Coming up with the ideas, creating the content and getting it published is only part of the job.
Content marketing doesn’t really work without a strategy supporting it.
Here are 5 tips to help build a successful content strategy.
1. Identify your target audience
If your content isn’t created with a specific audience in mind, it won’t land. Simple as that.
Content needs to resonate, which means it needs to be relevant. And being relevant is much easier if you know who you want to talk to before you create the content.
Trying to appeal to lots of different groups will inevitably lead to your content appealing to no one.
2. Value for your audience vs the sell
You know what you want your content to deliver something. But content marketing isn’t advertising, it’s not a direct sell. (How many ads do you read?)
Plan your content around building a relationship, positive association and trust with your target audience.
Think about how your audience benefits from reading/watching/listening to your content without you getting anything in return.
Yes, you can have a call to action, but if you are always trying to sell or segue into a sell, it’s obvious and a turn-off.
3. Promotional strategy
Too often, all the effort goes into creating content without much thought given to how to get eyeballs on it.
Your thought leader, white paper, research, blog series, podcast episode, video – whatever it is – needs a promotion strategy.
Posting a link to your article once on LinkedIn isn’t job done. It will only appear in the feed of a select few of your connections & followers. (See my previous post How to Magnify Your Visibility on LinkedIn)
Plan how and where you are going to promote your content and how many times you are going to promote it.
A proper promotional strategy will get more eyes on your content, extend its shelf life (if it’s not time-sensitive) – and help keep your social channels stocked up with content.
4. Be realistic
Creating content, editing/designing, scheduling and repurposing all take time.
Getting relevant approvals can also be time-consuming, so it’s important to be realistic about how long it will take from the initial idea to publishing and schedule appropriately.
Start with when you want to go live/publish and work backwards, adding in wriggle room for unexpected delays.
Keep approvals/’editors’ to a minimum, and if you need clients to sign off on a piece of content, factor in how that will be managed.
(Journalist tip: Never give people the real deadline if you can avoid it.)
It can be easier to achieve consistency by starting small or less frequent and building up rather than aiming big, struggling and being sporadic.
A good approach is to do more with less and sweat content with a proper promotion strategy (see point 4).
5. Different content types
It’s easy to stick with what you know, especially when there are many different demands on time, but the world moves on.
If you are producing the same type of content, you may be limiting your reach.
Not everyone consumes information the same way, so it’s a good idea to mix it up a bit.
You don’t have to start from scratch; instead, plan your content so it can be reformatted easily.
For example, a video can easily turn into an article or series of shorter LinkedIn posts. (Or both.)
Key learnings pulled from white paper can make an engaging carousel/slider on LinkedIn.
A blog post responding to clients’ pain points can be turned into a short explainer video.
BONUS: Some time-saving content creation tools I use
Otter.ai – automated transcript tool
Otter turns videos, podcasts and interviews quickly into text.
Canva – design tool
I’ve set up a branded template for LinkedIn carousels/document sliders, so I just have to drop in the text each time.
For my personal Instagram account, I also use Canva to create Reels easily.
Veed.io – Video editing
iMovie makes me want to cry, Veed is more user-friendly, so I use it for editing and adding subtitles.
Descript – Creating video clips
Descript transcribes your video (or audio), you then highlight the bit of text you want, and it creates a clip from what is highlighted.
Excellent for splicing and dicing longer videos into social media-friendly clips.
What tools do you use?
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