strategy. 

• Your new and updated potential audience
• Your vision and mission i.e. what kind of engagement you aim to have at the end of the campaign.
• Length of your content (you can determine an average best length after evaluating the engagement levels with each different length of content you have shared before)
• The tone of your content (same as above, however, it is best to use a persuasive yet flexible tool for content marketing as it sounds friendly and easily engages the audience)
• Relevance (same as above, however, it is always good to share content that fully reciprocates with your business but to avoid including a sales pitch in your content).
• Put out the old content from the evergreen list in front so that it can be reshared after the required modifications.

Once you are done with creating a compelling content strategy, learn further steps of content marketing in the next blog.

ReadMore: Essential Marketing Trends on Social Media Content during COVID-19