RESOURCE GUIDE
Content Creation Strategy
Formulate your winning strategy
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A Complete Guide To Content Creation Strategy
Content is king because it largely determines your success in social media marketing, Google ranking, and other digital marketing efforts. Your utmost priority should be giving your audience high-quality, engaging, and valuable content.
But to achieve success, you need a solid content strategy in which you need to create a list of content. This could be text, video, infographics, audio, ebook, cheat sheet, etc.
You should also consider timing and resources to achieve your goals. Think of it as a set of intended actions to fulfill your specific objectives.
Always Know Your Content Details
Content details are what make any piece unique and interesting. They can also help you create an emotional connection with your audience.
At LOJO, we’re ready to help you create content that will attract your ideal customer and drive them to your site. Call us today at (916) 303-4080 or drop us a message.
Continue reading below to learn the step-by-step guide to creating a content strategy framework.
1. Define your set of goals.
Without specific goals, you won’t know if your marketing strategy is successful. That’s because you don’t have anything to compare your results against, which gives you no feasible data to work with.
These are some of the most common content marketing goals businesses work towards:
-Increase brand awareness and authority
-Foster customer loyalty
-Increase revenue through new customer acquisition and lead generation
-Improve customer retention
-Create and manage customer groups for marketing and retargeting
2. Create a buyer persona.
Your content (from videos and images to blogs and landing pages) should reflect your target audience’s core values, interests, relevant demographic traits, pain points, and online behavior.
When you take the time to create a buyer persona, it’s easier to create content that speaks to their needs in a way that makes them want to buy from you.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional customer representing your target audience. Your market research and existing or desired audience determine this.
3. Conduct a content audit.
If you’ve been in business for a while, you already have sufficient content pieces. That includes blogs, product descriptions, and images at your disposal.
In this scenario, it’s advisable to run a content audit. The goal is to assess the top-performing content and then use this information to create new ones.
4. Brainstorm content ideas.
Your products, services, core business operations, goals, and target audience will decide your primary topics.
You can also conduct competitor analysis to determine which keywords, subjects, and format your direct rivals use in their content marketing.
Next, pick your format (blog posts, videos, SlideShare, eBooks, etc.). Finally, lay out your content structure with these structures: how-to, cheat sheet, how-to, list, etc.).
How To Set Up Your Content Planner
If you keep asking yourself this question, “What should I post next on my social media, my website, and my other digital platforms,” it simply means you don’t have a concrete content strategy.
Remember, you need a plan.
And it doesn’t even have to be perfect to guide you towards your goals. With a concrete plan like a content calendar, you can monitor your progress and make adjustments based on your goals and resources.
If you have some errors or unrealistic expectations, you can easily tweak them to achieve your goals. For example, you realize that churning 15 in-depth eBooks and blog posts per month is too much for your small business.
The benefits of having a content planner or calendar:
Planning is important, but having a content calendar isn’t just about planning. It’s also an important part of ensuring your content is effective and accomplishing the goals you set out for it.
A well-planned calendar can help you:
-Keep everything organized
-Ease of planning content
-Works for the campaign
-Maintains consistency
-Content is up-to-date and relevant
-Keeps the audience engaged
-Supports social media strategy
-Supports collaboration between departments
-Tracks your performance
Step-by-step guide to creating a content calendar
Now that you know the benefits of having a content calendar, continue reading below to learn how to create one.
1. Establish goals and key performance indicators.
When you have established goals, you can then decide which KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is the most important for your business.
For example, you should focus on growing your followers or subscribers and customer engagement (likes, comments, and shares). That’s if one of your primary objectives is to strengthen brand authority and awareness.
2. Identify your target audience.
Your existing customer base can shed light on your target audience’s demographics. You can also conduct market research, industry trends, client interviews, and competitive analysis to identify your potential customers.
3. Create a template for your content calendar.
You can use free tools, paid tools, or even a simple spreadsheet to create your content calendar. Make sure the template has a share option to allow team members to brainstorm by adding comments, sharing their ideas, and editing tasks.
As a general rule, create a calendar year to mark all important events (holidays, product launching, training, seminars, etc.). This step will help you identify the seasonal content you will need in the future.
