For a content strategy to fulfil its purpose, it must be closely aligned with your business goals.
A successful strategy incorporates the defining characteristics of your brand identity. Including its vision, goals, target audience and tone of voice – to produce engaging and highly effective content.
Taking the time to define your brand identity will equip you with the knowledge required to craft an effective content strategy. Implementing your strategy consistently ensures sustainability long-term. Providing a solid basis for development.
Here we’ve set out five key factors to consider when aligning your content strategy to your business goals, providing insight into the basics of a high-performing strategy. Whether you have a plan in place and are looking to maximise its value or are starting from scratch, these factors should underpin and inform the content you generate.
1) Ensure your vision is defined and understood
Vision is crucial for an effective content strategy. Well-defined ambitions push your business to find its footing, grow, generate ideas and break boundaries. Think about your goals for the business within a set timeframe (such as 3-5 years). Consider the role content and communications play in getting there. Core questions to ask here revolve around the purpose of the content you produce – what and why. Once drafted, ensure the vision is known and understood by everybody behind the scenes.
2) Set tangible goals
With your company vision defined and understood, the next core area to focus on is objectives. Setting tangible goals for your content helps guide idea creation and enables you to measure and analyse the performance of your strategy. Measurable objectives for website traffic, conversions or social media engagement clarify areas that require development and improvement via metrics, which underpin the performance of your content.
Echoing this, stats released by MediaMath state that 69% of data efforts are being focused on the targeting of offers, messages, and content.
3) Research your audience and provide content tailored to them
Knowing who you are producing content for and understanding their preferences is central to a successful strategy. Identifying your audience demographics such as their age, gender and profession mean you can accurately tailor and align your content. Think about it this way: your audience dictates the success of your content, it is only logical to consider them at each point in the content creation process.
Surveys are a great way of carrying out audience research. Setting one up can be really simple, with a whole host of online tools now available to help you create and deliver your survey via several channels, such as email, social media or your website. Results are easily measured and analysed too, making it a relatively painless way of generating user data to guide your content strategy.
4) Define your tone of voice
It is important to remember that tone of voice used in content conveys the personality of your company. Take into consideration your brand values, vision and audience when shaping your signature tone and style.
Once you have found the right tone for you, whether light-hearted, professional, funny or serious, it is essential that it is applied consistently across your content. Style guidelines are great here. A well-formed guide should include key terms, spelling, punctuation and capitalisation rules and brief content creators on the desired audience response.
5) Stay on top of your content strategy
For your content strategy to fully align with your goals, you need to be in full control of it. Organisation is the buzz word here: files should be strictly stored and categorised, making them easy for your marketing teams to access, share and update as company objectives develop over time.
Look into online content strategy tools designed to help you manage your strategy in a sustainable way if you’re feeling overwhelmed. Additionally, research carried out by the Content Marketing Institute found that 61% of the most effective B2B content marketers meet with their content team daily or weekly. Simply put, take time to organise your strategy and you’ll feel the benefits over time.
A well-structured content strategy is a core element of a successful business. Aligning it to your business is crucial in order to produce content that engages your audience and achieves results. Invest time defining these five key areas of your business and you will reap the rewards of increased traffic, engagement, conversions and profit margins.
As a copywriting agency, WooContent can help you develop an effective content strategy which is closely aligned with your business goals.
To find out more get in touch with us today.