Dig­i­tal con­tent strate­gies have become high­ly pop­u­lar in recent years, with 82% of mar­keters using them to get their results.

The three main tac­tics that make con­tent mar­ket­ing strate­gies more suc­cess­ful are

1) improv­ing the qual­i­ty of content,

2) search engine opti­mi­sa­tion (SEO), and

3) cre­at­ing more visu­al and video content.

These three fac­tors will form the basis of your con­tent strat­e­gy, when it comes to cre­at­ing it. Put sim­ply, you’ll be cre­at­ing con­tent and ensur­ing it’s of a high qual­i­ty whilst car­ry­ing out oth­er on-page SEO improve­ments.

If your com­pa­ny has exist­ed for a few years, it’s like­ly that it already has an arse­nal of con­tent to work from. Even if this con­tent was­n’t pro­duced under a “con­tent strat­e­gy,” mar­ket­ing large­ly involves con­tent of some form. For instance, con­tent is essen­tial to attract traf­fic and leads; any social media account needs con­tent to draw in fol­low­ers, PR requires writ­ten con­tent to even exist, and pay-per-click adver­tis­ing (PPC) needs com­pelling con­tent if it’s to attract clicks.

Turn­ing your pre-exist­ing mar­ket­ing efforts into a focused strat­e­gy will reap huge rewards. Many busi­ness­es will car­ry out a con­tent audit in order to inform their plan – which involves iden­ti­fy­ing valu­able con­tent, imag­in­ing how it can be repur­posed, and analysing how well it has performed.

A con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy is ulti­mate­ly there to improve your site pages’ rank­ing posi­tions in search engine results pages (SERPs), which, in turn, can have the fol­low­ing benefits:

• Gen­er­ates more brand awareness
• Greater con­sumer-brand affinity
• Improved brand reputation
• Defined brand personality
• More con­ver­sions and sales
• More effec­tive sales funnels
• Improved organ­ic search
• Bet­ter qual­i­ty leads
• Reach a broad­er audience

Though the rewards are boun­ti­ful, all these ben­e­fits come at a cost. Con­tent mar­ket­ing strate­gies can be expen­sive, time-con­sum­ing, and require the help of experts.

To cre­ate and sus­tain a con­tent strat­e­gy, you’re going to need to know a few things. To explain how to cre­ate a con­tent strat­e­gy, we’ve answered some FAQs about the subject:

What is included in a content strategy?

A lot of online mate­r­i­al is pro­duced by busi­ness­es in their con­tent strat­e­gy efforts. This type of con­tent isn’t intend­ed to explic­it­ly pro­mote a com­pa­ny but rather gen­er­ate inter­est and leads. Dig­i­tal con­tent, in this way, is also used by brands to devel­op rep­u­ta­tions as experts with­in their niches.

The con­tent might take any of the fol­low­ing forms:

• Arti­cles and blog posts
• Email mar­ket­ing
• “How to” guides
• “Top 10” guides
• Social media content
• Video con­tent such as “how to” demos or interviews
• Info­graph­ics
• Tem­plates and tools

Part of pro­duc­ing strate­gic con­tent is adapt­ing it to your busi­ness goals. Iden­ti­fy­ing these will be your first job when lay­ing out a plan. Com­mon goals for con­tent strate­gies include the same ben­e­fits as list­ed above. We’ve reit­er­at­ed them here:

• Greater brand awareness
• Greater con­sumer-brand affinity
• Improved brand reputation
• Defined brand personality
• More con­ver­sions and sales
• More effec­tive sales funnels
• Improved organ­ic search
• Bet­ter qual­i­ty leads
• Reach a broad­er audience

Once defined, your con­tent should be cre­at­ed in alliance with these aims. For instance, if you want to attract bet­ter qual­i­ty leads, you’d hone in your key­word research so that it is most rel­e­vant to your tar­get demo­graph­ic. Or, if Insta­gram is very pop­u­lar with your tar­get audi­ence, you’d pub­lish con­tent on that platform.

