Content Strategy Services

Article Writers Australia can help you ensure that your approach to content creation aligns with your content marketing goals and engages your target audience effectively.  Our content strategy services include:

• Content strategy development or review
• Content audits
• Competitor analysis
• Persona development
• 3 or 6-month content plans
• Content calendar creation
• SEO keyword research

Developing a documented content strategy and plan for your business provides a clear roadmap for future content creation. It also reduces the risk of wasting marketing budget on activities with poor ROI.

Strategise, plan, implement and review. It’s the order of almost any successful business endeavour!

What is a content strategy?

A content strategy or ‘content marketing’ strategy is a strategic approach to connecting with a target audience through creating, publishing and distributing relevant content. 

The primary purpose is to guide the development of relevant content to attract, engage, and retain customers, thereby contributing to the broader business goals. It is strategically developed to enhance brand visibility, improve leads, boost sales, and foster relationships with customers.

Key elements of an effective strategy

Companies that consistently produce content their audiences love are likely to have an effective strategy in place. Here are the key elements involved in achieving that:

1. Goal Setting: Before any content is created, it’s crucial to define what you want to achieve. This might include increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, improving customer engagement, or supporting other business goals.
2. Audience Research: A successful strategy requires a thorough understanding of your target audience. This involves research, profiling, and identifying customer needs, pain points, and buying motivations.
3. Content Audit and Inventory: Assessing existing content helps identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. This can involve evaluating the relevance, performance, and alignment of current content with your goals.
4. Competitor Analysis: Research on your competitors’ approach to content can provide valuable information and assist in identifying gaps or opportunities in content production,
5. SEO Research: Prospective customer use search engines to research their pain points and identify solutions before making purchases. Keyword research can provide valuable information about how they search and the questions they’re asking.
6. Content Creation: Based on the insights gained from audience research and content audits, content is tailored to meet the specific interests and needs of your audience. This involves deciding on the types of content (e.g., articles, videos, case studies), and the tone, style, and key messages that will resonate with your audience.
7. Content Distribution: Identifying the right distribution channels is essential. A strategic approach to distribution involves choosing platforms that your audience frequents, determining the frequency of updates, and optimising the content for each platform.
8. Measurement and Analysis: To gauge the effectiveness of your strategy, it’s important to track engagement metrics and analyse performance data. This helps in understanding what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to fine-tune your approach.
9. Continuous Optimisation: Content strategy is not a set-and-forget process. It requires periodic review, and refinement and adaptation based on ongoing analytics, feedback from your target audience, and any shifts in market conditions or audience behavior.

A strategy is not just about creating and distributing content. It’s about ensuring that every piece of content serves a specific purpose and contributes to business objectives.

Why create a documented strategy?

It’s important to document strategies so that the information can be accessed by all team members who are involved in the content creation process, and referred to regularly to ensure activities remain aligned with the strategic decisions. If it’s not documented, content creation decisions will be made ‘on the fly’ and often based on random ideas that might or might not align with your goals or audience.

Many businesses spend a fortune creating and publishing content that doesn’t reach their target market, or doesn’t resonate with that audience. When you do have a firm strategic approach that’s documented, it’s also easier to brief your content writers and ensure they’re creating content aligned with your content marketing goals.

Creating a content strategy

A complete content marketing strategy takes the entire content cycle into consideration – the who, what, when, how and why of creating and distributing content for a business or organisation. 

Everything from audience identification, buyer persona development, and messaging to processes around the creation, governance and maintenance of content may be covered. The larger the business, the more there will be to take into consideration when developing the content strategy.

For smaller businesses or start-ups, the strategy development will often include the development of buyer personas, and identification of the most appropriate publishing channels, content formats and themes. With these defined, content planning becomes easier.

SEO factors

For many businesses, being discovered by potential clients searching online is a significant source of leads and revenue.  A strategic approach to content creation will typically take SEO opportunities into consideration. SEO keyword research will play a role in identifying ther terms your potential customer use when searching for the products or services you offer. It can also identify topic areas of interest, and related questions your audience frequently ask.

Content audits and mapping

If you have existing content assets, taking inventory and incorporating a content audit into the strategy development process can be beneficial. An audit can help you to identify gaps in content creation, and low quality, off-message or outdated content that needs to be removed or revised. It typically identifies opportunities to improve content pieces and increase traffic to your website pages and blog, or increase conversions. 

