Developing a content strategy can be a daunting task, but it’s an essential one for any business or organisation looking to effectively reach and engage their target audience. With so many different types of content and channels available, it can be challenging to know where to start and what to prioritise. That’s why we’ve gathered a panel of experts in the field of content strategy to share their insights and advice.
Our panel includes seasoned professionals from a range of industries and backgrounds, each with their own unique perspectives on developing and implementing successful content strategies. They will provide guidance on topics such as identifying your target audience, creating a content plan that aligns with your business goals, selecting the right channels to distribute your content, measuring and analysing your results, and more.
Whether you’re just starting out or looking to refine your existing content strategy, this expert panel will offer valuable insights and actionable tips to help you achieve your goals. So sit back, relax, and get ready to learn from some of the best minds in the business.
Kingsley Bye
MD Lighthouse Consultants
It is important to include content relevant to your audience that then gives them new information and the content alone can help in some way. Then also to keep the content going, posts, articles, videos. There is such a lot of content out there that you have to keep your presence current.
Louise José
Senior Marketing Consultant
As a freelance consultant, I work with many clients to develop a content strategy to suit their needs. A lot of the time what they want to say is obvious. You just have to look at their website to get an idea of key topics and themes. The hard part is convincing them to keep it simple and stick to what they know.
Once we have the key themes laid out, it’s a case of working out how their target market consumes information. Do they attend webinars, read blog posts, listen to podcasts or browse social media? They often partake in a few, then it’s a case of marrying it all together and working out clear messaging for each platform!
Giving the target multiple opportunities to get associated with the brand and keeping in contact is a surefire way to drive traffic to the site and enable inbound enquiries that will lead to sales.
Leor Franks
Director of Marketing & Business Development, Kingsley Napley
“Content may be king, but it’s all in the marketing” once said Gerald Levin, then CEO of Time Warner. His maxim translates well to the professional services industry, where often the key challenge with content is how best to leverage – both externally and internally.
One model to address the content marketing challenge in professional services is a derivative of the ‘Content Tree’ concept used by many. A five-step approach, it has phases to get buy-in, create and deploy content. It begins with the ‘seeds’ of an idea, lays down ‘roots’, develops into ‘shoots’, grows into a solid ‘trunk’ and ends most importantly in multiple ‘branches’. Bear with me! This approach is not ground-breaking, but hopefully, it is simple to follow and communicate to stakeholders and colleagues.
The ‘Content Tree’ helps to make the most of time and effort, of partner stakeholders and of the marcoms and other team members managing the project. At all points, we focus on the outputs from the content, considering how these meet business objectives and resonate with the target audience. The steps below mention various roles – stakeholder, marketer, analyst, writer and designer. Of course, sometimes, others can be involved, or the marketer can wear more than one hat!
Anna Morrish
Managing Director
There are two sides to a content marketing strategy. You have the proactive and the reactive. Every content marketing strategy needs a plan, something to work towards to ensure you cover off all questions and answers your customers and audience will be searching for, but then you also need to be flexible enough to react. To create content quickly in response to news updates, new case studies, partnership and event announcements etc.
If you don’t know where to start, the first thing I’d recommend doing is writing down a comprehensive list of questions your customers ask you. Write page content and articles that answer these questions. Further to this, record and write out any case studies you have. Include relevant mentions of partners or people you worked with and once published, send them a link to the content, so they can also share it or link to it. You may also want to consider writing a press release that you can share with local journalists and those who write about your industry.
Once you’re on a roll with your content creation, ensure you have a content calendar and that you’re able to create a variety of forms of content, including surveys, infographics, games and guides. Conduct keyword research and competitor analysis to discover other ways to get in front of your audience, and use SEO and digital PR to propel your business forward.
Laura Devonald
Digital Strategist, Webmart
The biggest mistake I see when someone runs off to develop their content strategy is starting from scratch. Unless you’re a start-up, I’m going to take a guess that you’ve already got heaps of content. The question is, is it valuable?
