Content development strategies are all about creating and publishing content that helps you meet your business goals. Producing high-quality content helps you build trust with potential customers and retain your current ones. Make sure your content strategy is up-to-date to increase your brand awareness and drive traffic to your site.
Whether you’re new to content marketing or you want to revisit your content development strategies, we’ve put together this guide to make the process as simple as possible for you.
Questions to Ask Before You Get Started
Who Is Your Audience?
One of the first things you need to do is figure out who your audience is. You likely have different types of customers/viewers/readers, and you want to ensure that your content caters to as many of them as possible.
What Problem Are You Solving?
The aim of your products or services is to solve a problem for your audience, and your content is how you will educate them about the ways they can benefit from you. You want to clearly identify that problem and the solution you can provide.
What Makes Your Content Unique?
No matter the industry, you likely have competitors offering similar solutions to the same audience. You need your content to be unique and show your potential customers what sets you apart and why your product/service is worth it over others.
Where Will You Publish Your Content?
Once you have created your content, it’s time to figure out where you will publish it. Examples include social media like Twitter and Facebook, your website, and your blog. Having various types of content published on different channels is a great way to increase your reach.
How Will You Manage Your Content?
Creating and publishing your content is not an easy task, and how you choose to manage it makes a massive difference in your success. Content marketing platforms like Mindspun allow you to take control of your content in an easy-to-use way.
The Steps for a Stellar Content Development Strategy
Know Your Goals
What do you want to achieve through your content? Creating and sticking to a well-defined goal will help you determine the best content strategy and give you clear metrics to keep an eye on throughout the process.
Know Your Audience
Knowing your target audience is one of the first steps, but you need to understand what they want and what motivates them to make a purchase. Before creating content, you should research their buyer personas. It’s important to note that your ideal audience may change over time.
Survey What You Are Currently Doing
You can run a content audit to determine how your efforts performed in the past, figure out what you need to do differently, and set new goals accordingly. A content audit is a perfect way to align your content goals with your overall business goals.
Choose a System for Content Management
Content management systems let you create, manage, and track all of your content in one place. Your CMS allows you to plan, create, and publish your content so that you can focus on creating your best work rather than worrying about the logistics.
Decide What Type of Content You Will Create
There are a ton of options when it comes to content creation, and you’ll need to choose which ones best suit your business. We’ll go over these different types in the next section.
Map Your Ideas for Killer Content
The next step is to come up with ideas for your new content. If you’re having a hard time deciding on new topics for your content, you can use tools like this free idea generator to easily create great blog topics and titles.
Related: Blog Post Ideas From Mindspun
Plan, Schedule, and Publish
Now it’s time to bring your ideas to fruition. Once you have your content plan ready to go, you can create a schedule for your new topics and begin publishing them to the platforms that you chose in the first section!
Types of Content Marketing
Blog Posts
Blog posts like this one should give your audience meaningful information that is relevant to them. Since blog posts are posted to live websites to attract new visitors, it’s important to publish them regularly. Don’t ramble on — keep your blog posts concise; no one wants to read 5,000 words when you can explain it thoroughly in 1,000.
Case Studies
Case studies let you show how your product/service solved a problem for your customer in the real world. Case studies are the proof that your solution is effective, and they will help pull in undecided potential customers. You can format case studies into any form of content in this list.
Infographics
Infographics are a clear and concise way to get your point across in an organized, visual way. Especially effective for sharing a lot of data, infographics give your readers an easy way to analyze and understand all of that information.
Ebooks
Ebooks are a great way to give your readers and customers a lot more in-depth information than a blog post. Ebooks make for great lead-generation tools; you’ll typically send your customers a download link after they show interest and sign up with their contact information.
Videos
Videos are highly engaging for your audience, and you and your customers can share them across different social media platforms with ease. They take more time and resources to create, but marketing videos are an excellent way to spread your content to a wider audience; visual marketing is more popular than ever.
Social Media
Social media — it seems like everyone is on at least one platform daily. It’s a great way to distribute the content you have on your website to a larger population. You can create new content to share on social media, or you can share links to the content that you already host elsewhere.
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