How to Create Your Content Strategy

Step 1 Your Buyer Personas:

You know that your buyer personas are important in reaching your target audience and so that is the first area I look at when creating or promoting content for my audience. Some of this includes:

·????????Personal information

·????????Professional information

·????????Goals and challenges

·????????Where / how do they get their information?

·????????Values and fears

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Step 2 Your Buyers’ Journey:

When you consider the buyers’ journey, you want to include the types of content that buyers’ consume to move them through their journey. And so, I use The Content Matrix (below) to understand what I need to either produce or promote to move them along in their journey.?I use the matrix from the awareness stage that educates (in making rational decisions) or entertains them (in emotional decision making).

Then further down the customer journey, I use content that is more persuasive to convert them.

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Step 3 Content Evaluation: Next, I analyze the existing content on the site to determine what content needs updating and what needs to be created. ??I also include:

·????????Evaluating current SEO on site

·????????Keyword research

·????????Taking inventory of your competitors’ content

·????????Evaluating their content quantity and quality

·????????Analyzing content topics

·????????Benchmarking my site score with my competitors for domain authority and page authority using MOZ and SEMrush tools

Step 4 Content Audit: When I do a content audit, I collect published content materials and information about those materials into a comprehensive list. Content can be described by project or type, and can include site pages, PDFs, infographics, videos, photos, whitepapers, branding assets, as well as sales brochures.?

Evaluate what are your top performing and lowest performing web pages. What makes the best ones the best and the worst the worst? Compare these to determine how to make the lower performing pages better.

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Step 5: Plan Content Strategy: Review your content inventory with The Content Matrix to see where there may be holes in your existing content to move customers through the buyers’ journey. This is where you should begin creating content to fill in those holes. Take your competitors best content in those areas and begin using the skyscraper technique by making it bigger and better than theirs.

Image from: 6 Steps to Skyscraper Content and Growth Hacking Blog Traffic

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Step 6: Begin promoting pages:

1. Supercharge your SEO
2. Use email marketing
3. Start blogging
4. Create videos
5. Invest in paid marketing
6. Pitch for guest blogs
7. Advertise on social media
8. Update your email signature to include links to pages you want to promote and change the signature weekly or monthly with a strong call to action. Or you can have the links and in a Word document and change it up to personalize it based on where the customer is in the buyers’ journey.

How will you use this strategy? What is most important to you? Comment below.

Sherry Hedenberg?is a #Content and SEO Strategist in the far Northwest suburbs of Chicago. Her approach is customer centric that?provides valuable, engaging, educational, and persuasive content that will lead customers through the buyers’ journey. Sherry helps customers in their buying decisions, to connect with your messaging, and strengthen your brand. As a result, this will grow your customer base, followers and sell more of your products and services.

She has beat worldwide corporations in ranking top #Google #SERP's. Sherry helps sales team by boosting requests for quotes by one-third in less than a year. Contact her for ways she can help you in #digitalmarketing strategies.?

#contentstrategy?#contentmarketing #storytelling #leadgeneration