When briefing out your content marketing strategy, it’s crucial you find a partner agency or content creator who understands your company’s objectives, goals for growth and key performance indicators.
Content creation, paired with search engine optimization, can really improve your brand’s visibility online and drive a greater stream of traffic through to your website. However, to truly deliver against its promise, a content strategy should prioritize copy that’s relevant and motivating to its target consumer – content that’s generated simply “for content’s sake” isn’t doing any good.
Be selective with your content topics, placement and quantity. Here’s a guide on creating and crafting a content strategy.
Select the right topics
There are some key questions you should ask yourself when it comes to deciding what types of articles you should include in your content marketing strategy. Who is your target audience? What blog and article titles will attract their attention? How can you input a promotional message about your brand/business into these sorts of posts, in a way that’s subtle and avoids appearing too promotional?
Fail to select the right topics, and you risk wasting time and money on your content strategy; you’ll be getting your brand name in front of the wrong audience. To elicit growth, you want to attract the right traffic of visitors to your website and then convert into a sale. Irrelevant traffic will do you no favors.
Select the right placement
Just because a website or blog is popular and has an impressively high number of monthly visits, doesn’t mean it’s the best platform for you to advertise your brand or business on.
Where you can, push to agree affiliate marketing connections and partnerships with likeminded businesses, who share common goals and values with you. Furthermore, try to avoid placements where your competitors also have a presence.
Again, consider the target audience and current readership of potential websites and blogs – do these people fall under your target demographic too? Remember, you want to attract significant traffic to your website, so don’t be afraid to be selective.
Once you’ve selected your content placements, you should consistently reappraise and revisit these sites, to ensure the content is still performing for you. If you use an SEO agency for your content marketing, such as Click Intelligence, they’ll assist in reviewing your current links and audit your success regularly.
Select the right quantity
It’s tempting to want to brief out as much content creation as possible and negotiate down the price to get as many articles out into the Internet as possible with your name in them. However, as with choosing topics and article placements, you should be more selective to get results.
Financially, it’s often a more sound investment to pay a little more than some companies or individuals quote for content writing. If you go with the cheapest, you may end up having to make lots of edits and re-brief projects, causing longer lead times and eventually costing you more money. Instead, find a professional with an impressive portfolio of work and a keen eye for content writing; they’ll be worth the extra money you spend on them.