How to Create and Maintain Your Content Strategy

Putting together a solid and productive content strategy is an essential part of every marketing team. You’ve probably heard it a million times, but content is king. You need it to educate. You need it communicate. You need it to connect. You need it to sell. In other words, content is a pretty essential part of your company’s journey, so don’t ignore it. It’s so important that it most definitely deserves a special seat at your marketing table.

What does that even mean? Well, when you have a very important guest showing up at your house, you’re not go to wing it on the meal you’re serving or leave all your junk lying around your house. You’re going to get stuff cleaned up and create a meal plan and put together some activities to do throughout the night. Treat your “content king” the same way. Clean up what you already have. Create a content strategy or plan to support your marketing efforts. And develop a content plan that supports your efforts as you continue. It’s time to start prioritizing your content king. Follow these 5 easy steps to create and maintain a content strategy for your team.

Step 1) Identify Your Content Needs

The very first thing you need to do is figure out what you’d like to achieve through your content journey. Are you building brand awareness? Are you educating a customer about the tech specs of a product? Do you want them to attend an event you’re hosting? From that point, you’ll want to establish what your capabilities are and how you can apply them to meet your end goal. Content is constantly changing, but some good places to start your brainstorming are using the following content mediums: email, blogs, web content, informational brochures, social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.), case studies, and videos. That’s not an all-inclusive list, nor is it a check list. Only use content mediums that you a) have the technical skill to create and b) make sense for your audience. For example, if you don’t have an email platform at your disposal or have any way of generating a customer/prospect email list, it would be a little silly for you to be building out email content. Another good tip to remember: not all social media platforms make sense for all businesses. Know your audience and learn what spaces they like to communicate in. A little bit of research goes a long way in social media content.

Step 2) Connect with Your Experts

There’s a good chance you’re building content that you’re not necessarily an expert on. That’s pretty normal and completely manageable. While some research on your product or topic will help, don’t feel like you have to enter into full research paper mode. Identify someone in your company or network who is an expert at what you’re writing about. Connect with them and see what their availability is to support your content efforts. If you’re lucky, your company might say that helping you is part of their job role (which would definitely make your job easier), but odds are pretty good that won’t be the case as their workload is probably pretty full too. This is a catching flies with honey situation. Reach out to them requesting their expert help. This is also an excellent time for you to share compliments and gratitude for helping. Explain the benefit of the content piece you’re attempting to put together. You’re putting together a customer brochure to educate people about your products. You want to connect with customers more personally via the company’s blog. You’re creating an email campaign that will drum up some leads. Try to give them an estimate of the work effort on their end – if you’re requesting a 10-page white paper, they may be less likely to participate. If they’re a little hesitant to participate because they don’t feel they’re good writers, reassure them that you’re just coming to them for the facts and the selling points. You’re still there to flesh out the writing and make sure it’s clear, appropriate for your audience, and will help you reach your goals!

Step 3) Create a Content Calendar

It’s a lot easier to manage your content strategy with a little pre-planning. It seems daunting, but even the simplest content calendar can make all the difference. I suggest starting with a blank calendar of the month ahead. Mark the days you’d like to have some content go live. Color-code those dates based on the type of content you want to send out that day. For larger content efforts, it is also helpful to note your timelines for working on that project. For example, on my calendar, social media content is pink, emails are blue, and brochures are green (those are the big three content pieces my company uses). I post something on social media every day, so every day has pink. If I’m sending out a 3-part email campaign, I highlight those three send dates in blue, write down the emails’ subjects, plan some related social posts on the calendar in pink, all while also noting on the calendar what dates I plan to dedicate time to creating that email content. This is an easy way for me to look ahead at the content we plan to send out for the month and quickly assess what parts of the month I’ll have more time to dedicate to additional projects.

Step 4) Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

You spent a lot of time on that content you made. It doesn’t have to be done as soon as it’s out the door. Your content calendar can and should include content that you want to reuse! If your content was even remotely relevant to your business, you should be able to reuse it. Maybe you change up the verbiage on your social posts, but point them to the same landing page. Maybe you swap out the subject lines on your emails and resend to people who didn’t open. Maybe you take your 5-page brochure and chop it up into an email campaign. Or maybe you take some piece of written content that you made and turn it into a short blog or infographic. Sometimes, it takes people a little while to see how great your content is, depending on how they prefer to consume it. Be persistent and keep getting that content in front of them! You’ve worked hard on it, so don’t let it sit in your content library un-touched.

Step 5) Make an Assessment

Analyze your work. Take a look at your various analytics reports to make some educated conclusions about how your content is performing. Check out how well your social media posts are doing from day-to-day and month-to-month. Are you steady? Are you growing? Are you dropping? If you’re dropping interaction, think about taking your posts a different direction OR maybe spending your time and effort in a different area. How are your emails performing? Are your open rates and click through rates measuring up to industry bench marks? If not, make small adjustments to your content or start running A/B tests to try to identify the areas that you’re losing your customers. That data is priceless and will help you better target your customers and make better content calendars going forward.

A content strategy is a big challenge to tackle. You’ve got to put in the work to make and maintain a successful content strategy, but it will all be worth it in the end. Hopefully these 5 steps will help you kick off a strong and effective content strategy.