6 Steps to Creating a Content Strategy

If marketers learned anything from the COVID era, it’s the importance of remaining agile with their plans and strategies. That includes content marketing strategies. During those uncertain COVID times, the savvy marketers read the landscape, adapted their strategies, and continued to thrive.

At any time, it is essential to have a content marketing plan, constantly review it and be prepared to revise it. Sydney marketing agency, Icon Visual Marketing can help you, just as we have helped many great brands adapt their content marketing over the last 20 years.

What is a content marketing strategy?

Why is a content marketing strategy important for your business?

A content marketing strategy is important for your business because it:

• Helps you work towards your business goals
• Attracts new customers
• Creates trust in your existing and potential customers
• Invites engagement
• Encourages a call to action, including sales conversions
• Helps you compete with other brands
• Helps you to maintain an awareness level

Steps to creating a winning content strategy

Creating a content strategy is straightforward but takes planning. At Icon Visual Marketing, we can help you create a content strategy that fits in with your business plans and your brand personality, achieves results and helps your business thrive.

1. Determine your goal

As there are several directions to take with a content strategy, you need to clearly define your goal. Do you want to raise brand awareness? Do you want to sell product? Do you want to change public perception?

In any marketing strategy, you should follow a Marketing Funnel:

At the top of the funnel is Awareness. Brand Awareness refers to the familiarity of consumers with a particular product or service, differentiating it from competing brands. Obviously, your customers need to be aware of you before they can make a decision to use your products or services. You need Awareness before you can proceed further down the funnel.

The next step in the funnel is Engagement. Brand Engagement is when your customer interacts with your brand and is a more intimate step in the funnel than Awareness. The better the engagement, the more loyal your customer is likely to be. Engagement includes when a potential customer clicks on your social media post or ad, or visits your website, taking their relationship with your brand a step beyond Awareness.

The last step in the funnel is Conversion. This is when your customer makes the conscious decision to purchase your product or service and is the ultimate goal for any business.

Your content strategy can fit anywhere in the funnel. The clearer the goal, the easier it is to set a path towards reaching that goal.

2. Define your audience

Understanding who your audience is will help you create and publish content that reaches the right people. Consider variables such as age range, income, location, likes and dislikes, news source, etc. It all helps to define your audience. They are your audience. It’s fine to have thousands of followers on social media, but if few of them fall into your audience category, they’re not going to engage with your brand. It’s quality over quantity. The more you know about your audience, the better.

Ways to define your audience include:

• Conduct research
• Talk to your existing clients
• Define your desired audience
• Refer to data such as Google Analytics
• Create personas
• Analyse competitors and their activity

Sydney marketing agency, Icon Visual Marketing, can help define your audience using all the methods listed above.

3. Audit your content

An audit of your content can reveal an astonishing amount of information, and help you understand what is working and what is not.

These questions and more can be answered in an audit of your content:

• Is your content up to date?
• Does it serve a purpose?
• Is the message correct?
• Is the hierarchy of messages correct?
• Does it work for SEO purposes?
• Are you getting sufficient click-throughs?
• What are your bounce rates?
• What is the average time a visitor spends on your website?
• Are your eDMs performing?

Icon Visual Marketing can audit your content to see if it is helping your brand.

4. Check your content management system

A content management system (CMS) is a term for the software that you use to create your website. Common examples are WordPress, Joomla, and Duda which make it easy to create websites without specific training. You can choose one based on what your business is, for example, Joomla is great for large businesses where as Duda is ideal for small businesses.

It’s important to choose the right CMS so you’re not wasting time and money with a system that doesn’t suit your purposes. A good marketing company can recommend what you need quite quickly. Speak to us at Icon Visual Marketing and we can set your straight. We can also build your site, switch over to a CMS that better suits your needs if necessary and host it for you.

5. Choose which content channel is best for your brand

Generally, you wouldn’t choose just one type of content. You would use several, and importantly it should all work in harmony. All your content should link, build upon a message, and all have a similar tone of voice. You don’t want your messages conflicting. Some might speak to different audiences, but in the long run, all your content should look like it belongs to the same family.

Above we spoke of the Marketing Funnel. It applies here as well. Different messages suit different types of content.

For example, if you like to raise brand awareness, you might use paid advertising on LinkedIn, paid search advertising on Google or invest in some blog writing. If you want to make conversions, you can use paid Facebook advertising or eDMS (email marketing).

Choosing the best content would be done by considering your brand character and the audience you want to reach. For example, if your audience is on Facebook, you would naturally use that channel as opposed to a more youth-oriented channel such as TikTok.

6. Manage your content

It’s important to maintain control over your content. It should remain fresh, relevant and accurate. You don’t want expired messages being appearing. For example, on social media, your posts might show the date of posting. So a visitor to your socials can see if your posts are current or out of date. Being dormant on social media can make it appear as though your company no longer exists.

Content should be set to a plan. For example, social media posts should be posted at regular intervals. Content such as eDMs should be sent to subscribers on a planned basis rather than ad hoc.

By managing your content, you are managing what messages your audience is seeing and when they are seeing them. Icon Visual Marketing has extensive experience in managing content for clients. We can give you a content planner or we can set it for you.

How often should you update your content marketing strategy?

There is no definitive answer to the question of how often your content marketing strategy should be updated. A content marketing strategy should be updated as often as necessary. As mentioned in the first paragraph, it’s important to remain agile and ready to adapt to market pressures. Conditions might depend on the industry and environment you are in.

A highly competitive market would mean you would be constantly reviewing and updating your strategy. If you are in an industry where online content is not a priority, you would not need to update your strategy as often. 

At Icon Visual Marketing, we are always working with clients, reviewing, and updating their content strategy. We can do the same for you across all media and all content variations.

Creating a content marketing strategy will help you achieve your goals. It’s important to remain agile and review your content strategy as often as necessary. Icon Visual Marketing is a Sydney marketing agency with 20 years’ experience creating marketing content strategies for large and small clients. We can help you. Contact us for a free quote.