By Laure Justice
Developing an effective content strategy increases the relevance of the information you share on your website or blog. Content strategy means bringing relevant content to the people who are interested in
1. Why Content Strategy Typically Begins With a Persona
Content strategy is a term that means planning, developing and managing the content on your website or blog. To do that effectively, you need to know your customer or customers. Creating a persona – or several personas – lets you do that, and it’s more in-depth than just gathering a set of demographics.
Demographics are the basics. Demographic information provide some vital information about customers, but developing a persona helps companies create more accurate targeting when developing a content strategy. Creating a persona is part of building a user-friendly experience that begins with UX design and goes all the way through the content marketing stage.
2. Content Needs to Answer a Question or Solve a Problem
The next major part of creating a content strategy is finding out what your ideal customers need to know and what problems they’re trying to solve when visiting your website. Conducting surveys is one way to do this, keyword research is another way, and applying knowledge about your personas is also a valid way to establish this information.
- Customer surveys: Conducting surveys with your existing customers to determine what they like about your product and ways they feel it falls short gives you solid, fact-based information about which aspects of your product or service you need to discuss in your content marketing.
- Keyword research: Keyword research is part of SEO and it focuses on finding out which exact terms people use when looking for your product or service. Add relevant keywords to your content marketing strategy so your ideal customer will be more likely to find your company website when using a search engine.
- Understanding the needs of your personas: Focusing on the needs of your ideal clients lets you hone in on their habits, things they need, and how to reach them. It also helps you understand which content is likely to be the most relevant so you can be certain it’s properly featured and easy to find on your website or blog.
3. Prepare Website Content With the End in Mind
Every detail of content creation is connected to all the other parts. For content to be effective, it has to be presented in a way that your ideal customers are able to find it. It also has to provide the information they’re hunting, and it has to be delivered in a format that’s easily accessed and understood.
For example, if your ideal customer is a college physics professor who is looking for teaching aids, you wouldn’t want to prepare content for someone with a high school reading level that uses a lot of slang. You would want your content to feature a slightly formal tone and address the purpose of the physics teaching aids you sell using technical terminology.
Contact Me to Learn More About Creating a Content Strategy
A good content strategy can draw people to your website or blog and keep them coming back. If you’re interested in learning more about creating a content strategy, you’re welcome to send me an email at LaureJ@consutlant.com or fill out the contact form on the Hire Me page here on this website.