Here are a few examples:

A blog content audit might reveal several blog posts that are short and lacking in detailed information, but cover a topic that’s highly relevant to your target audience. These pieces of content can then be revised to transform them into longer and more useful posts. 

An audit might also highlight opportunities for internal links between content to be improved, or for the creation of ‘content clusters’ that can boost SEO.

During the content audit process you might discover that the majority of content you’ve been creating is useful at the ‘awareness’ stage of the buyer journey, but you have almost none for the ‘decision’ stage. This could mean you’re losing leads or sales by not publishing the more detailed information they’re looking for when they’re almost ready to purchase.

Content marketing goals

As with any strategic planning, it’s vital to set goals. Identify early on what you want to achieve by publishing content, and by reviewing or creating your strategy.

Your content marketing goals should have a hierarchy – high level goals, as well as more specific ones. For example, one high level goal might be to increase traffic to your blog or to increase brand awareness. A more specific goal could be to establish an audience on a previously unused channel. 

For each high level goal you identify, set specific goals that will help you achieve it.

Develop a content plan

With a strategy in place, a detailed content plan can be developed.  It will typically cover a 3 or 6-month period and serves as a guide to ensure that each piece of content—from blog posts, case studies and whitepapers to video—is purposefully crafted to meet your strategic goals.

Key Elements of a Plan Include:

• Themes and Topics: Based on audience research and strategic goals, defining what subjects will be addressed.
• Formats: Determining the types of content that will be most effective, whether written articles, videos, podcasts, or infographics.
• Scheduling: Laying out a timeline for creation, approval, and publication to ensure continuous and timely delivery of content.
• Distribution Channels: Identifying which platforms will be used to share the content, tailored to where your audience is most active.
• Metrics for Success: Establishing how the impact of the content will be measured against your objectives.

With an effective strategy and a well-defined plan, you can ensure that every piece of content you produce is targeted, relevant, and designed to resonate with your audience.

For small businesses, the plan can be created with sufficient detail to serve as the editorial calendar. Larger organisations with one or more content teams will typically create more detailed editorial calendars, guided by the plan.

Create content in line with your strategy and plan

With both strategy and plan in place, you know a lot about the content you’ll be creating, including its purpose and format, the audience it’s to be created for, and where each piece fits into the buyer journey for that audience.

You’ll be in a position to create the right content for the ideal buyer, and have appropriate content available for those people at each stage of their buyer journey, and beyond – awareness, consideration, comparison, decision making and post-purchase.

Measure your results and review

Only when you measure your results do you know how well your content is performing, and how well your strategy is working. 

If you publish regularly to your blog but don’t currently measure performance or update old posts, consider speaking with us about our blog writing service that incorporates a rolling content audit and content updates.

Benefits of a content marketing strategy

An effective content marketing strategy will help ensure you are:

• creating the type of content that will resonate with your target market;
• creating content for each stage of the buyer journey;
• reaching your target audience by publishing on the right channels;
• getting results from your content marketing efforts.

Over time, the result should be an increase in relevant website traffic, improved engagement on social channels, and an increase in leads and sales.

Content marketing strategists

Should you engage a content marketing strategist? Yes! The larger the business, the more complex content strategy development will be. Engaging one or more content strategists will usually be necessary, and the process is likely to take weeks or months. For small businesses, the cost can be a deterrent – yet it’s less expensive than paying content creators for months or years to create content that just isn’t providing a good ROI. 

For SMEs, our content strategy review is a good place to start. It includes:

• a strategic audit of your published content and existing strategies across your website, blog and social channels;
• Analysis of content (including website, blog, and social media), current strategies, content performance and SEO, and any existing procedures you have around content production;
• Analysis of competitor strategies and performance for comparison;
• Identification of issues and opportunities, and strategic recommendations;Recommendations.

The strategy review is designed to identify opportunities that could help you grow, as well as issues that could be deterring prospective clients, limiting your website traffic, or creating the wrong impression about your brand.

The information gathered, together with discussions around your business goals, can then inform the development of a content strategy to improve performance.

If you’re ready to take steps to ensure your content is earning its keep, arrange an introductory conversation with us to see how we can help.