Content strategy is a process of setting goals that a company wants to achieve with the help of content and researching the target market to define its needs and search intent. Content strategy development also includes deciding which metrics to use to define a company’s success in its content marketing efforts.
Content Strategy — steps
The content strategy development process starts with market research and compilation of the persona portrait. The aim is to paint a picture of a company’s customer. Once the picture becomes clear, a company can start conducting research to figure out current needs/struggles of its target audience.
Since content is a tool for achieving business objectives, a company should take time to think up these goals. It’s often better to narrow them down to one clear goal.
For example:
- To increase organic traffic by 20% in 3 months
- To attract 200+ new leads
- To improve conversion rate by 33% by the end of a year
- To increase brand awareness by 15% in 2 months
- To generate 5k shares in 4 months
- To boost impressions by 10% in 1 month
- To reach a new market with localized content and start acquiring new traffic in 1 month
- To increase page views by 30% by the end of the year
Content strategy doesn’t equal tactics. Strategy only outlines the goals that a company sets plus defines target markets. It doesn’t determine ways to achieve those goals.
KPIs/metrics
To understand how effectively a company is achieving its objectives, KPIs (key performance indicators) are set.
Content marketing KPIs are usually represented by:
- Pageviews (the amount of traffic on a website)
Pageviews is a metric that shows how many times users opened your pages per a selected time frame.
- Time on page
Time spent on pages defines how well people engage with the content (to put it another way, how much time they spend on each page).
- Scroll Depth
Scroll depth visualizes a user journey across the page. Tracking scroll depth provides insight into how users interact with the content in its different parts.
- Readability
Readability points at how comprehensive the content is for readers. This metric compares the time needed to read an article to the end, and the actual time spent on a page.
Recirculation tells how well the recirculation strategy works. It determines if the content is aligned in its pieces and if it works well as a content marketing funnel.
- Interactions
Interaction is a metric that shows how well the content matches audience expectations. In other words, if visitors are willing to share it on personal social media pages.
- Bounce rate
Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who landed on a page and left without any interaction.
- Exit rate
Exit rate calculates how many visitors left a website from a single page (even if they surfed other pages before in the same session).
- Organic rankings
Organic rankings tell how well the content is doing in terms of SEO — do search engines rank it for relevant queries?
- Conversion rates
A conversion rate represents the number of visitors who have completed a goal on a website. It can be subscriptions, conversions.
- Retention rate
Retention rate is the percentage of users who came back after the initial session.
- Loyal audience
Tracking the number of paid subscribers allows to understand how fast you grow.
Important paid metrics
- CPC
For promoted campaigns, CPC (cost-per-click) is tracked to measure the ROI of campaigns.
- CPL
Cost-per-lead represents the cost-effectiveness of marketing campaigns. It measures how effectively the company attracts leads (prospects who match the predefined criteria).
Why is content strategy important
Content strategy defines who you create content for and what for. Without this knowledge, you cannot possibly start doing content marketing, unless you think of it as some kind of art 🙂
But all jokes aside, the strategy is everything for a content marketer. It’s where all your marketing activities come from.
Strategy vs tactics
Tactics outline how to reach the target audience and which content will match its interests/needs better.
Tactics include defining the type of content that may work, channels to distribute, frequency of posting, ways of content promotion. While working on tactics, a company builds a content marketing funnel and a content plan for further implementation.
How to be good at content strategy
To build an effective content strategy, a company should focus efforts around its target audience. By finding efficient means of surveying and interacting with the audience, a company can build an effective strategy to produce competitive tactics and grow faster. Besides, a content strategy is not there for a lifetime: it should be constantly reviewed because the audiences’ needs change over time.
To put it in one sentence, a company that speaks the same language as its audience has better chances to succeed in content marketing.