Approximately 92 percent of marketers and businesses say that content is a valuable business asset.
Do you need to level up your business’s brand content strategy? Do you not have one in the first place?
In either case, keep reading. Listed below are some tips that will help you to create an effective content strategy plan that increases brand recognition and builds your business.
What Is a Content Strategy?
Before we dive into the specific steps you need to take when creating a brand identity/content marketing plan, let’s talk about what a typical content strategy entails. A brand content strategy encompasses all the processes a company goes through when it comes to planning, creating, and distributing content, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, etc.
A content strategy can cover a short period of time, such as a month-long campaign, or it can be a long-term plan that covers several months or even an entire year.
Why Do You Need a Brand and Content Strategy?
There are lots of benefits that your business can enjoy when you create a solid brand content strategy. Here are some of the top reasons why you ought to have one:
Monitor Progress
Without a content strategy, it’s harder to tell whether or not you’re making progress toward your content marketing and branding goals. Your content strategy, ideally, will include specific KPIs (key performance indicators) that you can measure and use as benchmarks to see how your company is doing.
Find New Opportunities
When you have a clear, well-planned content strategy, it’s easier to pick up on trends and identify new opportunities that you can capitalize on in the future. For example, if you review the data you’ve collected and see that a lot of people are engaging with a particular type of content, you’ll know that it’s worth it to create more of that content in the future.
Save Money
Content creation and distribution can get expensive, fast. If you don’t go in with a plan for your business’s branding and content marketing, you’ll likely end up spending a lot more than you would have otherwise.
Optimize Your Marketing Team
A content strategy also helps you ensure you’re optimizing your marketing team and allowing them to reach their full potential. By taking the time to work with them to create a content strategy, you can feel confident that everyone has plenty of work to do and isn’t wasting time or resources on things that don’t matter.
How to Create an Effective Content Strategy Plan
Now, what do you need to do to create an effective content plan for your business? Start by taking these steps:
Set Clear Goals
A good place to begin when it comes to your content strategy is goal-setting.
What do you want to accomplish with your content marketing and branding efforts? Do you want to grow your audience? Do you want to increase website traffic or the number of signups you get for your lead magnet?
No matter what kind of goal you set, make sure it’s specific and measurable. Give yourself a clear deadline, too. For example, maybe you want to reach 1,000 followers on all your social media platforms by the end of the month.
Learn About Your Audience
The next step is to learn as much as you can about your audience. Who is going to be reading, watching, and consuming your content?
How old are they? Where do they live? What are their hobbies and interests?
The more you know about your target audience, the easier it is to create material that they will enjoy and be interested in engaging with. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, and Twitter Analytics to gain more insight into your audience members and their preferences.
Choose the Right Channels
Another factor to consider when you’re doing audience research is their preferred channels. What social media platforms are they visiting most often? Which ones do they not care about?
Figure this out early on so you can create content that they will actually see and engage with regularly.
Set a Budget
Make sure you’ve set a clear budget for your content strategy, too. How much can you afford to spend each month on content marketing?
Consider, too, where your money is going to go, specifically. Are you going to invest in paid ads or sponsored posts? Are you going to pay influencers to promote your content to a wider audience?
Use A/B Testing
If you’re still trying to figure out the types of content that will resonate best with your audience, A/B testing can be a great tool to utilize.
A/B testing helps you to test out different factors, such as tone, font, color, and calls-to-action, and see which one gets a better response from your target audience. Once you’ve done these tests, you can use the results to fine-tune your strategy.
Batch-Create Content
Creating content in real-time (i.e., photographing and writing the caption for an Instagram post on the same day you plan to publish it) can get tiring very quickly. To make your content strategy more sustainable and to improve the quality of the content you’re putting out, try creating it in batches.
Designate specific days for taking photos, filming videos, making infographics. That way, you’ll have everything ready to go on the day you wanted to release it. All you’ll have to do is hit the “publish” button.
Create a Content Calendar
Finally, create a content calendar. This helps to streamline the content sharing process and ensures everyone’s on the same page.
A content calendar can also help with content creation. For example, if you know that you want to post a video on a specific holiday, you can work backward and find a day to reserve a production studio rental so you can get the video recorded and edited in advance.
Start Building Your Brand Content Strategy Today
Now that you know more about the importance of a solid brand content strategy, it’s time to get to work. Follow the steps listed above so you can put together the best brand content strategy for your business.
Do you want to learn more about brand marketing and business promotion? If so, head to the Business section of our site today for more tips and tricks.
