Content Strategy Software: How It Makes a Content Strategist’s Life Easier

What is Content?

The term content is often referred to as the information we write about and provide to customers, but it is actually an umbrella term that includes so much more! The images you see in a newspaper, the information you read online, and even the video that you watch on your television all refer to different kinds of content on many different kinds of platforms! When it comes to content creation, there are many different ways that you could be defined as a content creator. For example, we here at Markethinkers define our content through SEO Copywriting, which our team of experts help to plan, design and create. This type of content is more commonly displayed on blogs and websites and it helps brands gain organic traffic through unpaid tactics! 

Implementing, planning and designing your content is extremely important, and it should be done with careful consideration with regards to what you are promoting and who your target audience is. Planning your content with the intention of understanding these two elements can make all the difference in ensuring that your content inspires a potential customer to make a purchase or complete the desired action. 

What is Content Strategy?

In today’s age, online presence and the way you present yourself to your target market can make all the difference in whether or not your potential customers purchase from you, or make their way to one of your competitors. Having good-quality content that has been developed specifically for your unique products and offerings is extremely important, no more than ever! 

Content strategy refers to the planning, monitoring and development of content. The best content strategy is well-thought-out, developed with the understanding of goals and intention behind what you are hoping to achieve and it is always easy to understand. Content strategists and marketing agencies that develop content strategies and the content itself dedicate a lot of time and effort into creating the strategy and supporting elements of the content. This ensures that their clients know exactly what to expect out of the content and the strategist themselves have a good understanding of what the client is hoping to gain from the content itself. While the content strategy for startups is particularly important as it can be a good way to define who your company is and what they do, each and every company that is producing any kind of content should have a clearly defined set of content strategy goals and a team who can help to implement and create this vision. 

The main content strategy principles revolve around creating content that is easy to recognise and aimed towards helping your brand or business become more personable. By ensuring that your target audience can relate to and understand the content you are producing, you are helping to create awareness around your business and are ensuring that your goals and in line with the content that you are creating. By creating a content strategy that keeps these principles in mind, you are on your way to creating great content! 

How to Create Content Strategy?

Define Your Goals

One of the first things that any content strategist should do is lay out a list of clearly defined and achievable goals, both short and long term things that they want to achieve through the development of the content strategy and content itself. A sample content strategy document is on way to ensure that both you, as a content strategist, and your client know exactly what is going to come from creating the content and what should be achieved within a certain period of time. This set of clearly defined goals should include timeframes in which this should be done and the best methods to go about achieving these goals 

Do the Persona Research

Understanding who your target audience is and the best ways to attract them and draw them in using your content is a big part of creating a good content strategy. Persona research involves finding out who your target market is and what they like, dislike and the more common platforms that they use. This is particularly important when considering social media content strategy as the different platforms that are more commonly used do tend to differ between different age groups. There are many different ways that you can go about doing persona research, things like surveys, interviews and market research reports are all considered to be effective in helping to create your persona. Generally, at the end of your persona research, you should have created your ideal customer, highlighting their gender, age, nationality, likes and dislikes. 

Conduct a Content Audit

A content strategy audit is the collecting of all relevant information and content on your website and analysing it to see what works and what does not. this ensures that brands and businesses do not have to start from scratch when looking to optimise their content, and can take existing content and better align it with taking the content strategy and current goals of the business into account. having all of your current content collected and displayed for you to see will allow for brands and businesses to better examine what in their content needs work and what is still relevant to their goals. A content audit is thus an important part of the process of creating a good content strategy. 

Do a Keyword Research

In today’s age, where SEO can make all the difference in the amount of organic traffic that makes its way to your website, it is incredibly important that you include keyword research in your content strategy. There are tons of different SEO tools that are able to easily help provide you with the best and most effective keywords, ensuring that you are optimising your content to be recognised by search engines. Along with SEO, paid tactics, such as using Google ads keyword finder may also help you to find keywords, and quickly attract customers to your website. 

Choose a Content Management System

Content creation and development can often get pretty technical, and if you do not have the skills and the know-how to manage your content, you could fall behind. This is why content management systems offer the perfect platform to develop and create your content, leaving the platform itself to take care of the nitty-gritty technical issues. Finding a content management system that works well for you will ensure that your content is not only developed with the intent to draw in customers but that it will also be recognised as good content by the search engine crawlers who manage your search engine results page rank. 

Determine Which Type of Content You Want to Create

There are many different kinds of content and it is important that you decide on what kind you hope to use within your content strategy. With each different type of content, you need to make considerations for different things, and the tactics you use will depend on this element. This is another instance where your buyer persona will come in handy and being able to determine who your target audience is and what type of content they prefer will ensure that depending on the type of content is quick and easy. 

