Every strategy, every tactical action, every step we take, must be aligned with the goals of the company. Everything we do must contribute its grain of sand in achieving the objectives.
“The success of a strategy depends on the strength of the relationship between the objectives of the company and those of tactical action”
Business Objectives → Online Marketing Objectives → Social Media Goals → Facebook Objectives → Action Objectives
The same must happen with the contents.
In content strategies, whether for social networks or for a blog, you tend to write with the ‘make sense’ criterion.
Under this universal criterion we end up writing things about the product, with n variations and approaches, which end up producing contents of a dubious quality.
How to define a content strategy?
Objectives of the strategy
As I said at the beginning, we must define a goal for the contents that we are going to generate that will help us achieve the company’s objectives.
The goal is not to get it shared many times, but thanks to that content a user meets the goal we have defined (buy, register in a database, etc.). If it is also shared many times, perfect, but we do not have to obsess about it.
Movement
In order not to have problems with the quality of the contents, and also to obtain a good rate of engagement in our strategy of social networks, we must define the movement that guides our strategy.
“It is that topic of conversation, which allows the company to talk continuously with its audience, without having to speak of itself.”
That is, a topic of conversation, related to the company and its products, that allows us to generate content that attracts the attention of potential customers of the company.
If the company sells windows, and only talks about windows, it will run out of attractive content in a short time. But nevertheless, if you speak of decoration, thermal and acoustic insulation, security, etc. Will catch the attention of people who are potentially interested in buying your windows.
Define the profile of the audience
The next step is to define who we are going to target and in what social networks.
For this we will detail your audience profile or buyer person and taking advantage of what has already been defined in the previous point, we will customize it.
In this case we will take the audience profile defined for the overall strategy of the company, and adapt it to the contents. For this we will take into account the following aspects:
- Objective: what do we want to achieve from this profile? What do they have to get these contents?
- SEO: We will delve into the keywords most used by our audience in each context (discovery of the brand or product, consideration of purchase, purchase and loyalty).
- Interests: of the themes defined in the movement, which one is best suited to each profile? What kind of content would be most appropriate?
- Reading habits: when and how much.
- Device: PC, Smartphone or Tablet.
- Format: text, photo, video, …
- Favourite Channel: blog, social networks.
These are the basic fields, but they do not have to be valid for all cases. We must adapt it for each strategy.
Alignment with strategy
If we have followed the steps correctly to this point, what is defined and what we have planned, should be aligned with the strategy.
But to be sure and facilitate the work of the next stage, we must define in detail the role of content within the overall strategy of the company.
Assessment of the strategic needs of the company
This is something we have done in the definition of objectives, but now we are going to make it concrete.
What needs does the company have? Given the strengths of a content strategy, how can they help solve them? In other words, do the needs of the company match the things in which the content is efficient?
For this we must evaluate the strategy following the methodology of the purchase funnel. By having a global vision of the strategy and its operation, we will be able to detect these weak points and finish defining if the objectives set are the right ones and how they will help the content to solve them.
Although the content can be useful in the four stages of the marketing funnel, we must keep in mind the utility we have assigned to them within our strategy and try to adjust to what is defined.
Define the content plan
The format of a content plan will depend on the needs of the strategy, and the team structure.
Just as I did with the audience profile, I’m going to leave the fields that I deem necessary. These fields can serve you to design your own format adapted to the needs of your company.
- Content: title or topic to be published with a brief explanation.
- Keywords: most important keywords and with greater volume of searches.
- Stage Funnel objective.
- Objective: We already know which stage should be reinforced, but we must define exactly what goal they must fulfill.
- Metrics: What metrics best describe success?
- Audience profile: Who are we addressing?
- Tonality: what tone should we use to make the content as effective as possible?
- Channels: what channels and which formats will we use?
- Blog
- Social networks
- Newsletter
Surely those who dedicate to social networks and/or inbound marketing have equally valid and surely better proposals.
I hope you find this interesting. Have any questions? Do not hesitate to contact us!
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