You need a strategy to win every battle and the internet battle is no different. Here, content is always the king but you needed to have the right strategy to make that content available to your readers and visitors. It is surprising that more than 50% of web masters and marketers of content fail to have a strategy and often end up paying the price for it.
Content strategy can be simply defined as the preparation, formulation and control of information that you want your target visitors to read and taken action upon.
The ideal content strategy should revolve around the following:
- Identify the objective of your content and research well to target it to the appropriate audience. Once you know the “why” of your content, you can formulate lucid content and also have a follow up mechanism to make sure it reaches the people you want it to.
- Evaluate competition and the environment relevant to your content to ensure you are not feeding content that is no longer relevant. Understanding the topics being covered by your competitors to identify the unique selling propositions behind them is half the battle won.
- Make use of the tools available at hand to spot the topics that are currently hot and trending. This will stimulate your thought process to come out with ideas that are in tune with what the readers want to know.
- After having collected the ideas, you now need to brainstorm to filter out the ones that can emotionally connect to your audience. Emotional appeal never fails to engage readers and produces the action you want them to take.
- Create headlines that attract attention. The headline is without doubt the most important facet of your content which will provoke further reading of the content.
- You are now ready to write content making use of all the ideas you have collected.
- The format and frequency of your content hitting the blog or site are important parameters that will decide its success.
The parameters of a good content strategy can thus be summarized to be informative, relevant, should entertain, must be honest and should be delivered on a consistent basis.
Examples of a good content strategy being followed can be found in brands like Wistia’s learning centre videos that are short, crisp and help visitors hone their video marketing skills. You can find another example in American Express that encourages feedback from its business owners through its Open Forum initiative postings on various aspects of marketing, customer service, technology and leadership.
A more fitting example is that of a government site being responsive and tuned to the requirements of its people. The gov.uk site is filled with useful content teaching people how to go about accomplishing supposedly complicated government related tasks. The content is easy to read, does not have unnecessary jargon and has bullet lists that lead to links for people wanting more information on a particular task.