Brainstorm For Content Ideas

A brainstorming session within a content strategy team meeting will involve coming up with many different ideas for content and then whittling this list down by aligning your goals and buyer persona with the different ideas. Having a number of different suggestions about the content you create will offer a team the chance to combine ideas together and generate content that may have not been thought of without the help of the group mentality. Coming up with good and relevant content is extremely important, so monitoring the market and analysing your buyer persona in great detail will go a long way to make sure these brains storming sessions yield good quality content ideas! 

Publish and Manage Your Content

Once you have published your content, you will need to monitor it closely and see if it is hitting the short term goals that you laid out for it. Managing your content is a process that should not be forgotten and you need to see whether the tactics you have put in place are doing what they were designed to do. 

Track and Optimize Content

Many make the mistake of assuming that once content is published that it should no longer be tracked or monitored. This could be detrimental to the results you receive from your content and it should be noted that an effective content marketing strategy involves closely monitoring, tracking and updating content if need be. The market is always changing and so the content that we use to draw customers in and keep their attention needs to change and adapt all the time to ensure the best results. 

Why Is It Important to Have a Content Strategy?

Having a content strategy offers brands and businesses the opportunity to define their marketing goals and decide on where they want to be, both in the short and long term. Without this kind of strategy formulated and laid out, brands would have no concept of where their content sits and what needs to be done to refine it. Business is driven by goals, you can only reach stage number two once you have completed stage number one, and marketing and content planning work in a very similar way. You need to complete a set of tasks and come up with clearly defined goals and timelines in order to be successful. A content strategy also ensures that the successes you have can be measured accurately, offering brands and businesses the opportunity to see what they are doing right and what could perhaps use a bit more work. Having this information and strategy on hand could make all the difference in whether or not your company succeeds or fails, and each one should have a well thought out and clearly defined content strategy to ensure success! 

Why Do Content Strategist’s Need to Create a Well Defined Content Strategy?

To get the outcomes you are hoping for, a content marketing strategy needs to be clearly defined, with the goals, outlines and time frame all determined and projected before you have even started creating the content itself. A content strategy needs to be clearly defined in order for your team to be able to work around one identified goal, this goal is projected and analysed by an entire team and the process around defining and completing this goal is clearly laid out within the team. Any content strategy articles will tell you that in order to be successful at creating content, you have to be able to concisely describe and project what you are hoping your content to do. Whether it’s drawing in 50 website visits or helping you to sell 250 products before a certain date, defining the goals within your content strategy is always a good place to start and draw on for the rest of your strategy. 

What Are The Differences Between Content Strategy and Content Marketing?

While content strategy involves coming up with the ideas for the content that will promote your product or appear on your website, content marketing is the actual process of implementing these tactics and strategies. Content marketing goals outline what content marketing will need to do and it provides a space where ideas can be designed, improved on and then implemented through content marketing. The benefits of content marketing strategy ensure that the content that is created for marketing remains to be conducive to the goals that are outlined. These two elements walk hand in hand with one another, and attempting to move to content marketing without a content strategy will result in implementing a plan that has not been thought out and is not directed at your target market, meaning fewer site visits and far less effective content. 

One thing that remains similar between content strategy and marketing is that the content marketing goals are the same compared to content strategy, the overall goal being to get more people to visit your webpage through the content that you have designed and implemented. Content marketing and content strategy are two very similar concepts that are designed to fulfil the other, and through implementing the correct tactics within each part of the content creation process, you are sure to create content that is effective! 

What are The Benefits of Building a Content Strategy?

When designing and implementing content strategy for digital marketing, it is important that both content marketers and clients understand the benefits of having this plan in place. The following are just a few reasons why having a content strategy can make all the difference when it comes to your content fulfilling its purpose: 

• Creating a strategy ensures you reach your goals: Through implementing a content strategy, you can make sure that your goals are reached. Having a set plan in place, with what you need to do over a certain amount of time, you can be sure that your content will reach your desired goals. Not using a content strategy leaves brands and businesses without any idea of how their content should be doing over time and what the outcomes from it are. For marketers who are creating content for clients, this means that neither you nor your client would be sure of the outcomes, which could actually lead to conflict. With a content strategy, your goals and the client’s expectations are set before the content is even designed and released. 

• You can see what is working and what is not: With each of the elements of your content marketing plan clearly laid out through your strategy, you can see what elements of your content are meant to be doing over a certain time frame. Having this clearly defined strategy and set of timelines ensures that you are clearly able to see what part of the strategy is responsible for which elements of the content. If these elements are not doing what they are meant to, it means that you are still able to make adjustments until the solution is found.  

