In successfully marketing a website, you need to excel in multiple domains. Randomly posting blogs per month isn’t sufficient to bring about your desired results. Instead, you need an effective content strategy that will power up both your social media campaigns and search engine optimization (SEO).
Below are some effective ways to effectively wrap a strategy around your content and drive organic traffic and high-quality leads to your website.
Start with a Few Questions
There are 5 questions you need to answer.
- Who are your readers?
Knowing your target audience will help you determine what kind of writing tone and style you should use for your content. This will also help you analyze the best content format to use. These two elements can have a drastic effect on how your content impacts your audience.
- What problems do you want to solve for your audience?
Ideally, you should have a service or product that solves a certain product. In the same token, you also need to create content wrapped around customer problems and how you can solve it.
- What’s your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)?
You most likely have competitors who have similar services or products. With that, you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd.
Brainstorm at least three things that set your product or service apart from your competitors. And then choose one that you want your brand to focus on. Write your USP in a single sentence.
You won’t need your USP as you create content but you need to refer to it every once in a while. How you set the tone for your content should reflect your branding. It should reflect how you are different from your competitors. This will help bring emotional appeal to your content.
- What content format will you focus on?
In creating a content strategy, blogs are the most ideal content type. You can write SEO-optimized blogs up to 2,000 words long to help you rank on Google. But it also pays to have infographics and videos on your website. These are helpful in two ways:
- You will rank not just on content search but also image search and video search
- It helps you create a long supply of content by repurposing your old blogs
- Where will you publish the content?
The most obvious place would be your website but where else? Identify which social media channels you want to cross-post your content into. It is important to have these names in mind since they also play a part in effective content strategy.
Create a Buyer Persona
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A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of what your ideal customer or reader looks like.
Let’s say that you want to target a general audience and drive them through the awareness funnel. In this case, you need to create a buyer persona for what a qualified customer will look like. When you have that, creating content for that group will be easier.
There will be times that you need content aimed at people already deep in the content funnel. Your content for the awareness stage won’t be as effective in other stages of the funnel. So, you need to curate a new set of content designed for this group. And for that, a buyer persona is essential.
Here are some suggestions on how you can get started with a buyer’s persona:
- Use insights on Google Ads or Facebook ads to gather information about your customers
- Google Analytics can tell you the demographic of your consumer base
- Survey your customers after a product or service has been delivered (make the survey brief and easy to answer)
- Give the buyer persona a name, age, hobbies, profession, character traits, and so on
Include Media Files in Your Blog Posts
You need to create a content strategy that will please people in all stages of the content funnel. Sometimes, you’ll write for new prospects. Other times, you have to write ones for your existing clients/customers.
In that sense, it is important to have content that is detailed and comprehensive as well as one that has been broken down and easy to digest. It would be a good idea to create content in the form of media files like Powerpoint presentations to achieve this. You can create Powerpoint presentations from scratch or you can use slide templates that you can just customize to reflect your brand.
Some media files that you should consider including in your content are images, infographics, and videos. This helps the readers comprehend the message of the content faster and makes it more memorable.
Do Keyword Research
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Content is no good if you don’t sprinkle it with high-volume keywords (at the right amount). High-volume keywords mean that many people are searching for the term on Google. And if you make your content relevant to these keywords, you have a good chance of making it to the first page of SERPs.
Below are some tools we recommend for keyword research:
- Keywords Everywhere
- Ubersuggest
- SE Ranking
- SEMRUSH
Here is a suggested strategy for keyword research:
- Download and install KeywordsEveryday Extension
- Purchase some credits
- Go to a competitor website
- Use KeywordsEveryday to obtain a list of your competitors’ keywords
- Select the ones with high-volume searchers that SEO low-competition
- Include them in your keywords research spreadsheet
Here’s another one:
- List down random terms not directly about your niche but something related
- Type a root keyword on Ubersuggest and then Click Search
- Ubersuggest will “suggest” multiple long-tail keywords that you can use for your website
- Select the ones with decent search volume and have a low-competition SEO score
- Add them to your keyword research spreadsheet
Create a Content Audit Spreadsheet
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Below are all the labels that should be included in your content audit:
- Article title
- Content link
- Keyword used
- Buyer Persona name
- Content funnel stage
Having a content audit sheet helps you identify what kind of content you currently have and which ones you can repurpose. It also tells you what you can do differently in your content strategy for the following year.
Final Takeaway
Creating an effective content strategy can be time-consuming. If you’re not careful, your strategy may even prove to be ineffective. The key is to focus on the content foundation. This will make your process easier and will lead to good traffic and leads.
Have any more content strategy ideas you want to add? Let us know in the comment section.