My first step is always a content audit to uncover where there is wastage, and where there is opportunity.
Open Excel and get a list of every single URL (page) on your site and start adding the all-important data for each page, everything from users to engagement to conversions and existing ranks. Next, try to categorise them, I like to do this in terms of a sales funnel using a model like AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action), but you could keep it super simple, for example, information and sales.
Now it’s time to analyse the data, those that see no traffic and no ranks get marked up for deletion (please remember to redirect them once they are removed!). Those that sit somewhere in the middle, perhaps they rank but see poor engagement get marked up for a deeper dive. Finally, those boasting great traffic, engagement, conversions and ranks are keepers!
Renton Fenley
CEO at The Broke Backpacker
Considering your Audience is one of the most important parts of putting together your content plan. You can create the best content in the world – but if its not resonate with the audience you need it to, then it will still be unsuccessful.
There are many things to consider in how you build your customer profile, and while it is important to consider the age and natural markers to start building that picture, it will be really vital to look at the actions and activities of the consumers such as what social media they are most likely to use, would they prefer a serious or more casual tone, how do they spend their time and money personally?
It is these features that can really help you to decide the best way to approach your customer, rather than just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
Dustin Ray
CEO & Chief Growth Officer at Incfile
Having your goal in mind will be the first step you need to take when creating a content strategy. Failing to have a discussion and make a plan for this can lead your content to become sporadic, unfocused and reactive.
When making a goal consider the following questions:
- What are we trying to achieve? (eg. Sales/Interaction/Growth)
- What audience are we trying to reach and where are we most likely to find them?
- What tools are within our means to achieve this already, and what new tools might be worth considering? (for example, creating a TikTok account to reach a younger audience)
Understanding these 3 things can implement them as a core consideration when planning out your content, meaning that you will be approaching your strategy with focus and a constant thread running through it that connects everything together.
Kathy Bennett
CEO & founder of Bennett Packaging
The content-marketing strategy should be developed in a way where a company can maintain its omnichannel presence by repurposing the content to publish on a different platform. For instance, I’ve seen many bloggers who are making a PPT blog outline for their blog-post is and then using that PPT to make an Instagram carousel post that contains the main points & keywords for their blog post. The viewers that are enticed by that short post are then redirected to their blog post and thus get inside the omnichannel loop.
Business owners and marketing teams should be focusing on repurposing content from their old-blog libraries when they are short of content ideas for other social media platforms. By this method, you’re using your own past creations to attract new audiences through different platforms.
Mike Walsh
CEO at CloudMyBiz
One thing that will be important is brainstorming. It may sound simple enough, but when you entering a new quarter, or planning for a specific project, spending time at the beginning to discuss what content you should be creating can really help all of the creative ideas come out in a less panicked approach, and having (for example) ten chosen pieces of content you want to create during that time can give you a much longer lead on for making sure that everything is done on time and that you aren’t coming up with last minute ideas.
This can cover blog topics, but also conversations you want to start on social media avenues, looking at interesting ways to build a conversation with your audience.
Ana Codallo
Community Manager
Gone are the days when you get suggestions of posting just a 500-word blog and expect your content to flourish. People are actually in search of quality content, instead of those bogus content posts you plan to put. Your topic holds the literal direction of success, whether your audience will find it interesting yet useful or not. Have a few searches and get through what your competitors are doing, so that you deploy many efforts just to outweigh them.
Besides, lurk around a few podcasts, it’s the new trend for grabbing content. Take unique ideas and spread them as much as you can. Well, talking about podcasts invest your precious time into owning them. In nutshell, you just need to have a great topic, and further use keywords and SEO optimization to increase traffic.
For instance, instead of going in for short ones, you can definitely plan on having those long topic guides. Pick a niche you’re an expert in, and start jotting your words of wisdom in a guide form. A complete information centre often attracts people, since they won’t really have to navigate toward different links thereon.
