How to Create a Winning Content Strategy for Your Business

Content is one of the most important pieces of your marketing strategy. Whether you produce text content in-house or you partner with an inbound marketing agency to produce video as part of a social media management solution, content is what makes your brand unique and what provides value while your target audience is deciding whether or not to purchase your products and services.

But no good content marketing strategy can start with simply creating content—not only is it unlikely to resonate with your audience, but content takes time and energy to produce. Developing a strong content marketing strategy from the outset will maximize your ROI, minimize frustration and uncertainty, and give you a better path to becoming a fixture for your local Miami audiences. 

Follow these six steps to create your winning content strategy and put it in motion.

Establish Your Goals

"Producing content" is not itself a marketing goal. Instead, you and your team need to establish very specific goals that an ongoing content project can help serve. For example, consider each of these unique areas and shape potential SMART goals around them: 

• More content can boost your SEO optimization efforts, as successful articles and videos tell search engines more about the relevancy of your company and will engage active audiences for longer.
• Content is the backbone of social media management, as you need to have frequent posts, fast and helpful replies, and increasingly nuanced messaging that strikes the right chord with a passive audience.
• Content is also key for email marketing campaigns, as you can insert videos, highlight long-form blog pieces, and link to your calendar or promotional pages. 

Each of these pursuits requires very different types of content. But they also require different levels of attention and effort, potential support from a digital marketing agency with research or content creation as part of their online marketing services, and different metrics that should be the subject of your goals. Set these first, or create them as you conduct market research.

Research Your Audience

Without market research, you won't know who your most likely audience is, let alone what information they need along the buyer's journey. Audience research—whether it's general industry research, paid research through a local service specializing in South Florida, or analytics based on your past website, social, and selling data—tells you who your stories should cater to. 

Conduct in-depth research to create customer avatars: fictional but accurate "characters" who represent the different aspects of your market. For example, you might sell large and frequent orders to "Entrepreneur Emily," a business owner who frequently engages with your store and cares about scalability and predictability, and  "Busy Dad Budd," who cares more about convenience and price.

Even if they both buy similar products from your store, the way you talk to them—and the channels you talk to them on—will vary tremendously. Missing the market might lose you customers, or at least reduce your odds of finding more just like them. 

Identify Your Key Content Channels and Content Types

As part of your marketing research, or shortly after, zero in on the content channels and types that make the most sense for your brand. Ideally, you'll be able to create aligned content across every major channel, with concurrent Instagram posts, email marketing campaigns, blogs, and video productions. But if you're just starting your content journey, that level of ambition may be overwhelming.

Instead, during your market research, identify which channels and content types matter most to your high-priority audiences. For example, Entrepreneur Emily may love your long videos about supply chains, business principles, and tutorials (depending on what you sell), whereas Busy Dad Budd prefers short promotional posts that pop up in his social media feeds.

Identifying those high-importance channels and committing to a reasonable posting schedule is a healthy way to create a strategy you can stick to long-term. 

Brainstorm Content Creation and Posting Workflows

The next step is to dive into the particulars of how you're going to create your content—this is the project management phase. Depending on you and your team's work style, you might: 

• Ideate topics and create a content calendar for creation, review, and posting
• Hire a third-party digital marketing agency to handle content creation for you
• Create a detailed creation, revising, and publishing workflow that you can hand off to contractors for completion

This is the detailed "how" section of your content plan, and it may change radically over time. The goal here is to make sure your content creators don't get bogged down in uncertainty. 

Stick to the Plan

Once you commit to specific channels, content goals, and posting schedules, stick to them. Follow the plan to the best of your ability so you are routinely producing high-quality content that actually serves your business goals.

Throughout this process, you might change tactics, add or revise specific steps, or see new opportunities for your content. Implement any changes that allow you to follow the "bones" of your plan, but try not to radically shift your objectives. Instead, follow through on things until you reach the next phase: analyzing content performance. 

Analyze Your Results Through Ongoing Performance Analysis

Everything so far will lead up to this crucial step: analyzing how your content performed and determining what changes you should make in the future. If you work with an inbound marketing agency, they'll be able to help you make sense of complex analytics that measure:

• Engagement across multiple different platforms
• Whether your web design and site speed are interfering with the progression from email newsletter to shopping cart
• Where website visitors are coming from so you can identify the top-performing sources of inbound traffic
• Building attribution models that show how much impact each type of touchpoint is really making, even if it's hard to see the direct connection between a social post and a sale

You can also measure productivity. Are some types of content taking up so much time to make that they're a net loss? Is there a specific type of new content or concept focus your team can make without adding substantially to their workload?

Reviewing your results allows you to evaluate the costs, reprioritize based on real data, and know if you're moving in the right direction. 

Zero in on the Right Content Approach With Decographic

Every business owner knows that creating content is a great idea—but it's hard to know which content strategy is the right idea. At Decographic, we serve local Miami and South Florida businesses with market research, content creation support, analytics, web development, and strategy services so your content strategy is a winner. 

Reach out today to learn more or to start setting your company's content goals.