How to Create an Effective Content Strategy

"Content" is hotter than ever. Most brands know it's important. We consume it daily but often struggle to define “content” and produce it effectively.

Crafting a smart content strategy is crucial if your brand hopes to increase its reach and connect with its audiences. With the rapidly changing role of media in our lives, having a structured approach to content creation and distribution can be the difference between success and obscurity for your brand. This guide will delve into the essential steps for developing a content strategy that works for your brand.

What is Content?

The simplest definition of content comes from Scott Hepburn from Google, "Information designed for consumption." This information can be anything from a photo, blog post, video posted on social media, or the headline on a webpage. Velir primarily focuses on digital web content — the bits and pieces that make up a website.

What is a Content Strategy?

A content strategy is a comprehensive plan for using content to achieve specific goals. It involves understanding your target audiences, creating relevant content, and distributing it strategically. A well-defined content strategy helps your business focus on what matters, align its messaging, and drive meaningful engagement with its audiences.

The Benefits of a Content Strategy

• Clarity and Focus: A clear content strategy ensures all content aligns with your business objectives, preventing wasted effort on random or irrelevant content creation.
• Efficiency: Planning content in advance saves you time and resources, allowing for better allocation and management.
• Consistency: Consistent messaging across all platforms strengthens your brand identity and builds trust with your audiences.
• Improved ROI: With a focused strategy, your content efforts are more likely to result in conversions and measurable success.

Our Three-Step Process for Producing a Content Strategy

1. Inventory What You Have

Before planning, inventory what content is at your disposal. Has your business written blogs in the past? Do you have a folder of images, icons, and illustrations that align with your brand? Do you have brand guidelines for voice and tone? Organizing these assets in one cloud-based location will help keep things streamlined moving forward.

If you have a website, now might be a good time to inventory all its pages and items. Tools like Screaming Frog can help you organize this information into a large spreadsheet.

A content inventory is a systematic evaluation of your existing content that helps you identify its strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. The process uncovers gaps in content coverage and informs your future content creation efforts.

How to Conduct a Content Inventory

Inventory: Create a list of all existing content, including blog posts, videos, social media posts, and more.

Analyze: Evaluate each piece of content based on metrics such as traffic, engagement, and conversions.

Identify Gaps: Determine areas where content is lacking or outdated and identify opportunities for new content. At Velir, we use a Keep/Kill/Modify ROT analysis for this activity.

2. Outline Your Goals

Defining clear goals and objectives for your content is the cornerstone of a successful content strategy. These goals provide direction and purpose, guiding every aspect of your content creation and distribution.

Goals give content a sense of purpose and ensure that every piece serves a specific function. Whether you're looking to boost website traffic, increase engagement, or drive conversions, goals align your content efforts with your business priorities.

Examples of Website Goals

• Increase Awareness: One of the most important website objectives is to get more eyes on your brand. Whether you've been around for a while or just starting, you need a website to help your audiences find you and learn more about your organization.
• Generate More Qualified Leads: This is arguably the most popular goal for business websites that have lead generation as their main purpose. This goal is best if your company needs more sales leads through improved website marketing performance.
• Improve Customer Satisfaction: If your website provides a support role for existing customers, improving customer satisfaction through better user experience and service, along with reducing the time it takes to complete certain tasks, might be a good goal.
• Educate Visitors: In addition to informing visitors about your offering, you should add extra value through educational content that meets their needs at each stage of their journey. For example, writing blogs on relevant industry topics or featuring case studies with happy customers can help build credibility and authority. You want visitors to come to your site because they see it as a trustworthy source of information.

Match Goals to Your Audience

Knowing your audience inside and out is essential for creating content that resonates. This involves identifying key characteristics and building a detailed picture of your target audience.

• Demographics: Demographic information such as age, gender, location, and income level help you tailor content to specific segments of your audience.
• Psychographics: Psychographics delve into the psychological and behavioral aspects of your audience, including interests, values, and lifestyle choices.
• Personas: Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. They help humanize your audience and guide your content creation by providing a detailed breakdown of their needs, challenges, and motivations.

For the goals you outlined, determine which ones apply to your entire audience and which are for specific subsets. Take some time to match each goal to the appropriate audience segment.

3. Create Content Buckets

Creating relevant and engaging content starts with developing core themes and topics that align with your audiences’ interests and business goals. We often use the word "buckets" to visualize content that can easily be categorized into these themes.

Identify Core Themes

Core themes guide content creation and reflect your brand's messaging and values. These themes serve as pillars around which specific content ideas are developed and don’t need perfect alignment with your business's products. For example, the sunscreen brand Vacation created Poolsuite, a fun, 90's throwback website that encapsulates how the brand wants its customers to feel. Lifestyle choices and feelings associated with your product or service are great places to start brainstorming.

Content Bucket Cheat Sheet

If you're stumped, below are some common content buckets brands use:

1. Educational or How-to: People love learning — according to Pew Research Center, 73% of adults consider themselves lifelong learners. You're likely a subject matter expert in your industry and topics you care about; you might not think of it that way because you've been doing it for so long. Educational and how-to content is a great way to draw visitors, enticing them with rich information.
2. Entertainment: Entertainment is an often-understood category. Think of entertainment as a form of "value" — we all use sites and services regularly based on the value they provide. Value can be a laugh, an interesting video, or thoughtful advice. Entertainment isn't just for direct-to-consumer brands. More business-to-business brands are thinking beyond standard content. Consider how Mailchimp made Whale Synth, a digital synthesizer based on a campaign focused on words that rhymed with their brand.
3. Opportunistic: Trends move faster than ever before, especially during key moments when a lot of eyeballs are glued to a media source at once — Super Bowl, election cycles, Olympics, etc. A trend may start from nowhere, so businesses ready to capitalize on it are rewarded. Our advice is to know whether you have the right team to hop on an opportunistic trend immediately before it gets stale. No one wants to be the brand doing the Harlem Shake three years after everyone from leadership has signed off on the idea.
4. Brand Awareness: This is often a bucket brands over-index on, but it's still important. Without brand awareness, people may not associate you with your content. Our advice is to pair value with brand awareness and aim for much smaller, softer sells rather than laying it on thick. People require multiple touchpoints to make a sale or change their opinion of a brand. Deliver brand awareness content in small doses.
5. User-Generated Content: Do you have a product people use? Do you encourage photos of it? User-generated content feels authentic and often sells products better than polished assets. In fact, younger generations prefer the grit of phone-shot, lo-fi content featuring real people. This is a direct cultural swing against the perfectionism Millennials brought to the 2000-teens.
6. Success Stories: Have people used your product or service and have nice things to say? While not as enticing, success stories are like user-generated content where you let others tell your story. This serves two purposes: it showcases your trustworthiness and customer loyalty to your brand.

Where to Go From Here

Content strategy wouldn't be a full-time career if we could explain it in a single article. But we’ve offered enough advice to get you started with a content strategy. If you inventory what you have, set goals, and create content buckets, you can craft smarter content aligned with your business goals. Once you’re doing that you can measure your success and evolve your content strategy, especially as your organization grows and its priorities change.

Need help with creating an initial content strategy or refining yours to meet new organizational goals? Reach out. Our content experts would love to learn about your brand and brainstorm how we can reward your audience with high-quality, thoughtful content.