The goals of the company define the content goal. The most important question that we need to ask and revisit at every milestone is why are we doing this? What is the purpose and what are our goals? These questions will enable us to stay on track and tweak our plan of action constantly. This is true when we plan out a content strategy too.
Content strategy is a tool to reach the company goal. So no content campaign can produce the desired result unless and until the goals of the company are clear, specific. A clear cut goal for the content strategy is possible only if the company goal is clear. Also, it is important to remember that one campaign should have only one goal. This helps out to roll out a clear strategy with focused attention. It is, therefore, better to develop an individual content strategy for each goal.
Empathy to the customer pain point is of paramount importance. Content is created for a particular customer segment to address a particular pain point. Therefore, it is important to not just reach out to the right audience but to convince them that we understand them and then offer our solution. All these three steps are to be done in a graded manner. When we plan to create any form of content, we need to remember the audience.
The content type will depend completely on the demography of the customer segment. It is absolutely important to develop the buyer’s persona or personification of your target group. With free templates available it is an easy task. Once the buyer’s persona or the demographics of the target audience is well-defined, it is easier to develop a content strategy as now the decisions like platforms, Content-format, language and budget distribution on different online platforms can be zeroed upon.
Assessing our present online footprint is the first step to know what we need. Based on our target audience we need to take stock of where we are at present and what kind of platforms are needed to reach them. Content Campaign needs to be tweaked at different milestones and so it is very important to set stages in the campaign when we pause, take a step back and analyse. So before we rush into rolling out a content strategy, we need to mark the audience segment and understand what topics will prove relevant and in which form. For Eg To reach the younger population who are mostly either in their first job or still searching for them for selling a skilling course, a website, social media presence and an app would be an absolute necessity. At the same time if we are trying to sell a Payment Gateway solution to the rural and suburban “mom and pop” stores then we would need to concentrate more on WhatsApp and website traffic.
Measuring our performance is the second most important function of the tools. We need to make sure we are equipped with tools and metrics to measure performance at every stage. For Eg, if we have a website then it is necessary to know its performance. Nowadays online platforms are buzzing with a lot of tools offering specific metrics. While Oaktree offers clarity on the SEO performance on your website free of cost, Moz offers a lot more though for substantial fees. Social media especially the paid ones come with built-in metrics and comes as a package with the paid adverts. Paid Guest posting often provide a tool to access the metrics and reports though the prices range is very wide. The best would be to get a subscription for paid tools to constantly track our websites and posts for performance. This is especially needed for monitoring for experimental or first-time campaigns.
Consistency in publishing the content is key. Content campaign or marketing cannot work till it is published in a regularly spaced consistency. A calendar with dates dedicated to different platforms as worked out in the strategy is a must. With a fixed schedule, reverse engineering will help us freeze deadlines to create the content. This map of the schedule should also have a day or two to check the performance and tweak the content or the platforms. It is however necessary to plan even the “stepping back” days. Many tools can help in creating a content calendar.
Quality of the content is another important factor that dictates the performance of the content strategy. They may range from write-ups as in blogs, articles or even e-books or videos in you-tube or infographics or podcasts etc. The medium could be any but the most important factor to remember is that the content represents the credibility of the company. The content should be original, well researched and updated, and relevant to the target audience. For Eg If your product is a course to upskill the youngsters, a very well researched article on baby food may not exactly lure the college-going students who are looking to upskill themselves.
The readability of your content is the next most influential factor. Let's assume that you publish cooking recipes using milk which is your product. They are relevant and quality articles and are published twice a week on your blog site. However, the language used is very formal and filled with bombastic words. Do you think you might be able to reach your target market who are basically homemakers or cooks and chefs interested in new recipes? The good news is that even this can be solved through tools checking the readability of the articles.
All the above points if not adhered to would consist of the pitfalls that we need to avoid.
Pitfalls in Setting Goals: The goal of the content strategy should not be different from the goal of the company. Clumping many goals into a single strategy is spreading your resources and action plan too thinly. It will guarantee the failure to reach anyone target fully.
Pitfalls in Quality of the content: The content creates a relationship based on trust. Our understanding of the customer pain point builds our credibility. So empathizing with the target audience and proving that we know their pain points is important. An original, plagiarism-free and well-researched content can help us with that.
Pitfalls in choosing the platforms: Once we decide on the target audience, it pays to research which media do they spend most of their time on. The platform dictates the content presentation form. If the target audience prefers watching the video, then a you-tube channel and blogs with short bits of video would suit better. A long article posted on the website which talks about wall street scores may not entice them.
Pitfalls choosing the Tools to measure: Though the market is flooded with many online tools, it pays to research them. It is necessary to know the latest product available and not rush especially the paid tools. The metrics and the analysis are the ones that help you measure your performance and tweak if necessary. The more specific metrics the tools provide you, the better your tweaks would be.