A person’s time is the most important commodity that they possess. Money can be earned, and material items come and go, but as creatures trapped tragically in our relationship with time, our precious seconds are the only source that we possess that cannot be replenished.
And so, when considering your organization’s content strategy, first consider everyone’s relationship with time, because if your content isn’t worth someone’s time to read, then it’s not worth the time to write, and it’s not worth the time to publish and push.
Since we all value our time differently, first consider whose time you’re looking to enrich with your content, which brings us to our first tip.
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Who is your content for? Can you get more specific? If you’re unsure of who you’re writing for, it will make generating meaningful content that bolsters your brand much more of a challenge. The more defined this audience persona can be — their age, role(s), preferences, pain points, etc — the more you can sharpen your content to serve their needs.
Knowing who you’re writing for will help define the trajectory and depth of the article’s content, as well as the tone of voice you might adopt as the writer. Writing for novices in your space will mean you will need to explain fundamentals, define jargon, and progress through your thoughts slowly to ensure your reader is understanding. Writing for experts will require you to push their boundaries of understanding as they’re unlikely to be looking for content that recycles what they already know.
If you’re unsure of who you’re writing for, you can start by seeing who has engaged with your content in the past, be it a comment or a share.
In addition to framing who you’re writing for, establish some KPIs and goals that you’re looking to track and reach with your strategy. Perhaps you’re looking to increase the loyalty of current readers, in which you’d look to track pageviews per visit as well as visits per reader.
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You’ll need to understand how your content fits into your marketing and sales strategy to appropriately create and disseminate it.
On a high-level, the marketing funnel is Awareness → Engagement → Consideration → Purchase, with every step narrowing along the way (hence the term “funnel”).
Content can assist in every phase of this funnel, but consider the funnel in sequence when building your strategy. Later in the funnel, your content will serve to engage your Sales (pre-conversion) and Support (post-conversion) teams to ensure your continuously providing value to your audience, with the eventual goal of turning them into a brand advocate who helps add more leads into your funnel.
Content in the Awareness phase is meant to make your brand known and establish legitimacy at the outset of your audience’s research, so that when they are closer to needing your product or service, they already trust your brand and wisdom which eases them further down the funnel.
This is establishing the when and where of your content, starting with your distribution strategy.
Defining Your Distribution Strategy
The sad truth is that, just because you’ve taken the time to pop up a blog and write some content, doesn’t mean there will be anyone showing up to read it. A little proactivity goes a long way in ensuring your content gets the right eyeballs from get-go.
This is why exploring alternate platform like Salesforce can be a game-changer. Such platforms not only offer tools to streamline your content distribution but also help you uncover new opportunities, particularly if your target audience includes business-oriented users. By aligning your strategy with platforms where your audience already spends time, you can amplify your content’s visibility.
The secret is to populate your content in places where your target audience will see it. This is where your audience persona comes in, as you’ll need to consider the content and social media channels that your audience tends to ingest.
You’ll also want to consider your backlinking strategy as a way to grow your readership. Swapping backlinks and even offering Guest authorship with other relevant blogs and articles will open up the avenues that your target audience has to find you through.
Creating a Content Calendar
Your strategy is moved into action through your content calendar. Knowing what you’ll publish and when adds consistency to your releases as well as predictability for your readers. That said, it isn’t the sheer volume of content that will win you a devoted readerbase, so overcommitting writing resources to generating constant content isn’t in your best interest. Instead, focus on publishing valuable content at a competitive yet sustainable rate.
Easier said than done, right? The quality of your content is extremely important, as informative content is far more valuable and effective than any ad will ever be. Great content establishes your brand as a thought leader in your space and offers value before a potential client or customer even engages with you directly.
Some thoughts on how to bolster the quality of your content:
Share Your Knowledge
Being a thought leader means you’re willing to share what you know, so don’t feel like you need to hold back any wisdom or expertise. Earning trust and establishing a knowledgeable tone comes from freely sharing your knowledge rather than restricting it based on a conversion or engagement.
Solicit Others
You don’t need to know everything to become a source of knowledge. It’s encouraged to reach out to others to quote in your pieces or incorporate their wisdom so that your piece reflects the thoughts and research of many in your field.
Have Conviction
If you feel strongly about something in your field, make it known. Perhaps it makes sense to outline the conventional wisdom and the thinking behind it first, but definitely share why you think your perspective is valuable. Unique content written with conviction carries more gavitas to readers, even if you wind up being “wrong”.
When executing your strategy correctly, you’ll have some pieces that are bonafide winners. They rank well in SEO, you can trace conversions from them, and they solicit reactions and shares with ease. To scale this success, consider fractional hiring to bring in industry-specific professionals who can help repurpose or amplify your top-performing content effectively.
Even at this stage, these pieces can provide further value to your brand and others by collaborating with similar companies by offering to link back and feature their brand in some of your successful posts. This can be in the form of a listicle such as a list summing up the best project management software or through a value driven thought provoking article teaching readers about project management types and methodologies.
In both of those instances what makes marketers successful is firstly creating a highly ranking piece of content. Second driving traffic to resources of colleagues at other companies and building strong relationships to ensure that these favors are returned.
Strategies change based on insights and trends. If your content is landing more effectively on a different segment, or you find a shift of tone or viewpoint solicits more engagement, be bold and chase it. The core concept here is not to just write content for content’s sake, rather with a bigger value lattice in mind for both you and the reader.