What is a content strategy and why do you need one?

Everything your business or brand posts or shares is content, from your website and social media to brochures and business cards. Everything really is content and that can feel overwhelming, especially if you do not have a plan or strategy in place to deal with it all. If you are feeling lost amongst all the content, then you should develop a content strategy or hire someone who offers content strategy services to create one for you.

A strategy will help you to manage it all, to keep it all in line and connected, and to make sure it all serves its purpose: your business success. To do all that your content strategy needs certain elements, must haves if you will. But there are also elements that are nice to have, that can be a great addition and very helpful.

A bare bones content strategy: what is in it?

A bare bones content strategy consists of:

• Business description

• Target audience

• Simple tone of voice guidelines

• Unique selling points

• Primary SEO keywords

• Business goals

Any good content strategy will start with a description of your business. What you do exactly and how that impacts your customers, users or clients. On a very basic level, this is what all your content should communicate, not always directly but there should always be a link.

Second comes your target audience. At minimum, you want a short description of who your content should be aimed at. But a better option is to include demographic information to define a range of people.

This is followed by your tone of voice guidelines. You will want to include several characteristics that sit at the crossroads of your business and your audience. Consider things like formality and spoken versus written language rules.

If you plan to create content in multiple languages or not in your local language, be specific about which languages you will use. For instance, will you use British or American English, Portuguese or Brazilian, or European Spanish or one of the Latin American dialects? Setting this in your content strategy will bring consistency and create clarity for consumers.

Your strategy should also include an overview of what sets you apart from your competition. Your unique selling points (USPs) are important reasons why consumers choose you instead of your competition. These can be values or processes, or simply because you offer something your competition cannot or does not.

If any of your content is to be published online, you should include SEO (search engine optimisation) data in your content strategy. At the most basic level you should have a list of keywords or phrases that you want to be associated with or are closely related to your business and you want to rank on in search engines. But it is better to create a list of researched primary keywords, as these form the basis of your SEO strategy for your website over all and specific pages.

Finally, a bare bones content strategy should include your business goals that you want to reach with you content. These can range widely, from broad goals such as increase brand recognition to specific goals like reaching X amount of organic page traffic or grow revenue to Y amount. Be realistic in your goals, and make sure to adjust them and your strategy when you have reached them so that your business will continue to grow.

Developing a complete content strategy

A true content strategy contains every item from the bare bones version and then some. These extras will allow for more structure, better targetting and stronger positioning. So what is missing in a bare bones strategy?

For one, you should create personas for your target audience. These fictional individuals are representations of the people in your target audience. They have specific needs and wants, pain points and even a brief look at their daily lives to find out where best to connect with them.

Expanded tone of voice guidelines should also be part of your full content strategy. You do no want to just name the characteristics but describe them and give actual examples of how they apply. Include do’s and don’ts for extra clarity.

Fig. 1 An example of tone of voice characteristics with do’s and don’ts from Semrush

Also include a thorough analysis of your competition. For instance, take note of the tone of voice and the style that they use, and if they have a blog or post on social media, look at how often they publish new content. Thorough competition research in combination with your USPs will make it easier to stand out from the crowd and have audiences take notice of your business.

Lastly, you will want to create a more thorough SEO content strategy, one that exists out of primary keywords and secondary keywords. Include both long and short-tail keywords, as well as keywords focussing on different search intentions so that you can connect with customers throughout their sales journey. Also include backlink opportunities and content gaps that your competition may be using against your.

Your content strategy solution

Whether you develop your own content strategy, hire a content strategy agency or a marketeer with content strategy services, you will have to give input into the process. Having a good plan in place will be worth both the time, effort and money you put into creating it in the long run. If you are part of the creative process for your strategy, than you will also be better able to implement it.

Even a bare bones strategy requires you to have thought out what you do, what your business is. If this changes, this core of your strategy, you should redevelop your whole strategy. The different elements have to all work together, so if you change one thing you have to check the others are still correct.

If you hire me to create a content strategy for you, we will discuss before hand how detailed you want or need it to be. Maybe you only need an SEO strategy because you already have the other elements in place. I do not offer a no one-size-fits-all service, I offer a service tailor-made for each individual client.