9 Tips on Creating a Kick-Ass Content Strategy

Creating a content strategy is a sure-fire way to figure out what content your target audience will love, encouraging them to take actions on your site, therefore giving your business a little (or big) boost.

Essentially, your content marketing strategy acts as the ‘why’ you should be creating content, so not only is it a great tool for ensuring you create the right sort of content, but it’s also an effective means to convincing colleagues and managers why good content is a necessity for your site. If you need a bit more clarity on why content marketing is so important, have a read of our blog post around what content marketing means.

Already aware of how awesome content marketing is? That’s what we like to hear! So, without any further ado, here are our top 9 tips to help you create a kick-ass content strategy that will get results for your business…

1. Set your goals

This may seem like an obvious one, but it’s important to make sure you’ve set some goals, so you’ve got something to measure against after the content is live. You might want to see website visits increase by a certain percentage, increased time or engagement on your site, or you might want to use your content to drive higher conversions; once you’ve set out some goals you’ll also want to identify when you want to see those results by.

Tip: It’s important to be realistic. You’re not going to increase web traffic by 50% overnight. When it comes to content, it needs to be nurtured, but if done correctly and with thought behind it, you will see results.

2. Make sure you know your audience and your competitors

Studying your audience is an important aspect when developing a successful content strategy. You’re going to want to ensure that your content is designed for these customers, based on various demographics and behaviours. The chances are, you already know a fair amount about your audience, so this should be a fairly easy part to your overall strategy.

Your competitors also play a key part in building out your content strategy; we recommend identifying 2 or 3 main competitors which you can do some analysis around (which we’ll discuss in more detail in point 5). If you want to know who your competitors are from a search perspective, tools such as SEMrush can help paint a picture.

3. How’s your current content performing?

Assessing your current position in terms of existing content is a good way to identify what works for the business. If you’ve got blog content on the site, how is it performing? Have a read through and see whether the content on the site is relevant, a decent length and includes a selection of the right keywords. Don’t worry if you don’t already have a blog (as we’re aware you might be creating a content strategy to help you create one); you can also look into the landing pages on your site too.

4. Conduct a content gap analysis

A great way to explore what content is missing on your site; a content gap analysis helps you to identify ‘gaps’ in your keyword research where no content is currently ranking. It’s a great way to build out themes for a blog, so we highly recommend you add this into your overall content strategy. Here’s a super-quick rundown on how you’d do this:

• Gather all the keywords your site is currently ranking for into an excel spreadsheet
• Tag these up by categories so you can easily sift through which keywords belong to which category
• Filter your keywords by those that aren’t currently ranking
• Look through the list of non-ranking keywords and use the categories to explore what themes can be grouped together
• Explore what content already exists for these keywords through Google searches to give you an idea of what ranks well.

5. Conduct a competitor analysis

With your competitors (which you identified earlier), you’ll want to explore how they’re performing content-wise too. Things to explore include:

• Where do they rank better than you based on your shared keywords? How are they using these keywords to their advantage?
• What relevant content do they have that you don’t and what does the word count look like?
• How do they categorise their content?

6. What are the best content channels?

Once you’ve got your competitor analysis and content gap analysis, you can start to build a plan of where you need to make improvements. Your new-found insights will lead you as to where you need to create content and where your site is lacking in certain keywords. You might need to do some more work to the blog, you may need to create some new landing pages or update your FAQs, let the data guide you as to what you’ll need to flesh out your content creation with.

7. Plan your content into a calendar

Whether you prefer to use roadmaps, calendars, presentations or other forms of organisation, it’s important to figure out what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it!

Tip: Share your content calendar with everyone in the business if you can, communication is a great way to get everyone on board and

8. It’s time to get creative!

You’re now in a position to get your most fabulous content writers on board to get writing! Don’t forget to make the most of the keywords to create relevant content that your customers will love. You can also use tools such as SEMrush’s content template to ensure your content is the right length and that it includes the optimum amount of keywords. For some additional reading, check out what tools we think are fab for creating engaging content.

9. Don’t forget to explore the results

It’s not going to happen immediately, but don’t forget to explore how your new, optimised content is performing. Go back to your goals so you can check out what you wanted to achieve, and with a bit of luck (alongside of course your well-thought-out content strategy), your content will have had a super-positive effect on your website.

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