In a nutshell, “content strategy” is a roadmap to transforming your website from having no content, bad content or too much content into a useful site that people return to again and again. But before you even set out to create your plan, you need to have intimate knowledge of your brand and of your consumers.
Here are three key questions to ask when planning your content strategy:
1. Who is your target audience?
2. What key message(s) do we want to convey to our readers?
3. How do we deliver our content?
Let’s take a closer look at each of those questions.
1. Who is your target audience?
– Know your audience. Know who they are, where they are, what they know, what they want to know, and how they look for what they want to know. You can find this information through informal polls, analytics, and market research. Once you have a detailed picture, you can tailor your content to their needs.
2. What key message(s) do we want to convey to our readers?
– What do you hope to gain from publishing web content? Is it sales, is it readers, is it recognition by key personalities? Answering this question tells you what sort of writing style you need. Set clear goals to inform your content strategy.
– Know why your brand is better. If you don’t know your advantages, then you can’t convey them to your consumers.
– Identify most relevant topics. Make a top ten list, and keep returning to those topics again and again.
3. How do we deliver our content?
– Web design. Answering the previous questions should have given you enough information to think strategically about your web design – how it should look, what image it conveys, etc.
– Writers. Get the right people to create the appropriate content. A technical writer may have a difficult time explaining things to someone non-technical.
I hope that helps you to understand the basics of content strategy. Stay tuned as we cover content strategy in more depth in future posts.