While a content calendar can guide your content marketing strategy, make sure it’s flexible. This is so that you can easily add timely content like viral videos, news, and trends relevant to your audience.
4. Add your own content.
Once you mark down important holidays and events, start to fill the dates with relevant content ideas. It could be theme posts, PRs, videos, infographics, news from reliable sources, serial posts, guest blogs, brand-centric articles, etc.
When adding your own content, make sure also to include evergreen or timeless pieces. That’s because they are constantly searched online and remain relevant for a long time.
Another tip: Repurpose old content by adding its link to your newer content pieces. You can also publish them on different channels or change their format.
For instance, you can turn a blog post into a cheat sheet, a micro-video, or infographics.
5. Set time limits and publishing frequency.
The ideal publishing frequency depends on your time and resources. But you need to make enough content to generate substantial traffic to your site.
As previously mentioned, your content calendar is not set in stone. There should always be a certain degree of flexibility that allows you to respond to urgent requests or external events.
Sometimes, you may need to postpone a post to focus on a more pressing issue. For example, suppose you’re going to be making a big announcement and don’t want to overwhelm your audience with too many posts in one day. In that case, you can save it for later.
Pro tip: Once you’ve set up your content calendar, you need to review and monitor it regularly or at least every week. You must devote some time to examining and measuring the performance of your content.
This is so you can replicate your “successful” pieces (they have high customer engagement rates like shares and likes) and avoid or improve the content that fails to deliver.
Know Your Platforms
The ideal content format and structure depend primarily on the type of digital platforms you’re using. For instance, social media users gravitate towards micro-videos, stunning images, and catchy headlines.
On the other hand, website visitors are generally more willing to spend more time learning about your product. They want to know how it can improve their lives or address their pain points.
Here, we list the most common platforms and their “preferred” content structure and format.
Short educational videos like how-tos, entertaining micro video content, and blog post summaries are the ideal formats.
Users tend to gravitate toward stunning photos, high-resolution product images, quotes, behind-the-scenes clips, and user-generated content.
The ideal content format for this business community includes company news, jobs and career information, and professional content.
The most popular topics on this platform include home decor, food and drinks, design and DIY, and craft. They are usually presented using step-by-step photo guides and stunning images.
Blog sites
Use specific words that draw readers toward the main idea and divide sections into header tags to make your content “easy to digest.”
Youtube
Surveys show videos between 7 and 15 minutes perform better than other lengths. But this is not to say that you shouldn’t make longer content.
Content appeal still depends on your audience, particularly their intent. YouTube users are more intentional, with one study published by Google showing that around 68% of them watched videos to help them make a purchase decision.
Hire A Graphic Designer Or Invest In Paid Stock Photos
With the proliferation of stock image websites that offer royalty-free and paid images, some people think they won’t need the help of graphic designers.
But professionally designed visual content can help you deliver the right message to your audience.
In short, a highly effective graphic design includes:
-A stunning and descriptive image.
-A catchy headline.
-An easy-to-understand message.
Why do you need a graphic designer?
When you partner with a team of graphic designers who have industry expertise, diverse work experience, and impressive portfolio.
You also get to enjoy the following benefits:
1. Consistent brand image for your business.
Consistency in the tone of voice, color scheme, logo, and other visual identities is important when improving your brand authority and awareness. You need to work with a professional graphic designer who can deliver a consistent and engaging message to your target audience.
2. Up-to-date with the latest trends.
Our graphic designers are up-to-date with the latest trends. They can help you decide if adopting them to your website, social media, content pieces, etc., makes sense or if they reflect your brand and broad business goals.
3. Valuable insights.
When companies launch new products that deviate from their previous offers or change their core business operations, they may need a new brand and visual identity.
A professional graphic designer can help them create these visual elements that will communicate the new values and mission of the organization.
4. Unique visual identity.
Whether you need layout or web design, logos, infographics, and other visual identities, working with a graphic designer can add a professional touch to your brand. This is important because everything you post and publish reflects your business.
5. Positive first impression.
Bad website design and shoddy online content can hurt your business. You’d probably struggle to gain your target audience’s trust with these flawed practices.
Remember, people are highly visual creatures. They quickly judge your product or service based on your post’s visual content.
