Content Strategy: Keep It Simple!

When you look at these stats, one thing becomes clear:  if your business is not online, you’re missing out big time (in fact, you’re almost non-existent to the rest of the world)!

In my previous post, I wrote about why you should use content to grow your business. Understanding the basic logic is easy. The challenging part is how to come up with a content strategy that ticks all the right boxes and gets tangible results, such as generating new leads, building a relationship of trust and credibility or raising brand awareness.

Unless your last name is Kardashian and you break the Internet every time you tweet, you’ll need a content marketing strategy to put your business on the digital map.

Setting up a content strategy seems quite daunting to most, but it doesn’t need to be.
 

Understanding Content Strategy

Since I’ve started working in content marketing at Omibee, I’ve realized it entails much more than writing blog posts and sharing updates, videos and images on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

You need a STRATEGY: you have to know what the goals of your content are and who your target audience is and figure out a way to reach both, your goals and your audience, with an overall positive impact on your business.

In fact, content creation without strategy often leads to generic content with no core themes or purpose. Your target audience gets confused and doesn’t feel engaged and your brand’s credibility gets hurt in the process. As a result, you won’t see a positive impact of content in your marketing efforts.

To turn it into something you can relate to, think of your content marketing strategy as a gourmet food truck: it makes your food (content) stand out from generic restaurants food (competitors) and reach potential customers at the most appropriate times and places, making it easy for them to grab a delicious meal if they're hungry (solves a problem), and if they enjoy it, they will start looking for you instead and recommending your food to colleagues, friends and family (reputation, brand awareness, new leads, new sales).
 

Don’t Get Lost Along the Way

You want to set up your own gourmet food truck, but don’t know where to start? You can find tons of resources online, from comprehensive guides and videos to blog posts about how to build a content marketing strategy. But, if you’re like me, it’s easy to get caught up in so much information about personas, SEO, analytics, content audits, etc. You get confused and it almost looks like it requires extraordinary skills to put a content strategy together.

In one of my researches, I’ve come across a great article by Isla Mcketta about applying elements of storytelling to crafting a content strategy for your brand.

You’ll see that from the perspective of writing a love story, for example, writing a strategy for your content is not that complex, after all: who is the person most likely to fall in love with your brand? What kind of content will catch his or her eye? What are his or her fears, concerns, your blog posts will have to help them overcome to win them over? Who are your rivals (and what’s the best way to hinder them)?  

If you’re curious about the storytelling approach, Isla McKetta put together a template that can be very useful to start researching and writing your own content strategy.

Conclusion: Understand how content marketing can work for your business and keep the approach as simple as possible, so that you don’t get confused about what you should write about and how and you don’t confuse your audience about who you are and what you can do for them. Keep it simple!