The con­tent you pub­lish will need to have rel­e­vant key­words – dis­cov­ered by con­duct­ing key­word research. This is the process of find­ing the words and phras­es your tar­get demo­graph­ic is search­ing for on Google. Once iden­ti­fied, these words and phras­es will be strate­gi­cal­ly placed in your con­tent by your writer. Remem­ber: you won’t need to tar­get every key­word.

Each page on your site should focus on one pri­ma­ry key­word at a time, sup­port­ed by sec­ondary keywords.

Top tip: By using a tool such as Ahrefs, you’ll be able to see two impor­tant key­word met­rics: Dif­fi­cul­ty and Vol­ume. When you’re just start­ing out, it’s best to tar­get low-dif­fi­cul­ty key­words with as high search vol­ume as possible.

Stay­ing on top of search query trends will allow your con­tent to remain rel­e­vant. You can iden­ti­fy these trends with a tool such as Google Trends. This would form part of your key­word research.

Once your con­tent has been cre­at­ed, you’ll need to have process­es in place that ensure the con­tent is free of errors and opti­mised with key­words. Using tools such as Gram­marly and Word­met­rics can be used to dou­ble-check these issues.

You’ll then pub­lish this con­tent accord­ing to a plan or sched­ule – most like­ly laid out by your con­tent mar­ket­ing man­ag­er. Your sched­ule will be dic­tat­ed by your bud­get, so you’ll need to work out how often you can afford to cre­ate and pub­lish con­tent. Experts say that two to four blog posts per week will give the best results.

Once your strat­e­gy is up and run­ning, you’ll need to mon­i­tor its per­for­mance using a vari­ety of ana­lyt­ics tools. These could be:

• Ahrefs
• SEM­rush
• Google Search Console
• Google Ana­lyt­ics

Anoth­er post-launch task will be the issue of updat­ing your con­tent as time goes on or after an algo­rithm change. We rec­om­mend updat­ing your con­tent every three to six months. This is an impor­tant process as Google can change the goal­posts at any time, so even if a page is rank­ing well one day, it might not be the next. Run­ning your con­tent through your opti­mi­sa­tion tools again will be nec­es­sary to com­plete this step.

How do I create a content strategy for my website?

Con­tent strate­gies for web­sites will fol­low the steps laid out above. How­ev­er, they’ll focus more on blogs and less on social media or video content.

You can make your blogs SEO-opti­mised in a vari­ety of ways. You might opt for an inter­nal link­ing struc­ture called a SILO or endeav­our to pro­duce as many “top 10 guides” in your niche as is phys­i­cal­ly possible.

E‑commerce web­site con­tent strate­gies might strive to explain their prod­ucts or ser­vices to read­ers – par­tic­u­lar­ly if it’s a new or rare phe­nom­e­non. Blogs will have a call to action (CTA) at the bot­tom, which makes up a step in a mar­ket­ing or sales fun­nel. In this way, blogs are used to attract and nur­ture new leads.

In web­site con­tent strate­gies, con­tent acts as a “hook,” CTAs and mail­ing list sign-ups form a “line,” and email mar­ket­ing con­tent acts as the “sinker.” This pat­tern is essen­tial if e‑commerce sites are to attract leads and boost sales with their con­tent strategies.

Who do I need to hire for my content strategy?

Hir­ing the dream team is essen­tial if your con­tent strat­e­gy is to be suc­cess­ful. If you already have oth­er busi­ness and mar­ket­ing-relat­ed tasks, you won’t be able to pull off an entire con­tent strat­e­gy with­out help.

You’ll def­i­nite­ly need the fol­low­ing roles on board:

• Writ­ers and con­tent creators
• Con­tent mar­ket­ing man­ag­er or social media mar­ket­ing manager

Writ­ers and con­tent cre­ators know their craft. If they’ve worked for oth­er clients on their con­tent strate­gies, then they’ll be famil­iar with what’s expect­ed, and they’ll under­stand that blog writ­ing is made suc­cess­ful through pru­dent SEO deci­sions – not pure cre­ativ­i­ty. The mass of con­tent you’ll need to craft a suc­cess­ful con­tent strat­e­gy will be dif­fi­cult to cre­ate by your­self, so this one’s non-negotiable.

