Content strategy is a well thought and documented plan that uses content to engage and attract new clients. Your company plans to drive traffic, engagement, sales, and insights through your content. If you work in digital marketing, you know you can’t avoid the content strategy topic.
It’s the tool you use in marketing every day, and there’s a good reason behind that. It makes everything more attractive, functional, and much more rewarding for everyone involved, starting from your employees to your customers.
Let’s take a deeper look at what the term content production strategy stands for and learn how to create one.
What Is Content Production Strategy And Why It Is Important?
Before you learn about content production strategy, it’s worth understanding what the word content means.
Defining something as broad as “content” is a much bigger task than you might think. It can mean many different things to many other people depending on the situation or the context.
Fundamentally content equals information. This information is high-quality, helpful information designed to provide consumers value, entertainment, and knowledge.
Now that you understand the term content, it’s time to learn about content strategy and its importance.
Content production strategy is a method of planning, creating, distributing, and measuring content in all its forms and finally achieving your marketing and business goals. Therefore, an ongoing strategy is one of the most critical components of your overall business strategy.
A well-planned content strategy can make a huge difference and improve your marketing results by understanding why you are using any given type of content and who you want to reach with that content. In addition, it can answer what kind of content you are going to create and what goals you will achieve.
A content strategy construes all the criteria and pin-points what needs to be created or modified throughout the entire customer journey, including the post-sale touchpoints.
Building A Content Production Strategy In 6 Easy Steps
There are six essential steps in the process of creating a content strategy you should follow. They give you a groundwork and scheme for every content strategy you or your team makes.
So, let’s get started!
Define Your Goal
Even the best content you ever created won’t do much for your business if it doesn’t serve your business goal. However, ensuring that all the pieces of your content strategy fit into the puzzle can be challenging. So work on this together with your team and get as much help as you need.
To ease up this process, ask yourself these questions.
What are the goals and the wanted final result of developing a content strategy plan?
What is the reason for producing content, the benefits, and your content marketing plan?
You have to know your goals before you start planning, creating, and producing content. By strategically setting your target, you can concentrate and direct all your resources into achieving this specific target.
This way, you will have an easier time deciding what type of content is best for your strategy and your company, instead of just blindly writing content with hopes of getting the attention you want.
Build Your Personas And Target Audience
Without having a clear idea of who your target audience is, you can’t see the full potential of the content you create and produce. Before you know what you want to share and how you want your content to be shared, you need to know who you are sharing that content with. Click on this link and schedule a free 30-minute strategy call and let us help you with this question.
Your marketing personas will present these content consumers. Marketing personas are a semi-functional representation of your customer for a unique product or service your company has to offer. For a start, you can search for similarities in your current customers, then use them to build a presentation of your ideal client. It is all based on data and research.
As part of creating your buyer personas, you should think of why they want to buy your products or use your services. Keep in mind that the reason is rarely the product you are offering. Instead, it is the solution to a bigger problem they have.
Do You Need More Than One Marketing Persona? Several companies have more than one buyer persona, which means more people buy their products or services. Sometimes, more people, a group, or a committee decide to buy a product.
Your company should create a different persona for each individual involved in purchasing the product or services. Sometimes this process can take a lot of your time and be impractical. However, even acknowledging the other people involved in the decision-making process will help you improve the content you create and produce.
Brainstorm Content Ideas
Reading this, you must ask yourself, “How do I create unique and engaging content when there are so many articles and pages competing for the same readers and attention?”.
You don’t have to spend time looking for the one topic that hasn’t been written. Instead, come up with new ways and perspectives to approach some old topics, or merge two separate topics into one and create something creative and exciting.
Plan A Distribution And Promotion
Writing and creating the content is not enough. You need to work out a plan to distribute and promote that content the right way to gain an audience.
This plan should be determined firstly by your budget and then by the channels and ways you want your audience to consume it. Finally, it is where you can use the knowledge gained from your buyer persona.
