Today what we are witnessing is content plethora over the digital landscape. Despite the struggle with resources, time and most of all strategy, brands are publishing more content today than Time Magazine did two decades ago!
While most of these brands believe they have a strategy in place, there are content gaps, duplications, lack of direction and several other issues standing in the way of their strategy to perform to its full potential and deliver measurable results.
Content strategy is the heart of your digital marketing efforts. Hence you need to check the health of your strategy and take it through what I call “content strategy open-heart surgery” to make sure you’ve got it right! As you read through the following checklist, you’ll know why!
Story-Telling Not Selling
You want your customers to buy but you don’t want to sound like you are selling. Striking the right balance can get tricky at times.
The key is to build a story around your brand instead of rushing to sell it. Story-telling can work wonders for brands. It convinces your audience to continue listening, which is probably all you want since it’s the first and the most important step whether you are trying to improve reach, awareness or engagement. Once you have told the story you can always relate your product or service to it at the end and show how you can alleviate your audience’s pain-points.
Preferring Quality Over Quantity
With constant updates to Google that is now turning up only quality content pages is a big eye opener for those who have been trying to scam its algorithm with black-hat SEO tactics so far.
There are many who have already realized that and are instead pumping out more content to satisfy their SEO needs. The point these guys need to understand is that 10 pieces of content with mild appeal is not even close to making the impact a single piece of well planned and focused quality content can.
These high-profile pieces can help you make the best of your content strategy by enticing emotions and getting people talking!
Applying the 70/20/10 Rule
For businesses that are huge, have the resources to create all the content themselves. However, for start-ups and SME’s, the 70/20/10 rule can be very helpful.
This rule calls for allocating 70% of your content to build your brand and business, sharing 20% of the content from other resources while 10% of the content should be self-promotional.
Just the way you need the correct ratio of all the ingredients to get the recipe right, the 70/20/10 rule works betters rather than mixing everything up and hoping for the best. However, the ratio is just one aspect of this rule. The second aspect is to bring innovation to your content strategy.
This can be done by allocating 70% of your time to creating content that engages customers and lures them to return, 20% on exploring new topics, themes and distribution channels, while 10% on finding out ways to stay ahead of the competition by observing trends and following predictions by industry influencers.
Using Meaningful Keywords
We all know the importance of keywords when it comes to writing SEO friendly content and developing a result oriented content marketing strategy. However, as Google’s semantic indexing emerges the search engine seems to be attributing more significance to the meaning of the words, rather than the words themselves. That being said, the update is still in a transitional phase and precise keywords are still very important. Thus checking their relevancy for your business from time to time remains crucial
Balancing Stock and Flow Content
Stock refers to that timeless and evergreen content that has enduring relevancy to your audience such as guides, whitepapers, videos and so on. Flow as the name implies is fluid, timely and fresh such as surveys, tweets, images, discussions etc.
A good balance of stock and flow content is critical as it strengthens brand’s reputations and provides varied nature of content for targeting different audience segments. As content strategy consultant Dr. Mike Baxter puts it: “stock content is the bonfire and flow is the fireworks. They draw attention to the bonfire, but bonfire is the thing.”
Bringing Micro-Content Into the Mix
Most content strategists tend to overlook small pieces of micro-content that we see on sign-up forms, e-books, registrations, inquiries, call to action and so on. However, such micro-content pieces can play a highly crucial role in helping users move from one stage to the next in their customer journey and could very-well be termed as “transitional content” resulting in actual ROI.
Taking a Holistic Approach
Content is the single most important aspect of your website that brings people there and convinces them to stay. Put bluntly: your content is your website. Hence it should be crafted with precision. Businesses that need to genuinely build a reputation over the digital landscape must take a holistic approach towards content strategy. Begin by asking yourself:
- What kind of brand am I?
- Am I portraying that image through the content?
- How can I get people like what I stand for?
Content strategy is the essence of your digital marketing efforts and getting it right is vital for your online business.
Does your business need to go through a content strategy health-check or do you need a content strategy roadmap to pave the way forward for your business online? If that’s the case, we might be able to assist you with this.
About solomoIT
SolomoIT is a boutique digital marketing agency based in Melbourne and Sydney since 2004. Our clients benefit from our years of experience in Digital Marketing. Our strategies are flexible and adaptable and we make sure our clients get the right message in front of the target audience with our expert guidance and holistic approach.
Are you ready to take your business to the digital era and “Think Digital”? Give us a call on 1300 430 949 or +613 8630 2810 for a consultation and we can help you take your business to the next level