Unleash Your Story: Why You Need a Content Strategy
Any business, from a sprawling global conglomerate to your local hardware store, is always looking for new customers. Existing customers are great, but they have a frustrating habit of buying the stuff they need, then disposing of your business entirely.
But when you have a thoughtful, strategic content program? You gain something essential: Authority. By sharing and disseminating reliable information in your unique voice, you gain trust – a truly unparalleled business advantage.
When you have earned that all-important trust, you ensure that existing customers will return to your brand the next time they need a stepladder or can of paint – and, of course, that those coveted new customers are drawn to you.
So, how do you start earning trust? It’s simple.
All you need to start building a content strategy is two pieces of information, which you likely already have:
Your business goals
Your target audience
That’s it! Like a traditional building foundation, everything else can be built out from those two pillars. For example, say you’re running a B2C software startup that helps users locate olives near them. Your content strategy would start like this:
Business goal: increase usage by raising brand awareness
Target audience: consumers with disposable income who enjoy Mediterranean food
Next step: Gather as much data as you can get your hands on and dig in
To create a content strategy that’s truly tailor-made for your unique needs, you’ll want to take that target audience out for a nice coffee and get to know it in as much detail as possible. In the world of marketing, this is sometimes conceptualized by crafting “buyer personas,” or descriptive portraits of the people marketers want to buy their products.
For our fictitious olive-locating company, we’d start with any information we can glean about moderate-to-high-income consumers of Mediterranean food and how they tend to behave. Do they respond more favorably to SMS campaigns or email marketing? Video, audio, or text? Do they prefer messaging that centers on nutrition? Entertaining? Cost-effectiveness? We’d sketch out our ideal olive buyer in as fine a grain as possible, using tools like internal and external interviews, market research, and customer surveys.
Then we put it all together
Which is to say we combine our business goals with all the insight we’ve generated about our target audience to create the potpourri known as narrative strategy.
Say our startup, FindOlivesNow, is aiming to increase broad brand awareness, and we’ve determined that our target consumers favor longform, text-based communications focused on cooking healthy. We’d consider content initiatives like…
A blog series focused on the benefits of a Mediterranean diet
A bimonthly email newsletter providing cooking, food storage tips, and recipes
An SMS campaign that promotes available olive retailers at points in the year when people may be entertaining
That’s what we call a content strategy, folks! Crucially, these measures elevate FindOlivesNow from a simple olive purveyor to the holy grail we mentioned at the beginning: a trusted authority our audience relies on for more than just the product.
Now, we set it and forget it experiment
We’ve got a content strategy, and we’ve designed it with lots of thought and consideration. But it’s still an educated guess. So we don’t just launch it and expect all the results we’re looking for (our business goals) to come rolling in.
Instead, we monitor those results, look for patterns, and tinker with the strategy until it delivers the results we want. Maybe FindOlivesNow’s SMS and email campaigns are converting like gangbusters, but the blog series isn’t reaching our targets.
First, we’d look for potential content tweaks that may improve the blog posts’ value for our audience. Are the email and SMS messages promoting a more broadly popular message or angle? If so, we can edit the blog series accordingly and find out whether that turns things around. Are we promoting the blog series in the right settings, and is the promotional copy touting it properly? With blog posts in particular, we can also revisit our SEO strategy; maybe we’re working with outdated keyword insights or formatting best practices.
If these measures don’t do the trick, and our other campaigns are still performing, we may just wind down the blog series. That’s what the experimentation phase is all about: finding out what works for your audience and discarding what doesn’t. As they say in journalism, kill your darlings.
Presto! You now have a content strategy
From here on out, it’s all about optimizing; trying new mediums, formats, and channels, experimenting with content, and continually refining how you think of your target audience.
The work of promoting your business is never really done – there are still billboards for Apple and Walmart, after all – but the good news is that 18 Olives can handle all of your content strategy, from those first essential pillars until your only tasks are essentially buffing a well-oiled content marketing machine.
To get started, contact us right here.