6. Clear and engaging message.
Did you know that colors, fonts, shapes, and imagery deliver a message and evoke specific emotions and even memory?
That’s why great graphic designers are like storytellers who convey an engaging message or narrative using symbols rather than texts.
Pro tip: Stock images still have their place in your brand authority and awareness campaign, provided they are custom-made and reflect your branding.
Understanding SEO For Content
SEO content is critical to your overall digital marketing strategy. That’s because it increases the quality and quantity of traffic going to your website.
It can also keep your target audience engaged with your brand through high-quality and relevant content.
Key elements of SEO content
While SEO content comes in many shapes and sizes, it should always involve these key elements:
Keyword research.
To generate high-quality traffic, you must do keyword research before you start writing. You can use keywords and phrases that your buyer persona uses, and it should have a decent search volume.
Keyword optimization.
Gone are the days when businesses used keyword stuffing to rank high on Google.
Search engine bots that are smarter and more user-centric. That’s why you need to write content for people, with SEO only coming as your second priority.
Pro-tip: Answer common questions related to your target keyword—e.g., “How to lose belly fat, “What are the best places to visit,” “Where to go when in California,” etc.
Content organization.
Your content should be organized logically to help improve your visibility and search engine ranking. This allows your audience to find your content easily.
Content promotion.
After publishing a blog post, a landing page, or any content on your website, you can increase its visibility by sharing it on your social media channels, forums, and other platforms. The idea here is to build links to your content, both internally and externally.
LOJO Content Logic
Your website needs high-quality content to rank higher and perform better in relevant searches. This includes blogs, landing pages, press releases, guides, case studies, white papers, and text accompanying your videos and images.
Remember, SEO and content work together by moving the “right” website visitors through your sales funnel by offering them relevant, engaging, and interesting content.
Over the years, Google’s algorithms have evolved into more intelligent and user-centric.
Nowadays, your site can get penalized if you use anything that hurts the reader’s experience or causes misrepresentation and “friction.”
The more quality content you have, the more keyword opportunities you enjoy.
But remember that search engines “see” websites in a way that’s different from how humans perceive things. For instance, an e-commerce store caters to dog owners after seeing images of dog bowls, leashes, anti-bark collars, and toys.
Conversely, Google bots need words to identify, categorize, and index your site.
How to create an optimized content?
At LOJO Marketing, we believe every content should ALWAYS be optimized for SEO and your target audience.
Here are a few steps we follow to create valuable and optimized content for our clients.
1. Conduct keyword research to identify your topic.
This first step aims to create audience-centric content that the search engines will rank highly. The goal here is to stick to the recommendations mentioned below:
-Avoid highly competitive keywords with massive search numbers.
-You can avoid difficult-to-rank keywords by focusing on long-tail keywords.
-Make sure your topic and keywords reflect each other.
2. Create an easy-to-digest outline and format.
The number of your Facebook and Instagram followers and fans has no impact on your Google search rank.
But once they visit your site, engage with your content, and share it, the search engine will propel your website to the top.
Social media and SEO strategies are part of a solid inbound marketing campaign. Social media helps you reach new audiences, while SEO helps make sure people see your product and page.
You can check out our different SEO packages that meet your unique business needs and budget.
3. Present your topic using a target keyword.
Did you know that SEO-optimized content is more about serving your audience rather than “pleasing” the search engine bots?
In recent years, Google has been tweaking its algorithms to give people a better experience.
One way to create audience-centric content is to write about a topic.
You can include a target keyword instead of bloating it with multiple related keywords that come off as sounding forced and unnatural.
4. Include backlinks throughout your content.
Since credibility is an important SEO factor, linking to trustworthy and relevant sites can help improve your content’s search engine rankings. Make sure that your links are helpful to anyone who is going to visit them.
5. Conduct the technical part of content optimization.
Use a catchy and descriptive title tag that includes your main keyword. Also, make sure it’s under 60 characters.
You can also use descriptive meta-descriptions. As for your descriptive URLs, make sure that the readers and Google bots can easily “read.”
A good content strategy can help you build an engaged audience and give them what they want. It can also help you sell your products or services by providing value in exchange for the price of admission.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can make your marketing campaign a success! You can reach us at (916) 303-4080 or drop us a message.
