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Content strategy is an integral piece to any marketing plan. In order to find success, businesses need to shift their focus from simply telling stories to fostering genuine conversations and connections with their audience. By creating authentic digital relationships, companies can cultivate trust, loyalty, and long-term customer engagement–ultimately propelling their brand forward in the digital landscape.
It can be a lot of work to make this happen, but it doesn’t have to be impossible or reserved for only those with big marketing budgets. With the right plan in place, you can achieve a multi-channel approach to finding your audience–and engaging them–where they are.
Here’s what you need to think about when putting together a content strategy for your business:
Email Marketing
Believe it or not, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to reach your audience. HubSpot’s Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats for 2023 found that a typical return on investment (ROI) for email marketing is $36 for every $1 spent, which is pretty impressive. It’s also a big lost opportunity to not invest your time and resources into nurturing your target audiences via email.
Of course, being on the receiving end of receiving emails from brands on a daily basis, I think we all know that it’s tough to break through the noise and find a way for people to open your email. First, I would recommend thinking through how often you’d like to send emails as a brand and what kinds of audience actions will trigger email automations from your business. At the very least, choose to send out a monthly newsletter as a way to showcase your expertise and nurture an audience that you know is already interested in what you have to offer. Once you’ve chosen a cadence of how often to send out emails, stick with it. Inconsistency is not ideal for a content strategy.
Quick Tips:
For a high performing email, craft a strong subject line.
Asking questions, calls to action, personalization (using their name), and a sense of urgency are four tactics to have a higher open rate.
Keep an eye on your data. Pay attention to what your audience is clicking on, what they’re not clicking on, and what they seem most engaged with. The answers might surprise you
Social Media
In today's fast-paced digital world, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives, transforming the way we communicate, connect, and do business. Social media platforms have become the go-to channel for staying connected, sharing experiences. Whether you're a small startup or a well-established company, harnessing the power of social media is crucial for connecting with your target audience.
Having a strong social media presence is essential for businesses today as it allows you to connect directly with your target audience, build brand loyalty, and establish credibility in the online sphere, ultimately driving growth and success for your business. Not sure which social channel is best for your business?
Instagram is back to primarily being an image-based platform. They’ve changed the algorithm over the years to attempt keeping up with the competition (like introducing reels when TikTok was taking off), but they seem to be making a return to their original intent.Instagram is ideal for businesses that have something photogenic to share, such as food, or puppies, or clothing. For those businesses that aren’t very image-based, you have to get creative about how to visually display your ideas.
TikTok is the fastest-growing video platform on the market right now.There’s a formula for how to create compelling short-form video content that is fun, authentic, and concise for this platform. If you’re not comfortable with how to show up on video, I’d recommend spending time on the app for a while to get your sea legs. Eventually, you’ll feel comfortable enough to start playing around and testing different ideas to see what works.
Facebook has come a long way since its arrival in the early 2000’s. Originally created as a way for college kids to get to know each other (a literal book of faces for the internet), Facebook has since evolved to a place where people do everything from posting pictures of their dogs and babies to selling things on the marketplace to getting their daily intake of news. For businesses, I think the most valuable part of Facebook lies in the community pages. It’s an excellent way to build and engage with a community and can be a tremendous value-add to your digital marketing strategy.
Threads was launched by Meta this summer as a competitor to Twitter (now X). Although paid ads are not currently an option, brands can still have a presence to promote their content, and since it’s such a new entity, there’s a lot of room to grow and become a leader in the space. I’m going to leave Twitter/X off this list for now because most brands feel like it’s become too toxic of a place to invest resources.
Quick Tips:
Don’t feel pressure to show up on every social media platform. Choose the ones that make the most sense given your audience, time, and resources.
If you are struggling to come up with content for social media, go back and look through old blog posts, emails, and marketing materials to find ways to recycle old ideas.
Create pillars of content so that you always know exactly what you need to be talking about in order for your audience to understand who you are as a brand.
Blog/SEO
Like any sound financial advice that you’d receive from an advisor, you can’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Good content strategy advice is no different. Most of my clients come to me with a single-focus on social media, but are surprised to learn that one of the most effective ways to build an online business is with search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO uses specific keywords and phrases in website content to help improve your business’ chances of populating high enough in a Google search to be discovered, making a blog immensely beneficial for your website. When you publish blog content that is chocked full of both good advice and keywords, you have much better chances of bringing the right customers to your website.
Quick Tips:
Use your pillars of content (yes, the same ones you created while working on social media strategy) to help you stay on brand when cooking up new ideas
Understand that writing for SEO isn’t just about keywords, it’s about finding the best answers for whoever is doing the searching. Focus on quality over quantity.
Think about search intent when it comes to choosing your keywords. Just because certain keywords have high search volume, doesn’t mean that they’d yield the best return for your target audience.
Thought Leadership
Content that sets you up as an expert in your space and a leader in your field is considered to be thought leadership. There are many different ways to create thought leadership content, including launching a podcast, securing PR, and posting regularly on LinkedIn.
Podcasts are a great way to showcase your point of view, your expert network, and your personality. While podcasts were traditionally an auditory medium, they’ve since expanded to have a video component as well. This provides podcasters with an opportunity to have their content found in myriad ways, including any of the podcast apps, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
LinkedIn is an ideal platform for fostering and growing business-to-business relationships. Before you start writing, it is important to include a professional profile picture, and have up-to-date job information listed. Don’t be afraid to have a point of view–after all, boring never captures anyone’s attention.
Quick Tips:
Quality matters when it comes to thought leadership. If you’re going to create a podcast, make sure you find a good producer and editor, or have the technical skills to make it sound professional yourself.
Show up consistently on LinkedIn. It can be easy to forget that it exists as a platform sometimes, but making an effort to show up weekly can have a big impact.
If you’re posting as the business, follow your content pillars, but if you’re posting as the founder or CEO, it might also make sense for you to do some work on what your personal brand is all about. Otherwise, things can get a little murky.
Content Strategy = Less Overwhelm
With a solid content strategy in place, it’s always easier to approach your marketing. Without a plan, you remain on the endless hamster wheel of “what should I write about?” and struggle to post things just because you think you “should.”
The point of a content strategy is to reduce overwhelm while also helping you work towards achieving specific marketing goals. If you need a little extra help with your content strategy, book a Discovery Call with me to start the conversation.