How To Build A Content Strategy For Your Website
April 3, 2023
"High-quality web content that's useful, usable, and enjoyable is one of the greatest competitive advantages you can create for yourself online." - Kristina Halvorson, Author (Content Strategy for the Web)
Content is the most entertaining and engaging feature of any website. While a viewer may find the web design of your website cool, it is the content of the website that keeps him from exiting the page and drives him to keep exploring your website.
There is always a need for good, eye catching content that speaks volumes in just a few words about your brand to your audience. Therefore, whether you are creating a new website or refreshing your old one, content is the one thing you can't compromise upon. Good content creates value in the form of brand awareness and taking your audience one step further into the sales funnel and isn’t that one of the most essential goals of creating a website, to increase your lead generation and drive up your sales.
The ultimate goal of every business is profit, and how do we derive profit? Through successful marketing, and nowadays marketing strategies are dominated by content marketing. So, what are the key marketing tips and tricks that can help you to build an excellent content strategy for your website?
Building Blocks Of Creating An Excellent Content Strategy
To lay the foundation of a content strategy framework there are some significant questions that need to be answered to streamline the process of building a content marketing strategy. For example, who is your target audience and what problem will you be solving for them? To lay the foundation of a content strategy framework there are some significant questions that need to be answered to streamline the process of building a content marketing strategy. For example, who is your target audience and what problem will you be solving for them?
These questions will help you centralize your content strategy around the needs of your audience so that the solution you offer to them, your product or service, will become a straightforward answer that will satisfy their needs while simultaneously growing your business.
Once you are done defining your audience and their requirements, you can follow the below steps to create your content strategy and rule the kingdom of content!
- Define Your Content Marketing Goals
- Research Your Target Audience
- Highlight Your Unique Selling Point
- Run A Content Audit
- Create A Content Roadmap
- Measure Your Content Metrics
- Incorporate Consumer Feedback In Your Content
- Keep Brainstorming And Creating Content
Your content will only hit the right spots when those targets are well defined. You need to have a list of specific goals that one particular content marketing campaign will cover. You cannot create a hotpot of different marketing goals and expect each one to hit home.
You need to define whether you are creating content to generate leads, or raise brand awareness, or attract more business from past and current customers.
Once these goals are specified, you can then create content accordingly to achieve respective goals since each of those objectives will warrant a different kind of content to derive desired results.
For successful marketing campaigns you need to know your buyer. You need to know their demographics as they provide you invaluable insights on what products and marketing tactics might work the best for them.
You can gain valuable information regarding your target audience through the kind of sites they visit or social media content that they engage with. This way you can know what type of content will work best on them to give your brand and product a chance.
You can easily glean this information by enabling Google demographics and interest for your website users and get a better understanding of your target audience.
You need to highlight your unique selling point to your target audience so that they know why you are not like all the others. There are plenty of other fishes in the sea that’s why it is essential that you highlight your niche talents to attract more customers.
You need content that is fresh and innovative. The internet is full of repurposed content and your audience needs to know that you stand apart from the crowd in what you offer them in terms of freshness and quality of your content.
Before you embark on the journey to make new content, you need to run an audit on your current content. You need to know what works well and what falls flat for your audience.
You can only improve your content once you know what works best for you and what doesn’t. Auditing your content will also allow you to delete and modify backlinks that are redundant and holding your content back from ranking on SERPs.
You can also refresh some of your old content with new information so that your audience knows that your website is active and updated and not full of old irrelevant information.
Creating a content calendar will help you streamline your content releases. You will be able to focus better on staying in with the trends and your team will also get a clear idea of what is expected from them and when.
With a content roadmap in place you can release different contents as per quarterly or monthly goals targeting different aspects of your marketing plan. It will help you visualize and achieve your goals in a much more effective and efficient way.
It will help you to create, publish, and keep track of your content and how they are faring with your customers.
Measuring your content metrics is one of the most important steps in building a successful content marketing strategy. The numbers don’t lie.
Measuring the metrics on your content will give you a clear picture of what is working well for your business and what needs improvement. You can use tools like Google analytics or other paid tools to check your content consumption metrics and SEO metrics or directly get in touch with SEO experts that can optimze the website content for you.
Without measuring metrics of how well your website is faring it is almost impossible to find room for improvement or grow your business online. It's almost like giving a sales pitch on mute.
If you don’t listen to the voice of your customers what use is the revamping of your content strategy? The feedback from your end-users, your customers is the most valuable out of all as they speak from the perspective of the buyer.
Engage with your audience online through different channels and social media platforms. Keep interacting with them and asking their feedback about your products or content and working on it. This will make them feel valued and create a sense of loyalty within them for your brand.
Oftentime the most insightful feedback comes from the customers.
One important thing to remember about content marketing is that it has to be continuous. You need to keep churning those ideas and reaching out to your audience so that you don’t fade away from their minds.
The last step of an excellent marketing strategy is to keep the new ideas coming and implementing them in the upcoming campaigns to keep the audience waiting for more. You need to habitualize your interaction and engagement with your audience to make an impact on them.
Publishing quality content with fresh ideas and recent trends will undoubtedly make your brand seem more reliable and trustworthy to your audience than a slow update website.
Wrapping Up:
We are now citizens of the digital age where content is churned out at breakneck speed. To make your name amidst all the noise you need to have a sound content marketing strategy in place. If you think you need help from experts, you can always reach out to content marketing professionals who can guide you in the right direction.
