How you should think about your content strategy

Content is the foundation of effective online marketing. A well-designed content strategy is one of the most important building blocks for successful search engine optimization. Having high-quality content is, and will most likely become even more, crucial for capturing the interest of potential customers and ranking highly on competitive keywords.

In other words, having a so-called content strategy is something you and your company should think about, preferably long before you even start writing content for your site. Therefore, in this article, we will discuss how you can approach your content and content strategy.

What is a content strategy?

A content strategy is a plan for how you and your company will go about creating, distributing, and managing high-quality and relevant content for a specific target audience.

Primarily creating content for the site without reflecting on who you are writing for and what type of content you should create often leads to the “wrong” type of content being produced and sometimes even packaged in a format that doesn’t suit the intended target audience. A content strategy should not be “set in stone.” It’s crucial to be able to modify the strategy if it turns out you’re not achieving the results you want. In other words, it’s about testing and adjusting along the way. This also applies to strategies that have previously worked since our world and online behavior are constantly changing.

A content strategy can be boiled down to five main building blocks:

• Who is the content for?
• What content should be created?
• Who will create the content?
• How should the content be created?
• Where should the content be distributed?

We will therefore take a closer look at these five building blocks to help you think about your company’s content strategy. It’s important to note that the strategies will be influenced by the purpose and goals of your content strategy. From an SEO perspective, our main focus is to drive traffic, which will also be the primary focus of this article. However, much of the content here can also be applied to other channels like Facebook and YouTube.

Who is the content for?

You can actually take an additional step back and reflect on yourself and your company: who you are and what you want to communicate. What is your company’s expertise in the field, and what knowledge can you contribute? But for simplicity, let’s start by analyzing who you are creating content for.

Identifying your target audience isn’t always easy. Sometimes the perceived target audience differs from the actual one. There may also be an audience out there you’ve never thought of trying to reach.
There are several ways to identify your target audience, but a good starting point is to first look at the customers your company already has and see what interests them. If you can create content that interests your existing customers, you’re already well on your way. After that, you can begin exploring how to reach other audiences.

Don’t underestimate the importance of listening to your audience’s needs and interests. You can find many great content ideas if you keep an open mind and dare to listen to your audience. More on this below, where we discuss what type of content you can create.

What content should be created?

This is the most common question from companies that want to focus on content marketing. Our answer is usually: it depends. First and foremost, it depends on who you intend to create content for, but also on what your company is and what you can produce.

If you have the competence to write and conduct research, this can be a great content idea, provided your target audience is interested in what you write about.
Text content is also the format Google understands best, and high-quality written content will likely help your site’s pages rank highly, as long as the text properly answers the search query.

If you’re more interested in working with and producing video, this can be a good complement to text content. If possible, you can also transcribe the video content and mark it up with structured data so Google can process it. If you’d like to read more about this, we recommend Google’s own article on structured data for video.

The possibilities are many, and with creativity and knowledge of your target audience (and your industry), you can gain a lot by focusing your resources on what you do best.
Don’t underestimate the importance of listening to what’s being said

If your company decides to start a blog focused on text content, it may be worth first exploring what is being written about your industry. There are many tools you can use for this purpose. Here are some examples of tools to monitor what’s being said and shared on social media in a clear way:

• BuzzSumo
• HubSpot
• Brand24

You can also go into forums and read about people’s problems, then create articles that answer these questions. If a question is frequently asked, it’s likely that many people use Google to find the answer, and that’s how they find you.

A good idea is to identify “problems” that potential customers need help solving. Business owners often know most of the problems their customers are trying to solve, but sometimes it’s good to broaden your horizons.

If you can identify problems that many people are likely to have, half the job is done. Then you know exactly what to create content around. If you’d like to read more about how to create good content, check out our article on the subject.