A con­tent mar­ket­ing man­ag­er will be able to over­see your entire con­tent strat­e­gy. They’ll keep an eye on the ana­lyt­ics and data and make sug­ges­tions for improve­ments. They’ll also run the day-to-day edit­ing, pub­lish­ing, and man­ag­ing of your con­tent creators.

You may also want to hire:

• An SEO strategist
• An edi­tor

Although you’ll have done your research into con­tent mar­ket­ing, hav­ing an SEO strate­gist on board – even if it’s just for an hour a week – can be extreme­ly valu­able. They’ll be able to tell you the lat­est indus­try tips and trends, plus they’ll have access to help­ful online tools.

An SEO strate­gist is like­ly to dou­ble up – offer­ing help with both on and off-page SEO. Make sure you’re ask­ing the right ques­tions when hir­ing an SEO con­sul­tant.

Though you can hire an edi­tor to proof­read the writ­ers’ work, a con­tent mar­ket­ing man­ag­er will usu­al­ly do this before any work goes live, so it’s not essen­tial that you have an edi­tor on board.

Peo­ple are not the only invest­ment you’ll make in the cre­ation of a con­tent strat­e­gy. You might also pay for some help­ful tools such as:

• Ahrefs
• SEM­rush
• Hot­jar
• Word­met­rics
• PageOp­ti­miz­er Pro
• Yoast
• Word­Press
• Gram­marly
• Can­va
• Asana

Even if you’re on a bud­get, there are still tools that can help you man­age your con­tent strat­e­gy. Here’s a list of tools you can access for free:

(Some will have free and paid versions)

• Google Search Console
• Google Trends
• Google Ana­lyt­ics
• Yoast
• Asana
• MailChimp
• Gram­marly
• Quo­ra

How do I start content creation?

Before you begin cre­at­ing con­tent, you’ll need to draw up a plan. Con­duct­ing key­word research will ensure your con­tent is opti­mised and can give you insights into the dif­fi­cul­ty of these keywords.

For begin­ner strate­gies, we’d rec­om­mend iden­ti­fy­ing key­words with high search vol­ume but low dif­fi­cul­ty. High-dif­fi­cul­ty key­words will just be too chal­leng­ing – espe­cial­ly if the rest of your site isn’t yet SEO-optimised.

To begin cre­at­ing con­tent, you’ll need to hire some cre­ators. You’ll need con­tent writ­ers to cre­ate blogs and peo­ple with social media expe­ri­ence to cre­ate social media content.

Writ­ers are gen­er­al­ly hired for this type of work on a free­lance basis, and you can find them via sites such as Upwork or direct­ly on LinkedIn.

You’ll also need an edi­tor to proof­read this work, although if you’ve hired a mar­ket­ing man­ag­er, they can per­form this task instead.

To keep your con­tent opti­mised, writ­ers can use tools such as Word­met­rics to ensure key­words are includ­ed in their work.

It’s dif­fi­cult to say how many blog posts your web­site should pub­lish each week, as sites will vary, and it large­ly depends on your bud­get. If you’re already attract­ing prospects to your site via oth­er means, post­ing one arti­cle each week will like­ly suf­fice. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you aim to attract all your prospects via your blog, you’ll want this num­ber to be near­er four per week.

Many busi­ness­es will launch their blogs with sev­er­al ready­made blog posts so that they don’t seem sparse. This will mean cre­at­ing con­tent for a few weeks before launch­ing your site. If you’re think­ing about bud­get, a 2000-word blog can take writ­ers between 6 and 10 hours to

com­plete, depend­ing on how much research is need­ed. You can expect to pay between $20 and $50 per hour for writ­ers or between $0.05 and $0.10 per word.

How do you create a great content strategy?