Besides, by doing so you can also score essential backlinks to have your content seen! The frequency of posting must be consistent, however, posting for just the sake of doing it doesn’t really fulfil your goals. Thereby, weight quality above quantity, and that’s the ultimate key!
David Lewis
Owner, Monegenix
Selecting and sticking to a Brand voice and tone is essential for businesses today to separate themselves from all the other mediocre businesses out there. Your content marketing strategy should show your personality which can only be achieved from a set voice and tone of your brand. Because not many readers would be sticking to reading/viewing/listening to generic content that is already available on the Internet.
With your Brand’s adjusted Tone and voice, your audience would be more eager to listen to your side of things. And, many reputable brands have retained a loyal audience because of their unique voice in their content which made people like their perspective over a general topic in their respective industry.
Voice and tone you display from your content-marketing always give your company an identity that helps interested viewers to remember your brand. And, be sure to always stay loyal to the tone you’ve used since the beginning.
The best content-marketing advice I can give is to ensure that every communication channel and social media platform is maintaining the same perspective of the company. As you don’t want your statements to contradict over different platforms!
Julius Cermak
Founder of Deer Antler Velvet
One of the most important functions of a marketing strategy, is that it helps you to understand more about your business, and your brand. When creating your strategy, it’s important to develop a good understanding of your brand’s particular purpose, principles, and ideals. This can then be used to inform your brand story.
Your brand story is a valuable part of your marketing strategy. It is often overlooked, but it supports you in building an image which is cohesive and ensures that your content is consistent across platforms. This encourages consumer trust and helps to establish a positive reputation. It also ensures that all decisions are made in a way which reflects your company’s core values and avoids contradictory or confusing content choices.
Your brand story can also assist you in determining your Unique Selling Point (USP) and help you to stand out from competitors. This can also be an opportunity to invite your consumers to contribute to your brand story, and to experience its evolution as your business grows, inspiring emotion, connection, and brand loyalty.
Having a thorough understanding of your story, mission, and goals will enable you to make effective marketing decisions which align with your purpose.
Dexter Moscow
Managing Director – Dexter Moscow
There are 4 key elements to compelling content marketing.
- To understand what the problems your clients, customers and prospects are suffering. The key is to link to a universal truth. People buy EMOTIONALLY AND DECIDE LOGICALLY
- Relevant and concise storytelling. In essence, they are short-form case studies identifying INCIDENT – ACTION – BENEFIT My Mantra is – Don’t tell me what you do – Tell me what you have done for others.
- BRANDING – All the material that you put out regardless of the social networking platform must have congruency of style, typeface, colours, and logo.
- PROFILE – Effective content marketing should have a mix of written material, video (with subtitles) and in terms of LinkedIn newsletters.
Alex Mastin
CEO & Founder of Home Grounds
Your marketing strategy should facilitate a focus on high quality content. There is no point in attracting users to your site if they are going to be disappointed when they get there. It’s essential to craft content which is useful, practical, and relevant to your consumer. Carefully consider your buyer persona, and work to ensure that your content is meeting their particular needs, wants, and aspirations.
Think also about things they may not realize they require, and how you can offer solutions which will give you an advantage over competitors. This will help to build your brand, improve your reputation, and, most importantly, increase customer satisfaction. Producing high quality content will also help you avoid any penalties which might impact SEO rankings.
Used effectively, your content marketing strategy can help to inform your content creation and provide you with the insights and information needed to produce the best results. It will help you to gain a deeper understanding of your audience so that you can create content which is suited to their specific requirements. Happier customers mean higher conversion rates.
Mario Cacciottolo
PR & Branding Manager at SBO
Don’t be daunted by SEO. When you’re starting out, it can seem like a complex and overwhelming world. Backlinks, rankings, keywords, metrics, the terminology is extensive, and the concept can be confusing. However, if you really want to grow your business, you need to get confident with your SEO strategy and learn to use it to your advantage.
