CONTENT STRATEGY

How to Develop Content Strategy and SEO in less than 5 minutes

All of this in 5 minutes. Impossible? Maybe. This blog entails all the basics you should know for developing a successful content strategy.

There’s a widespread misconception about content strategy and SEO. We think that we just need to create content, and it will on its own attract visitors from the three primary sources, i.e., social, email, and search. We think that they will read our blog, subscribe to our newsletter. We‘ll send them to our service page, and then we will target them on their social media, and finally, they will land on our checkout page, and buy from us.

This, in my opinion, is an improbable scenario. According to a study done by Andy Crestodina, Instructor at CXL Institute, less than 1% of people who read your blog become your customers. People connect with your content, not your sales pages. So, just creating good content will not increase your purchases. It’s the links and authority that the blog content and the art of marketing content attracts, and that passes some of that authority to the more in-depth interior pages, including the checkout pages.

A good content strategy helps one to achieve the above-said goals.

What is Content Strategy?

A strategy is defined as the plan to reach a specific goal.

Content Strategy is the art and science of attracting customers towards your business, in simpler words in the process of using content to reach a specific goal desired by your organization.

All in all, the strategy is just a fancy word for a plan.

This strategy is usually done once in the beginning and then reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly depending upon the needs. The plan consists of the following:

• Audience
• Mission …for us and our audience
• Topics
• Keywords
• Influencers
• Social and email promotion

Let’s talk about all of them one by one

Audience

As explained in my previous blog Experimenting: The backbone of Growth Marketing, knowing your customers, their fears, their goals, their dreams is the key to winning their interest and time. We should know what exactly they want and then only we will get the things we want.

Empathy is the Greatest Marketing Skills

The process of knowing all about your customer is called persona development.

The trick here is to ask the right question to get the answers you want.

• If you are targeting other businesses (B2B), you should know

1. Where do they work and what are their titles?
2. What’s going to motivate them to make a purchase?
3. Are they the ultimate decision-maker?

• If you are targeting customers (B2C), you should know

1. What are their tastes and preferences?
2. What are their pain points and what concerns do they have that could potentially prevent them from buying?
3. What influences them in terms of their buying decisions?

Mission

Your content should always be on a mission. The purpose sets the aim of why the content is there and what it symbolizes.

A mission statement describes how the content we are delivering is beneficial to our customers.

Joe Pulizzi gave an easy template for designing your content mission statement. It states:

[Our Company] is the place where

[our audience] gets

[what information] that offers

[what benefit].

Let’s take an example of understanding it better. Indium Corporation is an online platform that manufactures materials used in assembling electronics. Their mission statement can be

Indium Corporation (our company) is the place where we Help engineers (our audience) answer (benefit) the most challenging industrial soldering questions (what information)

Topics

The right topic is the one that answers the pain points of your customers. A point which helps them make a decision. Great content is always at least one of the following

1. Informative
2. Useful
3. Entertaining

If it isn’t one of them, then we might enter the advertisement zone. Check out this article for learning more about Facebook Marketing.

We should create content pillars that create a web-like structure and take customers from one problem to another. Some of them should have a bigger picture, and some should always be focussing just on a simple topic.

You should also listen to your sales team and customer service teams for knowing the common pain points of your customer. These pain points help in deciding the topics for your blog

Keywords

Once you have selected the items to write on then comes which keywords should we focus on. Often, we discover topics while searching for keywords. Or we’re inspired by a topic and then find a keyword to align it with.

Your ideal keyword should meet the following criteria:

1. Search Volume — The number of people searching for it. More the volume search is more of a common pain point hence more chance of people landing on your website.
2. Competition- The blog pieces of your competitors have written on the same topic as you. The less the competition is more is the chance of people landing on your blog.
3. Relevant to your product — Google Bots also see how relevant is your keyword to your parent website.

Source: orbitmedia.com

Influencers

Influencers are the people in the industry who are talking about the same topic as you. They are those people who already have a considerable set of audience. They could be podcast hosts, media journalists, famous people on social media, etc.

If we find these people, we can borrow their audience and get attention quickly. This is what advertisers have always done, but as content marketers, we’re going to get there another way: by providing value.

• Provide useful content to them, and publish on their website
• Invite them to create content with you, then promote it together
• Interview them on your site

The main goal is to make something visible to your target audience.

Secret Tip: Never Approach content creators with a sales pitch. You should politely request them to ask permission for collaboration.

Social and Email Promotion

Whoever said that the best content wins is probably wrong. In my view, in this time where large budgets are allocated for promoting content, the best-promoted content wins.

So we need to send our content to our audience with the help of emails and social media platforms. Check out this article for creating a successful email campaign.

Each company has its own favorite social media platforms. Still, we should be on those social media platforms where our customers are.

Send out your content through email marketing. Email is critical. We don’t own our search engine rank or our following on social media. These are on proprietary websites (Google, Facebook, etc.), but we do own our list.

Once all of this is set, you should formulate all of the above points and make a content calendar. This schedule should include the what, the where, and the who.

Finally, you should always measure the reach of your articles and always keep optimizing it. You should only create more content when your previous content is fully optimized.

In this blog, we learned:

• What content strategy is? It is the process of using content to reach a specific goal desired by your organization.
• We learned who our audience is and how we should ask the right questions for getting the correct answers.
• We learned about choosing the correct content mission statement for reaching higher results.
• Then we covered how to select the correct topic and keyword for our blog.
• We also looked over how influencer, email and social media campaigns help us in reaching our desired audience.

Thank you so much for going through this blog.

Let’s connect if you want to know more about Content Strategy or growth marketing. You can reach out to me at LinkedIn at Shreyansh Goel or email me at shreyanshgoel16@gmail.com.