DIY Content Strategy for Small Business

It's not a plan, it's a path

Strategy is all about identifying your company’s future state, developing the yellow bricks and laying them to build the roads to get there. Content strategy aligns your marketing activities to deliver against business goals and using the research, data and actions of your audience you can develop a deep understanding of your market, your customers, and the opportunity.

The first stage is assessment and is focussed on developing a clear picture of the business before looking to your customers and the market. You can do this by running an internal and external audit which will answer the following questions;

Internal audit

1.    What is the business trying to achieve – vision, mission and brand?

2.    What are the business strategic goals and objectives?

3.    What are the marketing goals and objectives?

4.    What do you want from a content marketing program?

5.    What content and channels do you have, and what is working for you?

External audit

1.    Who makes up your audience?

2.    Where are they and in which channels?

3.    What do they want and how can content help them?

4.    Who are your product and content competitors?

5.    What stories are they telling?

6.    What are the content opportunities?

It's also important to run a gap analysis here to identify what it is you don't know. This allows you to prioritise your research needs and decide on which pieces are project critical, and which ones can wait.

You can go big, or keep it small

How deep you dive into finding answers to these questions is the scalable part. Research can be light with desktop reviews using quick and dirty analytics or you can use more involved techniques such as audience focus groups and workshops with business stakeholders to lock down vision, mission and brand stories. Traditional qualitative market and brand research will provide rich data for developing the strategy, as well audience surveys or quantitative research using tools such as Google Analytics, Moz Keyword Explorer, Buzzsumo and Facebook Topic Data. Social listening tools such as Social Studio and competitor analysis tools like RivalIQ will give you an understanding of the playing field. There’s a lot of analytics platforms out there, you just need to pick the analytics stack that will deliver the data you need.

Analysis is easy, insights are hard.

Once you have the data from these platforms, it is about analysing the data and uncovering insights to develop content pillars and content personas that ladder straight up into the strategic goals. Data is great but on its own it is useless and is as ineffective as spray and pray content marketing. When analysing the data, it is the ‘so what’ that provides the gold. And the ‘so what’ takes finding the right people or agency to uncover on your behalf.

Data makes up the bricks for your path forward and with the right team to lay them in a consistent and planned way you can certainly build your yellow brick road to oz. That said there ain’t no magic ruby slippers and you are going to need the right people with the right skills to make it happen.

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