How to Create Your Content Strategy From Scratch

Author: Jordan Teicher / Source: Contently

Any brand can increase awareness here or there, but the ones that stand out over time have a plan in place to guide smarter decision-making.

Content strategy boils down to figuring out what content will help your target audience and inspire them to take actions that boost your business. Doing that successfully requires melding together some moving parts. To name just a few, you need to set goals, research your audience, and map out how buyers will interact with your content.

How you craft a content strategy will ultimately be unique to your situation. There is no grand solution that every brand can copy to triple their revenue. However, there are a few core tactics that will put you on the right path.

Here are the seven tasks to focus on before you start creating content.

1. Set a mission, goals, and KPIs

A few years ago, athenahealth debuted athenaInsight, its data-driven news publication, to make a serious investment in content marketing. According to executive director of content and communications John Fox, the marketing team made a choice to adjust the brand’s point of view as they prepped for the launch.

“At various points in our history, we’ve talked a lot about what’s wrong with healthcare, what’s broken. We’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that in terms of thought leadership,” Fox said. But we’ve made a conscious move to point the way toward a solution, being that voice of hope and optimism to help doctors and others.”

Your mission should align your team and make it easier to eventually talk about your brand’s products organically. The goals and metrics will follow.

Since athenahealth’s initial goal was building an audience, the team was “obsessed over growth metrics like unique visitors.” But they also operated with a long-term view of business metrics, so their plan also accounted for pageviews per visit and visits per reader—data points tied to loyalty.

Let athenahealth’s early steps serve as a framework for getting your content program off to a clear start. “You can’t stand for ten things,” Fox said. “You need to stand for one thing and have a clear message for what you’re putting out in marketing. Align everything behind that as much as possible.”

2. Study your audience

In content chaos, the first mistake marketers make is leaning too heavily on intuition. They either try to reach everyone, or they trim their focus too narrowly on the person who has the most purchasing power. Gut instinct has a place in content marketing, but not if it goes unchecked.

“When I work with large technology companies, all they want to do is reach the CMO. And all they’ll ever tell me is their audience is the CMO,” said Rebecca Lieb, a research analyst and strategic advisor who co-founded Kaleido Insights. . “I push back. It’s not [just] the CMO. It’s the VP of marketing, it’s the SVP of marketing, it’s the assistant to those people, and the interns. They can be so laser-focused on the final decision-maker that they ignore everyone else in the decision-making process.”

The fix here is simple: Do research to find out more about your primary and secondary audiences. And don’t be afraid to weave together qualitative and quantitative data.

You need to define your own audience before you can own it.

Interview your existing customers to find out more about their demographics, habits, and preferences. What publications do they read on a regular basis? What level of education do they have? What are their biggest problems? What topics interest them the most?

For a general audience, you’ll also want to gather high-level data on age, industry, company name, title, etc. Contently conducts an annual survey at the end of every year to test assumptions about our audience. Sure, we want to reach the CMO, but we also want to help editors, managers, and other senior marketers who care about content marketing on a more granular level.

3. Perform SEO analysis

Once you have a better picture of your audience, you can lock on in on what topics they care about the most. Enter: Google.

Search algorithms used to have this weird, mystical quality in marketing because everyone was supposed to care about them but very few people actually knew how they worked. Thankfully, that changed over the years. Third-party tools like Moz and BuzzSumo now offer data on valuable search engine optimization data like keyword volume, difficulty, and click-through rates.

Gather all of this information and compile a list of primary and secondary keywords. For us, a primary keyword is “content marketing resources”–it’s a frequent search term that just about everyone in our audience cares about. A secondary keyword is “brand voice”—it’s important for part of our audience, but it’s a bit more niche and probably isn’t what a buyer would search when they’re ready to make a purchase.

How you rank for keywords related to your business could ultimately be the difference between good or bad brand awareness. Today, it’s not uncommon for brands to expect a majority of their traffic to come from search—up to 70 or 80 percent in some cases.

As Monster VP of marketing Margaret Magnarelli put it, “Search traffic is underrated. It’s so important because it can be the first opening for brand awareness. They’re not looking for your company. They’re tripping over your company because you happen to be providing the information that…

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