Building a good SEO ranking will ensure that your content is easily discoverable by users. It can be tempting to accelerate the process, a so-called ‘Black Hat’ approach, which involves duplicating content, linking to non-relevant sites, and using invisible text and stuffed keywords. While this may provide short-term success, it’s not recommended, and in fact, will result in penalties.
Instead, focus on creating quality content, which is well-researched, relevant, and relatable to your target audience. That way, when they do access your site, they will be more likely to engage, appreciate, and enjoy their experience, and conversion rates will increase. Successfully incorporating SEO into your marketing strategy will inform, improve, and enhance the buyer’s journey, and give you the edge over competitors.
Rebekah Billingsley
Managing Director, Gfinity Digital Media
A good content strategy starts with the data but journeys deeply into insight. A great content strategy will define the consumer, identify brand permissions within a cultural need, define a clear range of themes and topics, develop a tone of voice and provide a central point between customer, commerce and content. A glorious content strategy will provide an editorial position bang in the middle of what a brand wants to say and what an audience wants to hear. At the heart of a content strategy is an editor.
Brett Downes
Founder, Haro Helpers
If you develop a content strategy for everybody, then you’ll reach nobody.
I see content as germination, it goes from a seed and the content expands and develops as your site grows into a grand old oak tree.
Zeroing in on your target market, what are their initial needs and wants and then generate content that mirrors exactly what they are looking for. As your product/service develops so will the customers, so grow your content with them.
A medical intern doesn’t perform a heart bypass on their first day, but come their 1st decade they may be a leading cardiologist in the country.
Developing your content and planning in stages will help you adjust to the changing market. Unless you have a seasonal service or product don’t plan more than 3 months ahead, as this keeps you adaptable and ability to tweak your content on a more agile basis.
Whether it’s a trending topic or a gradual rise in popularity you will be able to satisfy both instant demand and build a credible and accurate content foundation for your audience.
Alex Seleska
Director, Dragonfire
Content strategies are about the creation of innovative, engaging content that grabs the attention and encourages sharing.
The best content marketing campaigns get 50-80% of their exposure from shares, not from paid reach. Our approach is to work with our partners and creators to generate this kind of content.
Yumna Ali
Managing director urbancrafts.uk
Content strategy is developed to boast the sales of the product. There are 3 steps which should be followed while planning a content strategy.
- Recognise the “Pain and Relief “relationship between your product or service and the end consumer.
What you are offering should be the cure or relief to the end consumer’s pain.
- Once you get this cord of “Pain and Relief ” relationship now it’s time to create a perfect hook to grab the attention of the end consumer and the buyer. Hook should be interesting, and engaging. Like it could be a hook for an Optical shop or Optometrist “” Don’t show angry eyes to the wife, show them to us,,, instead””. Here in a funny way attention of the consumer is attained instead of putting it in a monotonous or boring way.
- Once you are confident that you have a solution for your target audience,,and you have managed to grab the attention of customers by perfect Hook line, now its time to explain the features of the product or service in ” Simple Language “that could be understood easily by the customer or the consumer both. They get completely aware of the benefits and features of the product or service prior to buying. Simplicity here is the key , avoid complexity. The more simple and smart you are in your explanation the more success you can gather.
One more piece of advice , be “Truthful” to the customer while describing the product, as a truthful relationship goes a long way.
Matt Baldwin
Managing Director, Coast Communications
Always start with your audience. Ask who you are writing for.
Next, ask what are you trying to achieve. What is the goal behind your content marketing programme? One designed to drive sales will look very different from one designed to raise awareness.
Consider duration. Content programmes work best over a prolonged period of time. How will you sustain that?
Ideas are the fuel for your content programme. Use creative workshops to find content themes.
Use a professional writer.
Consider channels. Video, audio or the written word? Your target audience is your guide.
Keep it brief. We are all busy people, targeted everywhere we turn. Your audience will welcome brevity.