An excellent example of content distribution may be an email newsletter. You can also use social media to get your content in front of an audience and potential customers. It includes Snapchat or Instagram for a younger audience, Facebook, as it covers a large part of the population. If you have a business audience, you wouldn’t want to miss being active on LinkedIn.
Don’t forget, content distribution and promotion are a significant part of the whole content strategy process. It is the way you interact with your audience and present to them your content.
Listen To Your Audience To Improve Your Content Production Strategy
Your customers have to know that you can hear what they say and see you engaging with them on social media. Don’t forget to ask for their feedback, review of your service or product, or suggestions.
Engaging with your customers and responding to their feedback helps you gather essential data while showing them that you are interested in what they have to say and that their opinion matters.
One of your content strategy goals should be reaching out to your audience and providing them with valuable experience, which will ultimately generate many loyal customers who will choose your products over your competitors.
Create An Editorial Statement
The final step of developing your content strategy is creating an editorial statement. This statement clearly and precisely states your content goal. An editorial statement is not about selling a single service or product. Instead, it aims to influence the audience in purposeful and substantial, industry-related ways.
It helps you decide the meaning of the message you want to communicate to your clients and how and where to use that message.
An editorial statement answers four key questions:
- First, who are you as a company?
- Second, what audience do you want to reach?
- Third, how do you want to reach them?
- Finally, what do you want to be their reaction?
It involves the unification of ideas, opinions, and other forms of thought leadership. The wanted outcome of an editorial mission statement is to influence your customers through informative content that provides insight, inspiration, and knowledge.
This type of statement will help you focus and unite everyone in your company towards your final goal. And it delivers an understanding of your brand’s purpose to your employees and your customers.
Content Production Strategy VS Content Marketing Strategy
In what ways do content marketing strategy and content strategy differ?
In the marketing industry world, there is a lot of jargon, including unclear and contradictory definitions.
Often, readers are left on their own to draw meaning and conclusions from the content that they read. When this is the case, the readers constantly converge and mix the definitions. However, there is a distinct and relevant difference between the terms content strategy and content marketing strategy, and it is crucial to understand it.
What Is Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is a sub-category of marketing in which companies and brands create content where they share their expertise and advice with potential clients and existing ones.
Content marketing discusses the idea of helping your audience solve problems or issues relevant to your business and its offers. By doing so, you are building trust and approval from your customers and ensuring a path toward a particular goal.
Leadership philosophies, especially thought leadership, opinion pieces, industry research, and industry exploration, all fall into this discipline and guide your content marketing strategy.
The content marketing strategy is the broader view behind your achievements, trials, and errors. It is the big question of how and why. It characterizes the key aims, the target groups, and the pain points, which all need to be included in the content marketing program, along with the types of content created.
It involves a framework of the distribution plan for the final products and evaluations of what success means.
Your content marketing strategy is the ship’s navigational system, keeping all the parts aligned and focused.
Conclusion
There is so much more to a content strategy than creating just excellent and engaging content. All this doesn’t matter if you don’t know the steps mentioned in this article.
The content strategy gives you guidelines and instructions to follow each step of the way. It helps you get more strategic results while producing content that serves your audience and business target.
Follow the above-mentioned building content strategy steps in that specific order, and start creating your content production strategy today!
Content Production Strategy: Summary
If you are familiar with the content marketing world, you know that you need a framework that will help you create a solid content strategy. This article gives you a handy cheat sheet that you can use whenever creating and producing content.
The content strategy in this article lays out the goals you want to achieve with your content, what kind of content is best suited to accomplish those same goals, the process of creation, distribution, and the analysis of your achieved results.
You can learn what content strategy is and what it is so crucial for your business. Then, you can learn how to build your own content strategy from end to end in just six easy steps listed in this article.
Become an expert with your newly gained knowledge and create a mistake-free content production strategy with the help of this article as the only guidance.