Fol­low­ing the steps above will absolute­ly give you a well-per­form­ing con­tent strat­e­gy. But how can you ele­vate it to the next lev­el and ensure your busi­ness reach­es its goals?

There are sev­er­al dif­fer­ences between a good con­tent strat­e­gy and a great one. Here’s what you need to know:

The best SEO-opti­mised blogs will be of real­ly high qual­i­ty, bring­ing true exper­tise and advice to read­ers. Regur­gi­tat­ing pre-exist­ing con­tent will only get you so far; if your com­pa­ny is a gen­uine expert on its niche, then your con­tent will embody Google’s E.A.T pil­lars. Exper­tise, Author­i­ty, and Trust will ele­vate your blogs to the next lev­el as these qual­i­ties help and bring val­ue to the lives of readers.

Con­tent of this kind is called “Thought Lead­er­ship” and is the high­est form of qual­i­ty online con­tent. You can improve your con­tent even fur­ther by fol­low­ing trends and putting out rel­e­vant con­tent at rel­e­vant times.

Using Google Trends to iden­ti­fy valu­able key­words and top­ics can “super­pow­er” your con­tent strat­e­gy by pro­vid­ing more accu­rate insights into Google Search user behav­iour. Respond­ing to these insights by pro­duc­ing rel­e­vant con­tent as trends appear can reap even larg­er rewards than pub­lish­ing qual­i­ty con­tent at ran­dom times.

Sea­son­al trends can reveal even more about your audi­ence, and you could pre­pare con­tent for these times so that you are as rel­e­vant as possible.

Hir­ing an expert to write freely about your niche is like­ly to result in high-qual­i­ty con­tent. How­ev­er, it’s much shrewder to active­ly improve on cur­rent page 1 results. When you want to rank for a spe­cif­ic key­word, you must look at what’s cur­rent­ly on page 1 for that search query.

Check how long their arti­cle is and what kind of ques­tions it answers. The only way to get onto page 1 of Google is to do every­thing these results are doing and more.

Hav­ing clear­ly defined tar­gets and goals will be the biggest deter­min­ing fac­tor in your con­tent’s style and for­mat. So, these must be thought of care­ful­ly. Work out who you’re tar­get­ing and focus on these indi­vid­u­als rather than going broad.

If your goals are clear­ly defined, you’ll have pre­cise KPIs to mea­sure when it comes to mon­i­tor­ing the per­for­mance of your strat­e­gy. The bet­ter defined these tar­gets and goals, the more rel­e­vant your con­tent will be.

Our next expert tip is to task dif­fer­ent kinds of writ­ers with dif­fer­ent tasks:

• Thought Lead­er­ship con­tent should be writ­ten by those who are experts in a par­tic­u­lar field.
• Aware­ness Gen­er­at­ing con­tent should be writ­ten by those who spe­cialise in con­tent that per­suades read­ers to learn more and engage with brands.
• Sales con­tent should be writ­ten by those with expe­ri­ence in sales.

This sounds obvi­ous, but task­ing one writer with all these dif­fer­ent tasks isn’t the best way to approach con­tent cre­ation. Though many writ­ers are extreme­ly ver­sa­tile, a sur­pris­ing num­ber of web­sites do it this way and strug­gle to improve their brand’s rep­u­ta­tion. To have con­tent that suc­ceeds in its aims, it must be writ­ten by pro­fes­sion­als with rel­e­vant experience.

If your con­tent strat­e­gy is to be suc­cess­ful, you’ll need to have some oth­er things in place. For instance, slow site load­ing speed can mas­sive­ly hin­der SEO suc­cess, as can faulty web design and unop­ti­mised URLs. If SEO fac­tors are lack­ing, your con­tent strat­e­gy won’t reach its full poten­tial – so make sure these issues are resolved before expect­ing big results.

How do you create a social media content strategy?

Social media con­tent strate­gies will have sev­er­al dif­fer­ences that set them apart from reg­u­lar con­tent strate­gies, with a few similarities.

