CCW #008: How to Write a Winning Content Strategy in 7 Stupidly Simple Steps

"More (and better) content starts with a strategy."

In this issue, we're going to tackle why you need a content strategy and how to build and execute a successful content marketing strategy from scratch in 7 no-stress steps.

Your content strategy is the most important piece of your content marketing plan. A content strategy helps you define your goals, plan your content and measure your results. And a well documented content strategy ensures every piece of content generates tangible results.

Let's get started!

Step 1. Define your goals.

Know your goals before you start planning your strategy.

Answer these three questions to get started:

• What's the objective of your content?
• Why do you want to create content?
• Who are you creating content for?

This content strategy template will help you define your goals.

Step 2. Conduct persona research.

Create a character to embody your perfect buyer.

• Start by giving your perfect buyer persona a name; for example, Nurse Nancy, Real Estate Rhonda.

It will help make your persona easy to reference and remember.

• Audit your audience and find the top 7 performers and the top three things they have in common then study each person. You could also dig into your analytics data for a closer look at behavior to your current perfect buyers, i.e. which content consumed most, which path did they take to the content and if and where they dropped off during their content journey. 
• List every demographic and psychographic your buyers share. Demographics help you identify your buyers, while psychographics makes it easy for you to understand why they buy your solutions.

Demographics help you identify people based on their age, gender, income, kids, habits, hobbies, job status, location, religion, race, or anything relevant to your business.

Psychographics will help you understand what your buyer(s) enjoys, values, and believes. Psychographics is where you learn your buyer.

• Identify your buyers dreams and goals. What are your perfect buyers trying to achieve? Are they looking to increase revenue? Are they trying to connect with leaders in a particular industry? Are they trying to increase market share?

Then, make a list of goals that are relevant to what you offer.

Tip: A relevant conversation on LinkedIn will give you tons of valuable information.

• Identify challenges and pain points your buyers face to reach their goals. Does your perfect buyer need marketing help? Are they having trouble creating great content? Are they finding it hard to manage time efficiently?

Write down the problems you/r business can solve. 

• Identify how you can help. How does your solutions remove their pain? How can you help them reach a goal? Can you give them something they want and enjoy?
• You don’t need to sell anything if you have the solution to remove the pain.

Step 3. Run a content audit.

• Create a list of performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of your content. Here are some general categories to get you started.

SEO metrics like organic traffic or keyword rankings

User metrics like page views or bounce rates

Engagement metrics like comments or click-through rates

Sales metrics like number of leads or conversion rates

• Get organized and make a list of all of your content. Make a list of URLs to each of your landing pages, blogs, news, product descriptions, testimonials, and more.
• Categorize data about your content.I useful to create a basic Excel document to keep track of all your data. Common pieces of data to include:

Type of content, like educational, lead generating, etc.

Title of content (H1 headers)

Subtitles (H2 or H3 headers)

Internal and external links

SEO factors, including metadata and keywords

How timely the content is, including if any of it is outdated

Analytic data, including page views, average time on page, bounce rate, and search queries

Other factors, like page load speeds (should be less than two seconds) and how mobile-friendly it is

• Ask questions to determine what the data means.

Consider these key questions as you review:

What content is performing particularly well?

This might mean it has a high page view rate or a high conversion rate. What can you glean from this content to try to duplicate these results in the future?

What content is performing poorly?

For example, high bounce rates, long load speeds, or poor SEO rankings.

What content is outdated?

Does it need to be deleted, updated, or entirely reworked?

• Create a list of what needs to be done and divide up the tasks. This might include creating a list of new topics to write about, updating existing content, or removing content that’s performing poorly or is outdated. Schedule your Free 15min content audit.

Step 4. Choose a content management system.

The content management system (CMS) is where you create, manage, and optimize your content.

The complexity and functionality of your CMS depends on your needs and size; i.e. enterprise, small business, solopreneur, etc.

Here are a few examples:

• Wordpress
• Hubspot
• Contentstack

Step 5. Determine which type of content you want to create.

Focus on formats that add value (entertain, educate, inspire) and deeply connect with your audience.

• Who's your audience?

The perfect content format is the one that best fits your audience. Content creation is all about reaching out to specific persona types - the persona types most likely to buy your solutions.

Your perfect buyer profile will tell you what types of content your audience consumes and favors most.

• Which content speaks your brand?

The perfect type of content puts your products and brand at the top of your audience’s mind.

If you’re building trust with your audience, pick content types that give you room to explore and deliver content that educates. But, if your goal is spreading awareness, memes and short videos perform better.

• Which content fits your social platform?

Every social platform behaves differently and attracts different audiences; what performs well on one channel may not perform well on another channel.

If you're branding content solutions via video explainers, YouTube works great. But shorter videos perform better with Facebook and Twitter. And, if you're targeting B2B markets, eBooks are perfect for LinkedIn.

Everything depends on the attention level of your audience. If you’re competing in a low attention/high-turnover setting, simple content works best (i.e., Instagram and memes). If you’re competing in a high engagement/low-turnover setting, complex content forms will be more effective (i.e., LinkedIn and long-posts).

Step 6. Brainstorm content ideas.

Running out of content ideas will crush your momentum. Brainstorming provides quick and easy idea generation of fresh content ideas in a relaxed manner.

Try one of these four powerful group brainstorming techniques:

• Brainstorming
• Groups discuss ideas freely without fear of criticism.
• Braindumping
• Individuals write down ideas privately and share later in groups.
• Brainwriting
• Individuals write down ideas and pass the ideas to someone else to elaborate. After a few minutes, individuals pass their ideas to someone else and the process continues.
• Brainwalking
• Instead of passing around ideas, individuals walk around and find new “ideation stations” and elaborate on ideas.

7. Create, publish, analyze, iterate your content.

Your marketing strategy is about more than the types of content you create – your marketing strategy also details how you'll organize, distribute and analyze your content.

Use my editorial calendar to publish a well-balanced and diverse content library.

Featured Tool: Free 2023 Coaches Editorial Calendar with Posting Prompts

See you next week.

When you're ready, use these three tools to help you build:

1.The Dynamo Content Engine: When you're ready to start creating more, organizing better and distributing your content more effectively.

2.The 10X Creator Toolbox: Templates you can use now whether you know your audience yet or not.

3.The Essential Content Creation Resource: Join a community of like minded creators for Weekly podcasts, Content training and ask-me-anything sessions.