Get your content strategy right and you’ll open the doorway to better brand awareness, a stronger digital footprint, new prospects and customers, and ultimately, an increase in revenue. Content has the power to connect your brand to your target audiences. It can create a lasting impression that resonates and reinforces you as an expert in your niche. Great content can also be instrumental in creating demand – helping customers to realise the potential of your products or services and how you can add value to their lives. Here are five essential tips for devising and deploying a content strategy that will drive success across your business.
- Create themed content linked to business objectives
Your content has to be focused and meaningful. It might feel tempting to try and address every topic that’s relevant to your business, but content with a clear theme will help to reinforce your position as an expert. The theme that you choose should support your business objectives.
Do you want to be seen as an authority? Maybe you’re trying to reach and connect with a new audience segment? Over 50% of marketers that curate content indicate that it has increased their brand visibility, thought leadership position, SEO, web traffic, and buyer engagement – so now is the time to invest in your content strategy if you haven’t already.
- Strong SEO
Every piece of content that you produce should be optimised for search engines. This will help it to rank well when potential customers search for keywords that are pertinent to your business. As many as 70-80% of search engine users only focus on the organic results, so it’s really important that your brand has a presence, especially on the first page of results.
Make sure that you include your main keyword and related keywords naturally throughout the body copy, in the header and meta tags, in the page title and in any image alt text.
Google indexes web content by looking at the mobile experience first, so ensure that all of your content is responsive and loads quickly and smoothly. Share your content with key influencers, bloggers and publishers within your industry, as any links that you earn back to your website will boost your SEO.
- Keep things consistentEvery piece of content that you create has to be consistent in terms of style and tone, so that your audience can instantly recognise that it belongs to your brand. When making purchasing decisions, consumers indicated that trust in a brand’s content is three times more important to them than trust in a brand’s employees. Consistency helps to reinforce your brand and builds up trust between you and your audience.
4. Customer value
Your content has to be valuable to your customers, providing information and insight that they can’t find elsewhere – especially from your competitors. Speak to your customers, find out what their pain points are, and get their input into making your content more useful for new customers.
Use a free tool like Uber Suggest to research what questions and topics people are searching for around your theme. Look at your competitors – are there questions that they answer that you could do a better job of? Can you spot gaps that your content could fill? Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and use your content to answer all of the questions they might have before purchasing your product or services.
5. Use clear call to actions
Each piece of content you produce has a purpose and will support your business objectives. With this in mind, you should always include a clear call to action for your audience, so that they take the next steps towards becoming a customer. This might be to download some supporting content, subscribe to your newsletter, follow you on social media or learn more about your products and services.
These essential tips will help to get your content strategy up and off the ground. Revert back to them as you start to build your strategy out, and you’ll be creating winning content that drives business success in no time at all.