Sim­i­lar­ly to reg­u­lar con­tent plans, social media con­tent strate­gies will be dic­tat­ed by the busi­ness’s goals. For instance, if you want your social media plat­forms to help gen­er­ate sales, your posts will need to direct leads along a sales fun­nel, such as to a land­ing page.

Oth­er sim­i­lar­i­ties include the need for a con­tent cal­en­dar and data analy­sis tools to mon­i­tor performance.

The most obvi­ous dif­fer­ence between these two strate­gies is the type of con­tent pro­duced. Due to this, you’ll be bet­ter off with a spe­cial­ist writer with expe­ri­ence in social media con­tent, as well as a social media mar­ket­ing manager.

Social media con­tent strate­gies dif­fer from reg­u­lar ones in that social media is extreme­ly time sen­si­tive. The time of day that you post could mean the dif­fer­ence between thou­sands of peo­ple see­ing your posts. Work out when’s best to post so that you can reach max­i­mum engagement.

If you’ve already got accounts on social media plat­forms, you could analyse the data you have on pre­vi­ous posts. Check if some have per­formed par­tic­u­lar­ly well. If your goal is to increase brand aware­ness, look at your data to see which posts result­ed in the high­est num­ber of new followers.

Use the fol­low­ing fea­tures to access data on your social media per­for­mance: LinkedIn Ana­lyt­ics, Face­book Insights, and Twit­ter Analytics.

Though Insta­gram, YouTube, and Tik­Tok also have audi­ence insight fea­tures, the three men­tioned above are the most insightful.

Above all, you’ve got to choose the right social media platform/s for your busi­ness. Here’s how we view them:

• Twit­ter is per­fect for com­pa­nies deal­ing with lots of ser­vice and sup­port queries
• Face­book is an all-rounder for both B2C and B2B companies
• LinkedIn is pre­dom­i­nant­ly for B2B as well as pub­lish­ing Thought Lead­er­ship content
• YouTube is anoth­er all-rounder, although the demands of the plat­form (post­ing reg­u­lar and con­sis­tent video con­tent) can be too much for some businesses
• Tik­Tok is best for B2C brands with an empha­sis on lifestyle themes
• Insta­gram will be per­fect for com­pa­nies that can take engag­ing pho­tos and reels and is pre­dom­i­nant­ly used as a B2C channel

The social media con­tent you pub­lish will vary in for­mat – you can choose from:

• images
• info­graph­ics
• influ­encer collaborations
• user-gen­er­at­ed
• live streams
• reels
• videos
• con­tests
• give­aways

Evi­dence shows that social media cam­paigns are more suc­cess­ful when the con­tent they pro­duce is var­ied. If you can, use all the above for­mats in your con­tent plan for the best results.

Whether you vary your con­tent or not, hav­ing a con­sis­tent brand voice is vital to retain­ing social media followers.

Get started today!

Con­tent mar­ket­ing has both ben­e­fits and draw­backs, but the rewards are undeniable.

In 2021, 78% of those who believed their con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts were suc­cess­ful had a doc­u­ment­ed strat­e­gy. Plus, of the busi­ness­es that ded­i­cat­ed 10 to 70% of their mar­ket­ing bud­get towards a con­tent strat­e­gy, 73% had “very suc­cess­ful” results.

Evi­dent­ly, nar­row­ing down your con­tent out­put into a clear-cut strat­e­gy can bring big­ger and bet­ter results. SEO and con­tent mar­ket­ing might take a while to start work­ing, but the rewards are ulti­mate­ly high­ly valu­able and well sought-after.

Before you can reap the fruits of your labour, you must learn how to cre­ate, action, and main­tain a suc­cess­ful con­tent strat­e­gy. If you need some help, our ser­vices, pur­ple­seo and pur­ple­wave, have been spe­cial­ly designed to help your busi­ness with its par­tic­u­lar goals – whether you want your con­tent to improve your online pres­ence or reach a larg­er audience.

Fol­low the link below to learn more.