Here, we look at five reasons why you need a content strategy and how it will make your marketing more effective.
Whether you are a content marketing pro or a first-timer, sooner or later you will find yourself in need of a content strategy to define what your business wants to achieve. With a lot to consider, this can be a daunting experience. You have to consider not only your organisation’s aims and objectives, but those of your target customers too.
WHY DO I NEED A CONTENT STRATEGY?
Defining a clear content strategy at the outset of your campaign planning will set your business up for success. Some key considerations include knowing where you are working towards, who it is you are looking to engage with, and what you want them to do once you’ve got their attention.
To set you off on the right track, we have shared five key reasons you need a content strategy, each with a bit of advice on where you and your marketing team can get started. By the end, you should understand how a solid content strategy can supercharge your marketing efforts and grow your bottom line.
1. IT WILL HELP YOU SET MILESTONES AND TRACK GOALS.
Firstly, it is essential to understand where you are before activating your content strategy. Mapping out what success looks like will give you a clear indication of how well you are performing as you get going.
Knowing this is critical in getting the most from your content creation budget. Fundamentally, it ensures your spend results in growth. We will cover a bit more on that point later.
Understanding how you are tracking against these goals will provide you with extremely useful information. It will answer questions like, which content types resonate most with your audience? What kind of content performs best on each channel? Which messaging generates the most customer action? Etc.
You can develop this information as you continue to create content to build upon the successes you and your team has along the way.
Finally, be clear on what matters to your business. Avoid the ‘vanity metric’. Essentially, get to the nitty-gritty of what’s most important. If you need sales, then patting yourself on the back for a big view count won’t cut it. But, if your goal is brand awareness, then great! It is all relative when it comes to setting practical goals. Doing so as part of your content strategy will set your team up for success.
2. IT WILL ENSURE YOUR MESSAGE ALIGNS WITH YOUR BRAND.
Suppose you are working hard to build a new brand or growing an established one. You need to pay close attention to communicating consistently to impress your audience and win their custom.
A content strategy ensures the vision, mission and values you agonised over are communicated as intended. Accurately sharing what your brand stands for is a huge deal. For example, if your target audience ends up not ‘getting’ who you are or what you stand for, then you could lose out on potential sales.
By defining a strong content strategy that starts where your brand definition left off, people will understand why they should engage, buy, or get in touch!
It isn’t often you get a second shot at a first impression. So make it count! By understanding a content strategy’s role in helping you nail it the first time around, you will set you up for future success.
3. IT WILL INCREASE YOUR MARKETING TEAM’S EFFECTIVENESS
In addition to aligning your marketing content with your brand’s message, a content strategy will help unite your team around a common objective. Productivity can be a roadblock to significant gains for many brands. By helping your team define its ‘north star’ (gross terminology, we know) when creating you will help overcome that challenge.
Here, the key is to involve the whole team from start to finish in defining your strategy. By involving everyone, you will get widespread commitment to your goals which will inspire a sense of ownership over your campaign’s outcomes.
Finally, a strategy will provide an ongoing reminder of your goals as you launch your content campaigns. It is proven that where milestones remain front of mind, teams are more likely to meet them.
4. IT WILL MAXIMISE YOUR MARKETING BUDGET.
As well as helping you achieve your goals, a robust content strategy will act as a qualifier on activity. Visualising achievements will remind the team what is important, and what isn’t when planning a campaign activity. By retaining a close focus on critical elements your content should deliver against, you reduce the chance of non-essential spend.
A great content strategy serves as a vital project management tool. It will outline where you need to create content, why it is essential, and what you expect it will achieve. Covering off these elements will help in planning budgets, ensuring every penny works as hard as possible to generate a return.
5. IT WILL HELP YOU CONVERT MORE CUSTOMERS.
Finally, and arguably most importantly, a strong content strategy will help your brand convert. Fundamentally, it will set expectations both internally and in the minds of your customers when interacting with your brand.
If you have nailed who your customer is, what they care about, where they are, and how your product aligns, then you are well on your way. Your content strategy provides the bridge to put insight into action.
As you launch a new content strategy, your team will see what works and can experiment with variations of messaging and tone to optimise for future campaigns.
Ultimately, the outcome here is that your content across channels begins to pull in those lucrative leads.
If you are struggling with defining your content strategy, searching for some inspiration, or just want a chat with some friendly faces – give us a shout. We are always keen to talk about how brands can put content to use to grow and build upon their success. You can get in touch with us here.
