What is Content Strategy? It is the planning, development and management of written or in other media. It ensures that the piece of content has a purpose, it aligns with your clients’ needs or goals, and it exists to provide value to your users.
What is Content? As regards the internet, content is any information available for retrieval by the user, these includes web pages, images, music, audio, drivers and software downloads.
What is Strategy? Strategy is a defined as a laid down plan of action or techniques intended to accomplish a specific goal.
Before one creates or develops a Content Strategy, first you must know the business goals, requirements or needs. Ask yourself the following questions so that it can aid you in creating a Content Strategy:
• How does my content meet the business and user needs? Here you need to understand your business objectives. If the objective is not known, the strategy cannot be done.
• Who is my targeted audience? Find out what who your audience is, what they need or want.
• What goals and metrics do we need to achieve? Define the goals you want to accomplish.
• Where will I be publishing this content (and why)? Where does your audience visit and why? This will help you know where to post your contents as well.
• What action (or reaction) do I want from my audience?
• What time is the best time to publish this content? Time matters to people. Like some people will prefer checking out certain contents either early in the morning or late in the evening when they want to retire to bed, some people prefer going through their contents during the weekends. You must know the right timing so as to know the best time to post your content.
Content Strategy will help you decide the following:
• What subjects (topic circles) guide the brainstorming session? Content Strategy will help you streamline your thoughts towards the topic(s) you want to write on.
• What topics from the session make it onto the editorial calendar? From the step above, from a pool of topics, you can choose the ones that will make it to the into the content calendar.
• What’s the best voice, style, and formatting to use to meet an audience? Content Strategy will help you know the pattern, voice, format you will use in writing your content.
• What are you doing to create a more valuable and comprehensive piece of content than what your competitors provide? Here, you will have gone through your competitors’ contents and know the better way you can write yours. You can go through your previous content and know how to do better.
• Where and when content is posted or cross-posted? Content Strategy will help you know where and what time you should post as where as knowing where to cross post.
• How is the piece of content tracked and what metrics do you use to measure success?
• What happens to the content once it’s no longer fresh? Content Strategy will help you decide what do after the content becomes out dated or “stale”.
Types of Content Strategy Models
Frameworks / Models can be applied to content strategy from other fields to create content marketing strategy. Some of the popular ones are:
• The Pillar and Spoke Model: it is also known as topic clusters, it’s a well-known way of organizing content around one main topic that also helps with SEO.
• Frameworks from UX: Content strategy can map onto user experience (UX) frameworks, such as this one which maps content onto technical, editorial, and web development viewpoints.
• Canvas Model: In canvassing, processes are mapped in a way that defines their value proposition, key activities, channels, customer segments, and other features.
• Agile content strategy: Content strategy using the agile framework can enhance responsiveness and support change management initiatives in situations like pivoting or rebranding.
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