Doga Ilter
Director & Marketing Consultant at RETLI GROUP
To develop a successful content marketing strategy, it is crucial to understand your target audience and develop a persona. Having a well-defined persona will guide your content strategy, while helping you to create the right marketing messages and choose effective channels.
Natasha Vickery-Orme
Content Manager, Inbox Insight
The best way to develop a good content strategy is to first think about who you’re writing for. Without understanding your audience, you can’t reach them with the right topics. For our Insights for Professionals platform, we have an audience-first approach. Before creating any content, we spend time getting to know our audience, what their key pain points are and what their biggest challenges are. By understanding their needs, we’re better able to create content that will help to solve these challenges and provide tangible, usable assets.
Aimee Treasure
Templeton & Partners
- Communicate with your customers to find out what content would actually interest and help them – speak regularly with sales teams to understand direct client feedback and challenges, conduct polls and ask questions across the channels they frequent, and survey existing clients and target audience groups
- Map content to customer needs, interests and pain points at each stage of the buyer’s journey/funnel
- Don’t just parrot what everyone else is saying – what can you actually say on a topic that’s new, that provides real value and a new perspective on a challenge to really help your customer group?
- Create content in different formats – blogs, reports, diagrams, infographics, videos, short GIFs, podcasts – to engage customer groups across different channels according to the ways they prefer to engage
- Continually review your content – which does well and why? What can you leverage from the most engaging content to continually improve future content?
Charles McLachlan
Founder FuturePerfect
We are a business providing knowledge, insight and wisdom for CEOs and senior executives to build the future that will ‘Make your future work’.
We have decided that the primary channel for content should be LinkedIn personal accounts as we have a set of business-to-business service offers targeting the engagement of senior leaders. These channels are supported by LinkedIn company pages and other social media platforms such as Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
However, all longer-form content is posted on our product-specific websites to provide an archive of valuable evergreen content.
Our approach is to provide a full set of free resources so that potential customers can ‘do it yourself but will recognise that our ‘do it with you and ‘do it for you’ services increase impact and success.
John Russell
EMEA Managing Director Staffing Future LLP
Do your Keyword research – Sufficient volume, low competition, high relevancy, high cost per click
Here are a few things you have to master:
- Strong execution & show personality
- Think about your channels and imagery/infographics
- On-site discipline and consistency – interlinking
- Distribution and visibility
- Deep dive into your analytics
- Original and interesting content – which is updated
- Relevant high authority backlinks/shares
Raelyn Tan
Founder
The 2 most important things to take into consideration are quality and consistency.
Firstly, the content you produce should be of the highest quality. There is so much content being published on the internet every single day that it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out. Taking the time and effort to create your best work is important instead of just pushing something random out. This creates trust and builds up your credibility.
Secondly, it is important to be consistent. Choose a frequency (of content publishing) that you are comfortable with. For instance, if you can only commit to once a week of content, then do just that. It is essential to ensure that your content strategy is realistic. It has to be something that you can follow for years to come.
Ekta Swarnkar
SEO copywriter and Founder of Tia Says
Creating a content strategy is absolutely important to launch a successful business. I wish someone would have told me this.
A content strategy keeps your business targeted at the audience you want to speak to. Creating a content strategy is also simple.My best tip is to start with creating topic clusters. Never heard of them before? Let me tell you what a topic cluster is.A topic cluster is a group of blog posts that talk about one particular topic in detail. It has one parent topic and a bunch of sub topics also called child topics.
For example, SEO can be your parent topic. And keyword research, audience research, internal linking, link building, on-page, off-page and more are your child’s topics.
Do you know topic clusters help you rank for difficult keywords? Yes, Here’s how to do it in your niche.
Paul Walker
Paul Walker
In terms of content strategies, we do something which sounds completely crazy but works extremely well. The idea is to create 50 pieces of content on a single day. We have a methodology which is designed to bring out the best in the person creating the content and happy to share this on The Expert Panel. This may sound impossible but we do it for our customers all the time and if you would like to have a look, one of our customers talks about how we do this on the first page of our website.
