A lot of content strategies aren’t really strategies at all. They’re just a collection of decisions that have been made over the years without an actual vision uniting them in a purpose. Even if your brand has a content strategy, chances are it’s due for a reboot. Things change quickly in the business world and it’s a good idea to reevaluate how effective your content strategy is. Here are five steps to revamping your brand’s content strategy.
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Know What Interests Your Audience
Figure out who your ideal customer is. Knowing what your customer is like will help you design a content strategy that produces content they are interested in. Figure out what the demographics of your audience are. Are they students, people over 50, working parents, retirees, or young professionals? Do some market research and find out what they are looking for from your brand. Talk to people who are actually paying customers. Find out what brought them to your brand, and why they come back. Ask them what they like about your brand and what they would like to change. Combine this knowledge with content related to new products, contests, etc. to create content that entertains and informs your audience.
Tell Your Brand Story
“Tell the story of how your brand has come to be. Give your audience a crash course in your mission and what motivated, and continues to motivate, the people behind your brand,” writes Sandra Carter, content marketer at OxEssays. How and why was your brand founded? Who are the people working behind the scenes? You can adapt the way you articulate your brand’s story for different groups you’re appealing to. Don’t let your customers forget that there is a whole cast behind your brand working every day to bring them the products and services they love. People are a lot more interested in buying from people they can identify with than a faceless corporate entity.
Write Better Copy By Using Online Resources
Rebooting your content strategy will require your team to be writing at a high level. Get them working on their writing skills so your content copy is top notch. Here are some good tools that will help:
- ViaWriting & SimpleGrad – Get caught up on the rules of grammar with these helpful resources. Having a grammatical error in your content is going to result in your brand looking bad, and not being taken seriously.
- StateofWriting & WritingPopulist -These writing guides can help improve all aspects of your writing process. They are full of tips and tricks that will make your writing better.
- Grammarly – Use this online proofreading tools, to produce quality content copy that will give your brand an edge on the competition.
- MyWritingWay & LetsGoandLearn – These are a couple of active content writing communities. They are full of posts and discussions about how to improve your content copywriting.
Find Your Voice
Develop your brand’s voice. What is your brand’s personality? Your brand’s voice should be consistent with its personality. Are you funny, irreverent, sincere, formal, or informal? What kind of language suits your brand, and what phrases don’t? It’s important to keep the brand’s voice consistent across all touch points, from your marketing efforts to customer service interactions. It’s confusing to customers if your messaging and voice vary a lot from platform to platform. If your website is very formal, while your social media is full of slang and irreverence, that is a problem.
Creating Content
Once you know your audience well enough and have decided on a voice and personality for your brand, it’s time to start creating some good content. There are many different kinds of content you can create, the important thing is to create content that suits your brand and appeals to your customers. It’s also necessary to focus on creating content you’re confident you can do a quality job producing unless you plan on outsourcing. Play to your strengths and be realistic about your abilities and the amount of time you’re prepared to spend each week producing content. Some content types include whitepapers, ebooks, infographics, videos, images, and blog posts.
Conclusion
Content is a great way to demonstrate relevance and connect with your customers. Content marketing is something that needs to be done in a strategic way if it’s to be effective.
Author Bio
Grace Carter is a content manager at Admission Writing Service, where she works with email marketers and business communication specialists.