6 Key Initiatives That Will Make Your Content Strategy Shine
Strategy
It can be tempting to jump right into creating content without a concrete campaign plan or long-term content strategy in place. But spending the time (and resources) to set goals and decide what you want to publish can help you better meet your customers’ needs and reach your business goals or KPIs.
A content strategy typically spans the entire content marketing funnel, from awareness to decision and possibly through customer success. You may have somebody on your marketing team or within your organization who specifically focuses on the strategy part of content marketing. Or, if you work for a smaller organization, you may focus on both strategy and execution.
Key Initiatives in Building a Content Strategy
1. Define your goals
- For top-of-funnel (brand awareness) content: Social media engagement, blog and/or web traffic, content downloads, newsletter open rate, average time-on-page, organic search rankings, etc.
- For mid-funnel (consideration) content: Marketing qualified leads (MQLs), form submissions for eBooks, newsletter click-through rates, demos scheduled from UTM links in content, click-through rates on PPC ads, etc.
- For bottom-of-funnel (decision) content: Sales qualified leads (SQLs), deals closed, revenue generated, meetings scheduled via chatbot, etc.
- For post-sale (customer success/retention) content: Repeat customers, brand sentiment/affinity, repeat purchases, cross-sell or upsell purchases, brand advocacy, etc.
2. Analyze data to drive your strategy
- Demographics, habits, and preferences
- Publications your audience consumes regularly
- Biggest obstacles they encounter when making a purchase
- Solutions to problems they commonly face
- Topics of interest they want to know more about
- What will help them do their job better