5 Steps to Developing an Effective Content Strategy

Content marketing, using posts on your website, blog, and social media pages to gain customers and establish your business as an authority, has never been more relevant. 

Posting randomly is much less effective than having a cohesive content strategy. If you don’t have a well-developed content strategy for your business, it’s time to develop one, and here’s how.

What is a content strategy?

A content strategy is a game plan for what you post on your digital channels, such as your website, your blog, and your social media pages. 

This plan should include the topics you plan to address, where you’ll post each piece of content, what format you use and who will write or produce the content.

A good content strategy also covers what you hope to accomplish, your target audience, and the metrics you will use to determine whether your strategy is successful.

What is the purpose of a content strategy?

There are many benefits to having a written, cohesive plan. These include:

• Making sure that all of your content supports your brand marketing
• Saving time by knowing what you’ll be writing about and where you’ll be posting your content
• Helping all content team members understand what’s expected of them and when it’s expected
• Setting a goal or goals for the strategy and the means to measure success

Does content strategy help SEO?

A good content strategy can help your SEO results, depending on how it’s written. 

Ideally, your strategy will focus on topics that focus on keywords and phrases that rank well on Google. 

In addition, you might include in your strategy asking experts in your field to write guest posts that will likely garner high-quality backlinks.

The difference between a content strategy and a content plan

While these two concepts are similar, a content strategy builds on a content plan to include the purpose of each post, as well as the goals and results you expect from your content. 

A content plan simply lists what, when, and where you plan to post content. 

What are the 3 components of a content strategy?

As we touched on above, three essential parts of a good content strategy include the purpose and goals for your content, your target audience, and how to measure your strategy’s success.

Five steps to developing a content strategy

1. Establish your goals, objectives, and target audience

The first step to creating an effective content strategy is to sit down with your team and decide what you want to accomplish with your content. 

Do you want new customers or site users? 

Do you want to promote a new product or location? 

Maybe you want people to sign up for a free eBook or attend your webinar. 

Once you decide on your goals, narrow down who you want to target with your content.

2. Do your research

This is a step that many people skip to their peril. 

Good research can be the difference between people reading your posts on the first page and having them languish on the sixth page of Google’s SERP. 

This step includes looking at what your competitors are doing with their content, as well as, using a keyword tool to determine the most effective keywords that relate to the chosen content.

3. Build your content calendar

Once you’ve decided what you’re going to write about, your goals, your keywords, and your audience, it’s time to build a calendar that tells your team what topics you’ll be writing about, when you’ll write the content and where you’ll post it. 

The calendar should assign someone to be in charge of each piece of content, whether that means writing it themselves or outsourcing.

4. Create and post your content

Of course, even the best strategy won’t be effective until you actually produce and post your content. 

After you’ve taken the time to create a content calendar, it’s time to publish your content and monitor its performance.

5. Measure and analyze your results

Lastly, you’ll want to use the metrics outlined in your content strategy to determine whether your content is helping to advance your goals. 

Are you getting new site users, new customers, and/or new event attendees? 

If you’re falling short of your goals, make sure that your goals are realistic. 

If they are, then look at how small changes in your strategy might help better your results.

Writer Access can help your content strategy be a success

Having a good content strategy doesn’t mean you have to write and produce all your content in-house. 

Writer Access has a stable of more than 15,000 writers with expertise in a vast range of subjects. Our track record speaks for itself, as we have produced more than two million projects for customers with a 99.97% success rate. 

We make it easy to give us a try, as Writer Access offers a two-week trial. Visit us today to get started.