In today’s marketing world, content is what really moves the needle. In fact, Forbes reports that 74% of all companies in the United States say that content marketing significantly increases lead generation.

Your content strategy is what builds that all-important connection between your brand and your target audience. All of your content marketing efforts should be geared toward engaging your customers throughout each phase of the marketing funnel. 

But developing a successful content strategy can be difficult. You have to have a keen awareness of the habits of your target audience, develop content around their needs and make sure every piece of content you publish contributes to the overall narrative you want for your business.  

In today’s post we will be talking about why building a content strategy matters and what you can do to get started with one of your own. 

The Basic Roles of A Content Strategy

Essentially, you want your content strategy to work towards your overarching business goals. Keep in mind that your content strategy is a specialized subset of your overall marketing strategy. As such, there are some basic roles that any successful content strategy should fulfill:

• Organizing your existing content to make it easy for your audience to interact with the content that speaks to their needs/desires.
• Any good content strategy will also implement a method for monitoring the success of the campaign.
• Your content strategy should also address the creation of new content. 

Understanding these roles and their importance is simple. It can be harder to actually start building a successful content strategy. To that end, let’s take a look at some proven techniques.

Identifying Your Audience

It’s very important to know who you are directing your content to. For this, it may help to create a buyer persona – an imaginary representation of who your buyer is. To develop your buyer persona, think about the needs and values of your audience. You should also consider their demographic and how your brand can solve a problem or fulfill a need. 

Once you have a clear buyer persona, it’s important to find out how your audience engages with content. For example, younger audiences may trend towards platforms like TikTok and Instagram while older audiences may engage with content more through Facebook or YouTube.

Considering the Buyer’s Journey

Earlier we mentioned that your content strategy should engage your audience at all stages of the marketing funnel. To do this, you will likely need to develop different kinds of content. Let’s take a look at some different content types and how they align with the marketing funnel:

• Blog Posts – Blog posts are a great way to engage buyers who are in the research stage. Provide them with informative content that furthers their interest in your product/service.
• Email Newsletters – Email newsletters are a great way to drive conversion. They can help influence a buyer who has given their email address to actually make a purchase.
• Social Media Posts – Brand loyalty is an important part of the marketing funnel because it generates repeat customers. Engaging social media posts and creating a community are great ways to build brand loyalty. 

Creating Ongoing Content

When you have a clear image of who your audience is, you can start generating content for them. To get started you have to consider the type of content that will speak the clearest to your audience.

For example, if you are targeting customers through video content it would be wise to invest in editing software. Or if the majority of your content will be written you may need to hire a team of writers.

Creating a content calendar with clear goals at every stage of publishing will also help you align your publishing with your business goals. 

Launched Digital Solutions can put an entire content development team at your disposal to create engaging assets that help you corner your market.