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4 Elements Of An Effective Content Strategy

elements content strategy

When it comes to marketing on the internet, one of its core units is content. After all, without good content, what would hold your marketing campaigns together? It starts with how long you’re able to capture the attention of your target audience so that these potential customers understand more about how your products and services can be of any benefit to them. 

No matter how good your products and services are, if your target customers don’t even know they exist, there’s no way that they’ll be sold. And if your business manages to even become visible, the question is, how do you catch and keep their attention long enough to convert them into paying customers? This is where a sound content strategy, as part of your digital marketing strategy comes in. 

Here are the four key elements you should consider for your content strategy if you want it to be effective: 

Crucial Components Of Content Creation And Marketing

1. Customer Persona 

Before you come up with your content marketing strategy, consider the type of audience you want to appeal to. Once you’ve defined a target audience, narrow down their key traits to help you create a specific customer persona. To find these key traits, you need to do user research with the help of analytical data from your website visitors and the audience that responded to your initial marketing campaigns. 

A specific customer persona should include the age bracket of your typical audience and their common interests, and online behavior, among others. It will be the archetype that will best represent the majority of your audience. This is what you’ll base your content on, which means what you create should be interesting enough for such a group. 

Once you start creating content, make sure your titles are interesting for the customer persona you created. It should also be SEO-friendly enough so they come up in the search results when your audience looks for information that you might have. If you need help doing that, you can use a split-testing tool for your SEO titles

2. Style Guidelines 

Having a well-defined style guide is important so that everyone onboard your content marketing team is on the same page when creating content. Without one, each writer will create content based on their own writing style. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as this will also bring variety and fresh inputs to your website, but it may hinder consistency. 

Your style guidelines should include details such as the company’s standards on formatting, terminology, and tone of voice. 

If you don’t have style guidelines for your company, here are some tips to get you started: 

• Define your content objectives and your specific audience 
• Add your format preferences based on your niche 
• Check each content thoroughly for consistency before publishing 

It would also help to provide tools and opportunities to your writing team to help them improve their craft, such as content writing software to improve your SEO

3. Marketing Objectives 

Your website’s content is a major part of your marketing strategy. To create a solid foundation, it’s important that you begin with marketing objectives as early as possible. These will serve as the main purpose of your marketing campaigns in general. 

If you don’t have concrete marketing objectives in place, start by: 

• Defining your target market 
• Identifying the competitors within your niche that have the same target market 
• Working around your brand’s core mission statement 

Content marketing objectives are key to consistent success.

components content marketing strategy

4. SMART Goals 

Your content strategy should have SMART goals. This means they’re specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Without specific metrics to guide you, your content strategy will seem aimless, and you might just be cutting its potential for success. 

As you evaluate whether or not your strategy has SMART goals, don’t just focus on the short-term content strategies. Consider the long-term bigger picture so you can set your goals’ direction into a clearer path. 

Here’s how you can use SMART metrics for content marketing strategy success: 

Specific 
  - What do you want to accomplish? 
  - Why are these goals important? 
  - What resources are involved in reaching these goals? 

Measurable 
  - How do you determine when these goals are achieved? 
  - How much should each content be able to bring in each period, income-wise? 

Achievable 
  - How realistic are your goals, based on your current financial standing? 
  - How can these goals be attained? 

Relevant 
  - Are your goals relevant to the current market? 
  - Is this the right time to implement these goals? 

Time-Bound 
  - What can be done to achieve these goals in three months? Six months? A year? 
  - What can be done about these goals today? 

Focusing on SMART goals will keep your content marketing strategy consistent and creative.

Content Conclusion 

Now that you’ve got a list of these important key elements, it’s up to you now to go through your content strategy and do your own audit if you have all these elements. If you don’t, then as you tweak your content strategy for this business year, make sure that you at least have some of these key elements. If you don’t, then you’re not maximizing your content strategy’s potential. 

To be competitive, you can’t just have content without evaluating whether or not it’ll do well. You have to take it further by ensuring that these content strategies will achieve their intended purpose within a realistic timeframe.