Table of Contents:
Introduction
Step 1: Know Thyself
Step 2: Know Your Customer
Step 3: Determine Your Content Marketing Goals
Step 4: Search Engine Optimization
Step 5: Perform a Content Inventory
Step 6: Content Mapping
Step 7: Creating Content
Step 8: The Right Content in the Right Channel
Step 9: Measuring Your Content Strategy’s Success
Some Final Thoughts
The first step to building a content strategy is to understand yourself. Determine these three things:
- What do we want our customers and stakeholders to know about us? What drives us? What do we stand for? What problems do we solve? What is our culture? Understanding this requires a commitment by organizational leaders to sit down and put some thought into these topics. Often, organizations find it nearly impossible to get everyone to commit to the process, which is why outside agencies are sometimes the best facilitators of branding exercises. When you’re paying an agency a lot of money to do something, it’s sometimes easier to get people to the table.
- The next part of this step is understanding how your customers and stakeholders see you now. What do they actually know about you? Do they see you as a stable company? Are you ethical and trustworthy? Does your company have a perception of caring about issues important to them? And of course, what do they know about your products and services.
- The last, but very important part of this step is to understand what you’re doing now, from a content standpoint, to support your public persona and your product portfolio. What channels are you using to reach customers? How are you currently measuring success and what are your numbers today. You will need this information as a baseline to compare against once you’ve put your content strategy into motion.
From all of this research, you will uncover gaps. You’ll find that not all of your customers and stakeholders see you the same. You’ll find that your current content marketing practices, while doing well in certain channels, struggle in others.
Many believe the first thing you need to do in any content strategy is to define your KPIs or your goals, and that is necessary. But, how can you decide what you need to focus on without knowing what your problems are? Sure, you may know that your business is moving into a new area and you need to start building awareness and presence in that area, but that’s not going to be the only thing your organization needs to focus on.
So the first thing we need to do is baseline everything. To do that, here are a few key things to focus on as you document your findings:
- The buyer’s journey. Do you have content to support the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel?
- In what areas do your branding and messaging differ from what you gathered from your customers and external stakeholders?
- Do you have a good balance of organizational-level content, awareness content and product-level content? Don’t worry if you don’t know what these three categories of content are, because you likely won’t find it anywhere but here. We’ll discuss these content buckets in Step 5.
Save this information for now. We’ll plug it back in later in our planning.
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