How to Build a Content Strategy for SEO?

When it comes to creating an SEO content strategy, many marketers believe that keyword research alone is able to structure and push your content to your target market, and while it certainly does help, it is important to remember that the basis of a good content strategy is understanding your target market. This fact also holds true when thinking about SEO and how you can create content that is sure to draw customers in, hold their attention, and hopefully get them to make a purchase or complete the desired action. This cannot just be done through using the most popular keywords available within your industry, and a large part of SEO and content strategy involves using your buyer persona to relate potential keywords to your specific market!

Building an SEO content marketing strategy is very similar to building a normal content strategy, and outlining your goals and creating your buyer persona are still very important parts of the process. One thing that may be different between the two is the goals that you have outlined. While the goals for content strategy are to convince the customer to make a purchase, the goals of SEO are broader and are based around optimising content to be easily found through organic means. It is important to keep this in mind when building a content strategy for SEO as this can make all the difference in how effective the strategy is after it has been implemented. 

What Tools Can Help to Create a Content Strategy? 

Whether you are after topic ideas related to your digital content strategy or are looking to find the perfect content strategy template, there are many different tools that content strategists can use and implement to make their lives easier. These tools are offered online and can be free or paid for, ensuring that there is something for every brand or business to use! The following are just a few of the most effective content strategy tools that can be used to create the ideal content strategy for your brand or business. 

Feedly

One of the major things to consider when creating content is that you need to be able to find good content to write about and have popular topics that are sure to draw customers in. Finding information on what the most popular topics are at a given point in time would be time-consuming without tools like Feedly to help you out and make sure that you have the best ideas with regards to what your content should be about! This software has tons of information and updates about topics that you are interested in, ensuring you are up to date with any changes in the content you have produced or are hoping to create. For the best ideas, all sourced from online platforms, look no further than Feedly for all your most valuable information and insights about the topics you create content about! 

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a cloud-based tool that can be used for a number of different reasons, from crisis and support management to monitoring breaking news. BuzzSumo is a tool that has rolled a ton of unique features onto one easy to use platform, and if you are completing 10 searches or less per month, it is entirely free! The platform does not restrict any of its products from you if you are using the free version of the tool and so it is easy to get a good idea of whether or not it would be useful without having to make a monetary commitment. 

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

While creating your actual content is extremely important, another feature that is just as important and should be included in your analysis is the headlines that you use to promote your content. This headline is the first introduction that your content receives and it is responsible for both drawing customers in and grabbing their attention. With the CoSchedlue headline analyzer, users are able to get a score on the quality of their headline, this tool takes things like keywords, structure and overall quality into account when analysing and determining the quality of the headline through a score. This is a good tool to use if you are hoping to keep track of how effective your headlines are! 

How Can The Effectiveness of Content Strategy be Measured?

before actually implementing the content strategy, it is important to be able to measure the effectiveness of it before going and actually creating the content itself. Not measuring a brands content strategy can lead to time being wasted on creating something that will not be able to accomplish what it was made for. A good multi-channel content strategy will be tested out before it is even created to keep down the content strategy costs that come from mistakes being made. 

One of the best ways to measure a content strategy is through keeping up to date with the changes in the market and constantly looking for new buyer persona changes that occur as these market changes occur. Having this information on hand will ensure that you are not creating content that is outdated. Keeping up with the analytics of the industry is another way that the effectiveness of a strategy can be measured. Having reliable tools that are tracking the analytics and different insights as they change over time. In short, measuring the effectiveness of a strategy is simply keeping track of information as it becomes available, marketing is an industry that is extremely fluid and constantly changing, so it is important to constantly measure these changes so that you can adapt your content strategy! 

How Can Our  Expert Team at Markethinkers Help Its Customers to Create Content Strategy?

Whether you are looking to create a social media content strategy or are looking to implement new content for your website, we here at Markethinkers can help you through every step of the process, from the initial stages of creating your buyer persona and coming up with the goals you hope to achieve, to measuring and changing your content as the market adapts and helping you figure out how to present a content strategy! Our Professional SEO Consulting and content strategy services are some of the best in the business, and we adapt our own methods and way of working for each individual company that walks through the Markethinkers doors! Our team of specialists are equipped with the tools and the know-how to help make your content strategy as effective as possible, determining which types of content marketing strategies are best suited to you and drawing in your target market and making sure that they understand both your brand and the products or services you supply. For a team of knowledgeable experts who are making an effort to not only apply the best methods today but also look to the future of content strategy, look no further than the Markethinkers team!