Think about the intent behind the search query

One thing many companies often overlook at this stage is the search intent behind Google searches. Of course, it can be tempting to rank first on a keyword with thousands of searches each month, but if the searcher’s intent doesn’t align with what you offer, optimizing for that keyword is usually a waste of time.
If your company sells cleaning services, the search phrase “How to clean a kitchen?” isn’t the one you want to rank for, since the intent is likely that the searcher plans to clean the kitchen themselves.
The same principle applies to more general searches. For example, it’s hard to know the intent behind the search “travel,” since there are so many different types of travel available.
Sometimes it’s a good idea to focus on narrower, more specific topics where the intent aligns with what your site offers. For more on search intent, we recommend reading our article on the subject.

Who should create the content?

So far, the building blocks of content strategies have been fairly obvious. Knowing your target audience and what you want to say is clear for most companies. But it’s not as obvious who should actually create the content.

It’s not uncommon for a company to decide it wants to create certain content for its site and then assign the task to an intern or someone not central to the company’s operations. This isn’t strange since many companies want their core employees to focus on their main tasks. It can be difficult to justify having a salesperson spend hours on research and writing instead of sales. The problem with this is that interns or non-core staff rarely have the knowledge and expertise that experienced employees possess. This can result in lower-quality content. And when that person leaves, the company is left without anyone with that knowledge.
Hiring freelancers or writers isn’t always ideal either, since high-quality articles are often expensive.

The best option is usually to look at what competencies exist within the company and then share the responsibility for creating content. This also spreads the risk, so the entire initiative doesn’t depend on one person. This is especially important to consider if you focus on video and only one person in the company can produce it.

How should the content be created?

Once the above steps have been analyzed and you have answers to the questions, you should think about how to create the content. This is closely tied to who is responsible for creating it.
How you choose to proceed depends on those responsible. Everyone has their own working methods. What’s important, however, is to set some basic principles and clear guidelines for how the work should continue:

• What content should be produced?
• What are the company’s goals with the content?
• How often should you publish?

Creating a plan for how to divide the work and how often to create and publish is especially important for building a clear structure for those working with the site’s content. Publishing content continuously also sends positive signals to Google that the site is active and fresh content is being added regularly.

Where should the content be distributed?

Distribution is the final building block to consider and plan for. How will you get your content in front of your audience? From a search perspective, you want your content on your own site so it appears in the organic search results. This puts you in front of people searching for answers to questions or products they’re interested in.

But there are other ways to distribute content. If you create videos, YouTube is the obvious channel. If you have images, you can use Pinterest or Instagram, and so on, to generate interest in your content.

The key is getting your message out. This is especially important in the beginning when your content hasn’t ranked on Google yet. Distributing your content across multiple channels can also help you build backlinks to your site, which is positive from an SEO perspective.
Just remember it’s impossible to be on every platform. Choose the most important platforms where you feel comfortable and where your potential customers are.

Repurpose content for different channels and audiences

If you’ve created a written article, the process doesn’t have to stop there. The content can be repurposed and used across different channels and for different audiences.
If you’ve already done research on a topic and spent hours writing a blog post, you can reuse it when creating content in other formats.
For really great content, it can even be worth repackaging it into new formats to reach other audiences.

For example, if you write a blog post about “How to make the perfect cinnamon bun,” you can rewrite the text for Instagram or Pinterest and post a photo of the bun. Not that Pinterest and Instagram need more cinnamon bun pictures, but you get the idea.

Many companies already have good resources in the form of old articles that can be updated and presented in new formats. Some articles are too short and only scratch the surface. These articles don’t always provide enough information to solve visitors’ problems and therefore rarely rank well. These articles can be repurposed and updated to breathe new life into the content.

Final comments

Creating a content strategy isn’t easy. But it’s necessary if you and your company want to minimize the risk of wasting time creating content that doesn’t deliver results. It’s also essential for running long-term content marketing. Working with content for your site is an ongoing project that never really ends. There’s always something new to write about or improve in existing posts.

If you have a clear plan for what to create, who does what, and how to proceed, you’ve come a long way. That way, you can avoid spending time on content that doesn’t spark engagement and interest.

It’s impossible to predict in advance which content will drive traffic, generate leads, and convert customers. But with the help of this article, we hope you can minimize the risk of creating too many articles that don’t contribute to achieving your company’s goals, whatever they may be.

We hope this article helps you understand the importance of a long-term content strategy and what you should keep in mind when developing one.