Launching a new brand or growing an existing one? First, learn how to create a content strategy that sets you up for success!
Last week’s ‘We Love What You Do’ looked at how our friends at Creag Dhu launched their new Scotch whisky brand. If you haven’t already, we strongly recommend you go and take a look – the visuals of their Cairngorms-based distillery are INCREDIBLE! Speaking to Chris got us thinking, whether you are working to launch a new brand or trying to inject some life into one that has been around forever – how do you create a content strategy that gets your brand’s product or service in front of the right people?
We have run through some of the key stages to give you a bit of a head start.
ENSURE YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY IS ROOTED IN INSIGHT.
Creating a content strategy that is strong enough to perform well begins with solid insight. As well as knowing what you want your campaign to achieve, you need to know who it is going to target. Developing a clear understanding of who your target customers are is critical to how successful your campaign will be. With the average campaign costs running into the thousands, this is something you do not want to gloss over!
So what is essential to know about your customer when creating a content strategy? Well, there are two areas you will want to look into, their demographics and psychographics.
Demographics include how old they are, where they live, what their gender is, and how much they earn. If you are *really* digging into detail, you might include information on your audiences occupation, education level, or marital status. There is a watch out here, though. Try and avoid over-targeting. Relevance is key to understanding what you should and should not use when targeting audiences.
Secondly, psychographics includes personality traits, values, interests and beliefs. These details start to tell the story of your target customer’s and might include things like:
- Enjoys gathering their friends together for nights out.
- Prefers to save their money rather than spend it.
- Likes to go to the gym but struggles to find the time.
- Prioritises time with the family over career progression.
Knowing these details will inform the shape your output takes and the targeting you set when planning supporting advertising.
DIVERSIFY YOUR CHANNEL STRATEGY.
Once you have defined who you are targeting, you will be in a great position to know where to reach them. At this stage, you will need to choose where your creative is going to launch.
If you are launching a new product or developing an existing one, you might find that you need to break away from where you traditionally post content or take out ads. Make sure you know where your audience exists, and don’t be afraid to switch things up once in a while if you are growing into new territories or audiences.
It always helps if you consider how you want to diversify your approach across channels simultaneously upfront. Your creative team can adapt assets across target channels upfront by planning ahead, making delivery a breeze!
INVEST IN YOUR VIDEO PRODUCTION.
Here is where we get to the exciting part. But we would say that! Your creative is where you have the opportunity to strike a chord with your audience. By this point, you know who they are and how to reach them. What you shoot will become the tool you have to move and engage them. You will only achieve that if you nail your storyline.
To do that, look back to your insight for clues and make sure the intelligence is leading you as you craft your approach. Ask yourself, does the situation look and feel right, is this moment relatable, does it matter to the people we are trying to speak with?
If you want to get this part right, then you need to put the work into understanding your audiences, knowing what it is that they like about you or would like about you – if they don’t already know who you are. This part takes time and will evolve as you continue to interact with your audience and customers.
From a practical point of view, know how your assets need to work. If you are posting something informational and informative to YouTube, you know you can play with time. If you are trying to win the war of attention on Instagram, short, sharp and snappy is what you should aim for.
Essentially, your creative needs to fulfil its duty both to its environment and its audience. The decisions you make early on in the planning stages will inform this and set you and your team up for success.
DEFINE CONTROLS TO MEASURE THE SUCCESS OF YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY.
Finally, and probably the most crucial consideration is deciding on control measures. Without knowing what you want to achieve when creating a content strategy, you will have no idea whether it has achieved its goal or not. The trick here is to keep it simple but focus on what matters. Vanity metrics (things like views and likes, etc.) do not make much difference if you aren’t selling. Focus on what’s important, know how you will measure these metrics from the start, and keep track of them.
By setting value-oriented goals from the off, you will develop an ability to tell great campaigns from average ones. Finally, by sharing these metrics and uniting your teams around them, you will develop a broadly held understanding of the mission you are working towards, increasing the likelihood of more great ideas when things work out or successful pivot strategies when you miss the mark.
If you got this far….. Thanks for reading! Our team is always available if you need an extra pair of hands to create a content strategy of your own. Want to chat it through? Get in touch with us here.