Just go to the website and click on the video saying ‘you did the impossible.’
This particular customer is B2C although our speciality is to do this within B2B. The craziest thing is this customer says that she learned more about her own business while creating these 50 pieces of content. And incidentally, she worked for NASA, there is a Channel 4 program about her, she has set up a load of clinics in the NHS (she is healthcare) and is a world-class, thought leader in her field.
Simon Baker
Managing Director
To understand how to build a content strategy it’s important to look at the influence of wider culture and how your brand fits in. But rather than ask ‘what’ changes culture, it can be more effective to look at ‘who’.
The change-makers, taste-makers, mavericks and renegades who challenge the status quo, that’s who.
Every culture-shaping product follows a set of characters who, in their interactions with wider communities, have captured some kind of zeitgeist and created something new: a new way of speaking, of behaving, of expressing themselves. Brands then follow: think of Nike Airforce One, the iPhone and TESLA; they all followed actual people who captured a zeitgeist and leveraged technology as catalysts for cultural change.
In other words, people – and the norms and customs and ideas they develop — exist when there is no actual product involved. People and their ideas come first. Always.
Often when someone is disruptive, people turn to look, and this attention can create a small movement of people, ideas or ideals; a small wave. Just as a maverick disrupts and gains attention, so too do emerging sub-cultures. Initially led by a small group of individuals, subcultures are interesting, different and refreshing. In their originality, they are inherently creative, bold and risk-taking
Depending on the impact, benefit and timing of this new movement, wider culture may start to adopt some of its elements. This adds and shapes culture while adding fire to the sub-culture until it becomes absorbed and appropriated by the mainstream. We’ve seen this countless times as disruptive technology, sport or politics becomes the norm.
To me, this is emblematic of the transition of followers being ‘core’ to a movement moving to those who are following the ‘lifestyle’ of that movement. Core has credibility that can only be earned through exclusivity and via a highly influential group of people. As that area of culture is adopted by the mainstream, the core becomes a lifestyle.
Continue Reading Baker’s How to Develop a Content Strategy: Look at the influence of wider culture and how your brand fits in
Benj Arriola
Senior SEO Director, ForwardPMX/Assembly
I generally separate my content into 2 main categories. Content for:
- Products/Services
- Content Marketing
Content for products and services highlight all the information a website visitor needs to know about a product or service. This may be across a few pages or thousands of pages or more, depending on the nature of the product or service. The content here helps the potential customer make the buying decision. The content should help influence or compel them to buy.
But when we talk about content for products and services for sites with 100k to millions of pages, some type of algorithmic optimization should also be implemented, which this is dependent on the richness of the structured data on every page that can help formulate rules for the default values of various page elements, such as the title tag, meta description, image alt text, headings etc.
While content used for content marketing purposes, even if they may also help convert into a sale of a product or service, another use of the content in content marketing is to also improve popularity of the webpage. Content marketing pages are often featured in a blog, but they may also be in other forms such as FAQs, knowledge base, forums, how-to guides, and more. Content will not always be only text, but can also be in various forms, such as images, videos, interactive pages like quizzes, games, surveys, downloadable pdfs, software, tools, etc. The content here intents to be more engaging, and promotes to get the content shared in social media to increase visibility. Topics here stretch the relevance of simply selling a product or service. It can talk about the application of it, or tips and tricks, other use cases, events, or things that are just interesting, informative or even inspiring. As more people see this content, it helps improve brand visibility, thus improving brand recall which helps general demand. And as an after effect also, more potential natural links going to these useful pages, which also help out in SEO ranking.
Sean Walker
Director, Niro RS
Content creation in today’s business world is everything, especially when it comes to attracting new logo customers.
I’ve personally found that video content designed with the customers needs in mind, solving business issues in a clear and pragmatic fashion via the likes of business led social networks IE LinkedIn is paramount to success here.
