A content strategy is your plan to create, publish, and control usable content on social media. Essentially, it is your way to give your audience consistent, valuable, and educational information in the form of blogs, graphics, videos, podcasts, infographics, social media posts, and more.
A good content strategy boosts SEO, increases your brand’s exposure, grows your audience, gives your brand an identity, and allows your brand to stay relevant.
Building a great content strategy takes a little bit of time at first, but once you have all of the elements in place, you’ll be able to plug in each piece of content with ease. Here are the steps you can take to get started with your content strategy:
Research
First, think about your industry and your expertise. Find out what is trending, what topics people are searching for, and what questions they are asking that you can answer for them. Also, take a look at your own page’s analytics. Your own insights can give you an idea of what kind of content works and what you should probably avoid.
Audience
Next, learn who your target audience is and how they are consuming information. If your target audience is millennials, they are likely spending the majority of their time on Instagram, Facebook, and maybe Snapchat, and they are probably using their mobile device to look at these platforms. Your content strategy should reflect that, focusing most of your content publishing and advertising budget on those platforms.
Competition
You should also analyze your competition. What is working – or not working – for them? Remember, your competition is not an obstacle to overcome, but rather an opportunity to better your own brand. Understanding your competitors’ content plan allows you to create a path of growth and differentiation for your brand.
SEO
Finally, don’t forget to boost your content with keywords. This applies not only to your blogs and the content on your website pages but also to your Tweets and Facebook posts. Google’s crawlers do find and archive your social media posts, so make sure you are posting valuable content relevant to your industry. All of your blogs and website pages should be optimized for SEO, too. WordPress plugins like Yoast make this easy to do.
When you take the time to set up a content strategy and do the initial research, you’ll find out that curating content for your brand isn’t so hard after all. But we know you, as a business owner, are busy with the daily aspects of running a business. So, of course, you can always find an agency that has expert content-creation skills to help you crush the competition and boost your business online.