WHY YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS A CONTENT STRATEGY
A content strategy involves the creation, distribution and management of free information. This free content has many goals. It is used for marketing, branding, and positioning a company. Content strategy is an effective practice for improving a company?s sales and increasing its market share. While most entrepreneurs and executive invest good money in the design of the websites, many won?t do the same for the content of those websites. This is a mistake.
All companies that want to accomplish their business goals need to devise a comprehensive content strategy. Ultimately, a content strategy is a way to communicate with your target market.
What is a Content Strategy?
Simply put, a content strategy is a plan for the development and publication of useful and free information. This information is geared towards a company?s target audience or buyer. A good content strategy helps a company to achieve its various goals. Business executives and owners have to keep in mind that a content strategy involves more than just the copy on the website. Content is everything your company creates to communicate with people. The various types of content ? blog posts, articles, press releases, tweets, videos, ebooks, white papers, case studies, web pages, newsletters, auto-responders and sales literature ? can all be useful parts of a content strategy.
Why You Need a Content Strategy?
Content strategy helps you to achieve business objectives using the wide range of content types at your disposal. While planning a content strategy, you force yourself to think about what you want the company to accomplish. For all companies the goal is to sell more products or services, but other goals include lead generation, customer retention, training customers to use the products, collecting names and email addresses for list building, introducing customers to related products and services for upselling, or informing customers about transactions and refund policies. A content strategy helps you see the bigger picture while providing step-by-step guidance. As the content strategy starts to take shape, you have a better understanding of how all the content you use works together to create sales and repeat buyers.
How to Create a Content Strategy?
When creating a content strategy, you need to look at all of your company?s content through all channels. This means websites, blogs, social media sites, video and all printed materials. By looking over all this content, you can determine what changes need to be made. Some content may be outdated or irrelevant to your target audience. Articles or web pages may need better SEO techniques, while other content is redundant or needs revision. The content you want for you company is fresh, inviting and informative.
By analyzing the content you already use, you discover where there are problems. The next step is to create a company style guideline. The guideline makes certain that any and all future content you develop is consistent in tone, voice, style, SEO and message.
The analysis of the content also helps you determine what methods offer the best results. You need to consider the company goals and the needs of the customers when creating content. The best way to do this is to have a comprehensive understanding of who you customers are, why they buy, and what they want. With this vital information, you can create a strategy using channels that your customers will actually want such as online video or blog posts.
As you create the strategy, you also think about who will create the content. Will you use employees or hire independent contractors? Who will over see the content creation? How much content do you want or need each week or month? What is the budget for creating and distributing the content? Once you decide on the type of content you want, you then have to see if there is a way to have a daily blog post or a video that is cost-effective. If you need to hire a production company to create a video, you first must determine if it is worth the cost and if your customers like to watch videos. As you answer these questions, the content strategy starts to take form. A schedule also helps you decide when content needs to be created or published. Ongoing new content is important for every company.
The Components of Content
Each piece of content you use for the content strategy has a few jobs to do. These jobs include the following:
1, Purpose
Each piece of content has to have a purpose, a reason for existing. Before anything is created, you need to know what you hope to accomplish with the content. Will a tweet announce a sale? Will an article educate customers on the new improvements to a product?
?2. Core Messages
Many companies have core messages or a mission statement that defines the company. Companies get these messages across to customers through the content. It is a good idea to integrate one or more core messages into all the content.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Every page, articles, tweet or blog post has to employ SEO techniques. This includes metadata and relevant keywords. With proper SEO, your target audience finds the content on the Internet.
4. Features and Benefits
With most content you want to talk about the product or service. The features are what a product does or has while the benefits describe how these features make your customers? lives easier or better by saving time or energy.
A Five-Step Plan
When it comes to creating a content strategy for your company, there are five steps you need to be aware of. The first step is to review all the content your company produces. Once you know what content you need, you then have to create new content or review old content. The third is to publish the content either online and/or off-line. The next step is to manage the content using a content management system or CMS. The final step is to analyze all the content. Web analytics tools and programs tell you how well the content is doing, based on the number of unique visitors, bounce rates and other criteria.
Conclusion
A content strategy creates a blueprint for creating valuable free information on a regular basis that keeps customers engaged. Once you have a strategy in place, never put content on your site or on the Internet and forget about it. For your company to stay current, you need original or updated content to keep visitors and customers coming back to the website. A content strategy creates an organized approach for creating content designed to sell. After all, selling is what your business is all about.
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Source: http://www.name.com/blog/contentmarketing/2012/12/why-your-business-needs-a-content-strategy/
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