Your content strategy is a critical part of your online marketing
strategy. Content is becoming more and more important in a world where
the majority, if not all, of a business’ content comes from the
Internet. If your content strategy is poor, or if it is missing
something, you’ll end up not getting the best out of the resources you
spend on content.
Here is a list of items every content strategy should include:
Numerous Content Outlets
Your business should have, at the very, very least, an official
website, an official page on Facebook and a Twitter account. The website
should have a descriptive page explaining what your business does and
description pages for each product or service it offers. If your
business creates customized products for each customer, like a
landscaping company does, you should showcase some of those products. A
company blog is something that you definitely want if your business can
afford the resources involved in having one. Having company pages on
other social media sites is a good idea too, if possible.
A Process
Your content has to go through an approval process before it is
published. Your content strategy should say who has to check and approve
different types of content after it has been created. Obviously,
different types of content will have to go through different amounts of
checking. After all, a tweet doesn’t need to be checked as thoroughly as
a blog post.
A Clear Schedule
Your content strategy should make it clear how often different types
of content on different content outlets will be updated. For example, it
could specify the company’s Facebook page should be updated at least
once every other day, that a new post should be added to the company
blog at least every week, and that every month the business’ product
descriptions will be reviewed and updated.
Of course, how often content is added will depend on how many
resources can be used to create it. If your business can’t afford the
time to support the schedule it outlined in its content strategy, it
should be changed. Also, you should think about what kinds of content
your target audience is most likely to consume. For example, if the
visitors you are trying to attract use social media extensively, you
should try to update your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social
media pages at least daily or, preferably, even more often.
Plan What Kinds of Content Will Be Posted
You need to make it clear what kinds of content will be posted in
different places. For example, what will the company blog be about? What
will the tone be like? When the business adds a new product to its
product line, will the related blog post be about why the business
decided to add that product, or will it be a post from one of your
employees, talking about how everyone wanted to work on it? Tone and
perspective must be chosen for each place that content will be posted.
Likewise, what will Facebook status updates and tweets from the business
be like? Your content strategy needs to decide this.
Hopefully, your content strategy includes all of these aspects. If it
doesn’t, think about adding the aspects you are missing to make your
content strategy complete. Including these aspects will increase site
traffic, readership and search engine ranking via your content.