Last week you were able to read that developing a content strategy can be painful when it turns out not to work. To avoid this, Colleague Ilias has listed 8 steps for you to achieve a successful and good content strategy.
The first four steps can be found in the blog of last week. Hopefully you got something out of this and are a little further in developing a successful strategy.
In this blog, you will read how to create good content in particular and how to optimize this content for various online marketing channels. Avoid a content strategy that doesn't work by following the rest of the 8 steps. Good luck!
Step 5. Create a content calendar
An important part of your content strategy is to know exactly when you are going to post what. It is also important to know which piece of content will be posted on which channel. The biggest stumbling block for many organizations and entrepreneurs is the lack of planning. You can avoid this by developing a content calendar.
A content calendar is a tool to organize and schedule all the content you want to post. There are several methods for carrying this out. Some are relatively simple and some ways require a little more thought and time.
You can use the Google Calendar And put deadlines for each piece of content in your calendar. This works pretty well on its own if you don't publish that much content. This is probably the simplest approach. However, if you post a lot of content and even need to manage a content team, you will probably need something extra.
Nowadays there are many different tools available to do this. You can choose to use task management and productivity tools. A personal recommendation then is the online program Asana, but you also have the program CoSchedule which is specifically for organizing all marketing activities.
Step 6. Research relevant topics
Before scheduling content, you obviously need to know what content needs to be developed. You do this by thoroughly researching topics your audience is inspired by. Part 1 of this blog article already mentioned that you create content according to what your target audience is waiting for. You simply want to know what questions your target audience has within the field in which you are active. The ideal tool for this is Answer the Public, because it literally shows you a list of questions that people type into Google.
Below a small example from Monkey Vision:
From this you can take a question that seems relevant to your target audience. Then decide what type of content you want to develop for it and give the piece of content to be created a title. Repeat this process for each piece of content you want to schedule for the coming months.
Step 7. Developing the content
The time has finally come when you can actually start creating content. As you have read, a lot of time goes into developing a content strategy. To arrive at a value-added piece of content, here's a very handy tip (shhh, don't tell). Because you have already done your research, you already know roughly what you are going to write about and on what topic. Before you start writing, you will need to do a little more research, this is going to set your piece of content apart from the rest. You will need to find out two things:
- What content is already available on the Internet?
- How can your new piece of content bring value to your target audience?
To find out, it's a matter of doing some nice Googling. Check out the top content on your topic and determine how you can improve this piece of content. In addition, of course, you want to develop original content. You do this by properly researching the keywords you want to be found on in the search engine. Once you've done this, it's time to write the piece of content.
Step 8. Measure the results
Als je dacht dat jouw content strategie ophield bij het ontwikkelen van de content, heb je het goed mis. Een content strategie zou constant in ontwikkeling moeten zijn. Het is belangrijk om de resultaten van jouw strategie te meten, zodat deze constant verbeterd kan worden. In deel 1 van de blog heb je kunnen lezen dat het opstellen van doelen en KPI’s belangrijk is om de succes van je strategie te meten. Dit kan je doen in Google Analytics door te kijken hoe lang bezoekers op een bepaalde pagina aanwezig zijn, wat de bounce rate is en of er conversies voortkomen uit de content. Is dat laatste het geval? Gefeliciteerd! Jouw content strategie kan succesvol genoemd worden! Ben je nog niet zo ver? Laat je niet ontmoedigen, het ontwikkelen van een succesvolle content strategie heeft tijd nodig.
Want more advice on developing a successful content strategy? Then contact us at content specialist Ilias!
