7 Things to Consider Before Starting Your Content Strategy

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An effective content marketing strategy can attract, engage and converts clients. Learn the 7 things to consider before starting your content strategy.

One of the main reasons that clients find me because they realize that they need to be on social media. The realize that they are missing out on the potential to grow their business, their brand and their clients list if they are not doing some form of content marketing.

Another reason people find me is because they are already on social media. They are posting photos, writing captions and using hashtags. But with no idea what they’re actually doing and absolutely no results.

An effective content marketing strategy can attract, engage and converts clients. Learn the 7 things to consider before starting your content strategy.

1. Determine Your Business Goals

As a business owner, you should create a content strategy that supports whatever it is you are trying to do in your business. There’s no point in posting, planning and scheduling if it’s not going to do anything for your business goals.

Let’s say your business goal is to participate in X number of speaking engagements before the end of the year. Your content strategy might include:

Blog Posts: Publish content specific to your area of expertise.

LinkedIn: Publish a mix of original and curated content. Take advantage of the LinkedIn Publisher feature and create SlideShare decks with useful content to demonstrate your knowledge.

Twitter: Participate in Twitter chats to connect with other like-minded influencers in your industry.

2. Determine What Kind of Clients You Want

Figure out the who, what, where, why and how behind the buying decisions of your products or services.

Consider conducting a survey, an email questionnaire, a focus group, or interviews with previous or existing customers to get to know what makes them tick.

The information you receive can help inform everything from more effective copy, to high impact photography and graphics, from social media channel strategy to blog post topic ideation.

3. Develop Content Buckets

Content buckets is a term I first heard in a Social Media course. Content buckets simply means the different areas, categories or genres that you’re going to focus on with your content in order to achieve your business goals.

If you are fitness coach you’d concentrate on workout routines, healthy eating tips, recipes and active lifestyle activities.

Once you know your goals and have better insight into your customers and their needs – you should begin to formulate ideas on which topics you want your content marketing to cover, and how these topics will meet their needs.

Think about your content and bucket them as follows:

Original: Evergreen content that you will become known for. It will comprise most of your content mix

Curated: Articles and other blog posts that you can share in order to complement and support your expertise. This kind of content is useful for social sharing such as Twitter and LinkedIn and even newsletters.

Collaborations: This can include blog post content, guest posts, or a webinar that you do with another industry influencer. Guest blogging and partnering on webinars is a great way to enhance your original content and engage with others in your niche.

4. Decide On Content Formats

When settling on what kind of content formats you want to create, consider your customers or clients and their needs.

You don’t want to spend a lot of resources on producing a weekly video series if a majority of your customers prefer direct mail or listening to podcasts on their evening commute. This is why knowing your audience is so important.

Consider the content formats below and how they might support your business goals as well as fit within your content buckets:

Blogs: A good blog post should identify a problem, discuss how your experience and services solve this problem, then end with a call-to-action in order to convert your reader into a prospective client.

Webinars: By hosting a free webinar, you can have access to an audience that is ready to hear about the information and resources that you can provide.

E-books: Information is one of the most valuable things that you can sell, so if you consider yourself a “thought leader” or have an original idea, creating an e-book as part of your content marketing strategy is a great way to attract freelance clients.

Video: Engaging and rich as a content format that can be re-purposed, video is an effective tactic for attracting more clients to your business. You can even re-purpose evergreen blog posts into videos in order to share them with a wider audience.

5. Keep SEO in Mind

If you create internet content without thinking through search engine optimization (SEO) and keywords, you run the risk of short-changing your content marketing strategy.

Choosing the right keywords and using them in an optimized way can help you appear in search engine results.

6. Decide on Social Media Channels

Social media usually is a core way to market your content marketing, but you need a plan that supports a custom approach to each channel.

Let your goals dictate the decisions you make in regard to social media content. Keep in mind that if your customers or clients are not on Pinterest, you don’t have to be. If they are not on Snapchat, then your business does not have to be either.

Consider the following recommendations on what to post on each social media channel:

Facebook: Posts on business pages don’t have a strong organic reach on their own, so posting must be consistent and frequent, such as 1-2 posts a day. Videos represent the highest organic reach at 8.7% and growing. Add video posts to your social media content calendar and incorporate them with blog posts, behind-the-scene posts, and how-tos.

Twitter: You have 160 characters to inform and excite new customers on Twitter. Do so by including basic information, but in a catchy way that represents the brand.

Instagram: Share updates and drive engagement with a community of over 400 million users. Engage with the profiles you’d like to make connections with. Build relationships with other Instagram users and businesses that are in a similar field and have users that can benefit from what you have to post.

Pinterest: Design boards to represent your business. Curate boards that share information of interest to your target audience and boards that are about your business. Pay attention to the size of your images. Make sure your boards and pins look as inviting as they can. Pinterest is a visual search engine so it tells your brand’s story through images. Long, skinny pins are the most clicked-on image sizes.

LinkedIn: Post blog posts, business updates, upcoming speaking engagements, industry news and other information LinkedIn users would find useful.

7. Decide What Success Looks Like

KPIs (key performance indicators) are the high-level metrics you can use to determine if your content marketing is working.

Indicators such as the number of email subscribers earned, phone numbers submitted, registration forms completed, or clients secured. If you’re a blogger, this can also mean the number of pageviews on your site.

Measurement can be as simple or as complicated as you make it. Don’t measure simply for the sake of having some numbers.

If you aren’t certain what you should be measuring, ask yourself these two questions: Do these metrics support my key goals? Can I take action on these metrics?

Bottom Line

By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your audience, an effective content strategy can attract qualified prospects to your business.

If you find yourself posting randomly or maybe posting family photos on your Instagram Business page, you may need to re-think your current strategy or seek the assistance of a content marketing strategist to get one created.

Need more resources? In my FREE e-book, I share my top 6 tips for using your blog effectively in order to generate interest, find prospects and grow your freelance business. Download your copy below.

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Image via Jazmin Quaynor