And we move on.
Chapter 2. Content Strategy
So, you've realized that you're on the right track with content marketing. Great! But the journey itself will start later. In the meantime, you need to prepare for it.
You need to start with a content strategy - a plan that will help list of japan cell phone numbers multiply the results of your hard work. Let's figure out what a content strategy is and how to develop it. From scratch.
Content strategy ≠ content marketing
First, let's define the terminology. Many people think that content marketing and content strategy are interchangeable concepts. But this is not true. There are content strategies that are not related to marketing in any way.
But let's agree: by "content strategy" we will mean "content marketing strategy".
Content strategy is about the overall vision: how to create and organize content, how to manage it, how to archive and update it. And it concerns all the content that a user encounters. Content strategy and content marketing overlap, but they are essentially different things.
Content marketing is more of a tactical story. It's focused on execution, on solving strategic problems — that is, on the actual creation of content for marketing purposes, its organization and editing. This includes blog posts, opt-in pages, and other content that aims to build trust with the buyer.
The main thing to remember is that content should not just entertain people, but work through the sales funnel .
If a content strategist understands that customers do not trust the company enough, he will offer several possible solutions. Not even options, but ways that stretch out over time. And a content marketer, in order to strengthen trust, will resort to a tactical solution and prepare a competent interview with the company's founder. One complements the other.
Now let's figure out how to develop your own strategy.
Shared vision: Know where you're going
A content marketing strategy is the North Star that guides you when you’re bombarded with questions like, “What are we doing?” and “Why are we doing this again?” Of course, you’ll want the strategy to be relevant to your company’s specific needs, audience, and circumstances. But you’ll also want the strategy to be flexible enough to change as your company, audience, and circumstances change.
We'll have to find a balance.
First, decide on a direction. Where do you want the company to be in three years? Five? Keep that in mind. And then, once you’ve decided, it’s time to start planning.
A plan is the basic element of your strategy. It will help you achieve your goals.
Define your audience
Now is the time to figure out who you will be communicating with. Who will you be creating content for? In a separate document, write down:
Audience demographics: gender, age, geography
What sites do your customers visit most often?
What social networks do they use? Vkontakte or Facebook? How active are they on Instagram? Do they like Twitter?
What authoritative sources (individuals, resources) do they listen to?
And most importantly: what worries them?
For now, these are enough general theses. We will talk in more detail about the tools and different approaches to audience research in the fifth chapter, when we will figure out where to get ideas and how to develop them.
In the meantime, let's move on.
Content audit
This is an important step in your strategy. You will need to carefully analyze all the content you have already created.
The basics are simple, but you can't lose sight of them: this way you'll be able to assess your mistakes and understand how to improve your site. Let's look at where to start a content audit.
Step 1: Take inventory!
Before starting an audit, you should assess the scope of the work - understand how much and what needs to be checked.
If the site is small, ten to thirty pages, you can do it manually. But if the resource is large, it is better to use a special parser Screaming Frog SEO Spider. The program collects all URLs, all data from your site. We have already told you how to work with Screaming Frog (and other programs). And you can study the instructions on the SEER Interactive website (the instructions are in English, but everyone will understand: there are dozens of visual screenshots). Or look at the detailed guide on Habr .
Step 2: Structure and tag
A simple list of links and materials is not enough. Describe the content:
Topic
What is the content about? Does it talk about your products and services, or is it more educational? Perhaps the materials are related to content marketing, social media, conversion, landing pages, A/B testing… whatever?
Create a list of categories that meet your content marketing goals — and identify which category a particular piece of content falls into. At this stage, you will already draw conclusions, sometimes unexpected ones: “Wow, so our audience is twice as interested in posts about advertising . It seems we know what they need.”
Maxim Ilyakhov wrote about the same thing in the 100th issue of the Megaplan newsletter : a simple experiment with topics led to the newsletter having to be completely reformatted - and from management, sales technologies, and business books, Megaplan switched to articles on personal effectiveness and psychology.
"The audience is not what you picture in your head. We studied the preferences of readers and saw how to become more useful and better," Ilyakhov writes.
You too should study: sometimes the most popular materials are unexpected ones. But try not to make the mistake we wrote about in the first part : create content for your audience - content that will be related to the product.
