Creating lots of content isn’t the same thing as having a content strategy! Here’s why you should care

In a world where your website meets your prospects long before you do, content like blogs, eBooks, case studies, white papers, guides etc., all have to do the work you need them to, to convince new faces to engage with you.

But while many companies can be very busy and productive generating content, the strategy behind it all often hasn’t had anything like the same work put into it. And no matter how much you invest in content marketing and content creation, if there's no strategy behind it, it simply won’t give you the returns you hoped from it. Here’s my content creation check-list

Why do you want to create content at all?

Not all content can do the same thing for you: why you want to create it will determine which type of content is the right fit. So, brand exposure is about blogs, thought leadership are your opinion pieces, lead generation tends to be on downloadable assets like eBooks, guides, white papers and case studies. Start with the why and then the right content follows.

Who's going to engage with it?

You must be able to map content to buyers. Have you thought about who the targets are, how they engage with you and, and through what channels and indeed what they care about? Spend time developing (or going back to finesse and enhance) your core buyer personas, which may well be different after nearly two years of COVID. Rethinking the buyer persona could really help focus your content marketing efforts.

Do a content audit

If you nodded but secretly drew a blank on that one, you’re not alone: ‘content audit’ is one of those things that no-one quite knows what it means. Let’s keep it simple, and just look at what’s in the hopper already? Don’t charge off and spend months on new content until you’ve looked very closely at what you already have or is in the pipeline: then map what you've got to that great new buyer persona you've just created, step back and see what you're missing.

Are you using the best keywords?

As we live in an SEO universe now, you must be looking not just if you’re (still) using the right keywords, also take a gander at search volumes and keyword competition for your solution. And most critically, long tail keywords—the three to four phrase terms related to your products and services but more importantly related to what people are actually searching for. I’m happy if you are producing lots of content, but if it doesn’t have the right keywords, and isn’t what people are looking for, you won’t get found.

ABC (Always Be Closing), meet your new pal CTA—Call To Action

How many times do you publish some great content that doesn’t actually invite the reader to do something useful to you? What do you want the next stage of the journey to be? Is it to contact you, go to your website, engage with some part of your team, what? If I get to the end of an eBook, I want it to link me to something, to invite me to a webinar, to book a one-to-one, to start a conversation on it with somebody. Your choice, but give the prospect something to do! Not having a CTA (Call To Action) like this at the end of your content marketing asset is such a missed opportunity.

Now--promote the heck out of it!

You’ve done all the hard work: you've worked out why you're doing it, who you're doing it for, you've written something or had it written for you, you’ve keyworded it right and there’s a kick-ass CTA in there.

Now you got to promote it! If no-one knows you’ve done this, what was the point? And when I say promote it, that means not just across your social media channels and your website, but also for the biggest audience —your own team.

So, promote it internally, and encourage the guys to do the same. If you need to do some education on why it's highly relevant to the brand and why it’s of value to the brand, do it. Then do the same for all your network: your stakeholders, partners, investors—don’t be shy about pushing some of your major content assets out to them so they can promote them through their excellent contacts, too. If the content is not just purely promotional, what about some industry influencers? And for some reason, people forget their most important audience of all for content and messaging, your customers—lots of people don't put it out there because they think they're already sold, but what about looking to see if they might want to buy more from you? You stand a much higher chance of stopping them buying from competitors if you give them solid reasons to stay ‘sticky’ with you.

Here at Sarum we mastermind, manage and run many of our clients’ content campaigns.?If we’re not doing it for you, ping me on [email protected] ?and let’s get talking (see what I did there??CTA – love it! ??)