Twitter & YouTube are also good outlets for video content, alongside the more fresh approaches that can be made via Instagram & TikTok, entirely dependent on your target market/customer demographics.
In summary when creating content – think from your ideal clients “needs & wants” and strategise your content to create a clear interest in your services to prospective buyers. This applies to video, imaging, blogging and all other content entities.
Clement Lim
B2B Copywriter and Content Strategist
The foundation of any successful content marketing strategy depends on three steps:
- Define the target audience or audiences for your content. If you have more than one type of customer, you will have more than one target audience. Decide which content type and channel will be most effective for delivering your content to each audience.
- Work out what problem you will be solving for your audience. Your content should be able to engage both people who know what their problem is and those who are still figuring out what their main challenges are.
- Identify what makes you unique in solving your audience’s problem. Your audience needs to know why they should choose you over your competitors. When you have pinpointed your unique quality this needs to be a core message in your content.
Lindsay Sutherland
LS Enterprises LLC – Owner
My Content Effect Method teaches business owners how to scale their business by using a layered strategy that incorporates short-form content and long-form content so they can leverage a strategy that has lasting effects so they can stop spending money on quick fixes rather than long-lasting solutions.
Debbie Roy
Organic Social Media Strategist
I like to approach content strategy differently based on who I am working with. Still, one thing that always remains the same is ensuring that we are clear on the problem we are solving or the benefit the audience will gain from engaging with the content.
Get clear on who your ideal client is; some businesses go into it thinking that if they advertise, they will reach their ideal clients anyway, but you’ll make your life a lot harder and waste money if you don’t define your ideal clients. Things can vary significantly from one generation to another, and the same goes for other market segments.
When it comes to content creation, I always recommend leaving room for flexibility and trying to be one step ahead. Visit Reddit, Quora, and answerthepublic.com to see the types of questions asked regarding the industry or niche that you are working with. Take those questions and questions you may receive on social media to create helpful content.
In terms of the type of content, if you’re new to the online world, test the waters with various formats, videos, carousels, reels, live videos, graphics, and GIFs. Make it a point to regularly spend time with your analytics so that you can refine and define the best type of content for your audience. Really nailing down who your ideal client is will also play a big role in you knowing the type of content that will work best for your audience.
David White
CEO Weboptimiser
First focus on a topic related to your business where you know people are interested. Verify the level of interest by undertaking keyword analysis on Amazon and Google. Time taken to research keywords is time well spent as this will verify you are targeting a significant audience. If you want to target a very small number of people target them individually.
Secondly, write out key information your audience must know in order to succeed or protect themselves in your chosen topic area to set yourself up as an expert. Work out a step-by-step guide, a calculator, or system and make an offer to send it to them, or tell them where they can get it from. As the mafia might say, make an offer they can’t refuse!
Then give it to them, although they have to request it, as increasingly you cannot give information and track them anymore as you could, due to privacy changes.
When you start you may find this difficult to do, but after a while, you will find there are lots of options available to you. Most of them are low-cost and free. I have outlined some of them in my new book: How to Start A Business Without Any Money. Get your copy from Amazon.
Martin cox
Strategic Development and PR Director – Copestone Marketing
Data and Insight are your best friends when it comes to developing a content strategy.
Tools such as SEMrush or Ubersuggest allow agencies to understand the relevant terms being searched-for, and the frequency (and potential value) of those terms.
Armed with this quantitative data, we look to create a qualitative understanding so the data then speaks more than numbers to us – this analysis adds significant depth to the process and allows us to hone in on key terms and understand the rationale behind those searches.
Once we have both terms and an understanding of the why of those searches, and only then, we can start to craft a content strategy that is answering those questions, and solving problems for our potential customers.
And the how? A multi-layered approach of blogging, social media, PR, Video, and even memes – all helping our customer to solve their challenges.
Solve their problems, add value, win trust.
