A content strategy is vital to ensure your digital marketing is consistent. Being predictable sounds boring, but being relied on for informative blogs doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a constant dedication to creating great content and delivering regularly. Having a plan to follow and a schedule to keep ensures that you know what your deadlines are and can aim to meet them. The regularity (and of course quality!) of your content will also impact your SEO performance significantly.
However, once you have made the strategy then you have to actually stick to it. Self-imposed deadlines are the hardest to stick to. When you have a boss then delivering on deadlines becomes a habit that enables you to keep your job, but as a website owner and your own boss, it is easy to put them aside when you think something else takes precedence.
How to make the plan stick
Simplicity is the key to following through with your plan. Over reaching and over committing is the fastest way to abandon your plan merely hours into it.
Firstly, determine what you hope to achieve and who you want to target with your strategy. Once you understand who your audience is, you can then design your content to engage with them.
The practicalities of creating and spreading content
This is often easier said than done. It is a time-consuming process that doesn’t yield immediate results. It requires patience and a view of the big picture to get the most from it.
Make it easy
10x content is hard to create. It takes time and research, and for busy business owners it can often be better to get it through other sources. Crowd-sourced and out-sourced content costs money, but it isn’t as time consuming as creating it yourself. Freelancers often provide a discounted rate for the promise of consistent work and this is a good way to bring in expertise that can be prohibitively expensive to employ on a full time basis.
There are also less time-consuming forms of content to incorporate. Videos, images and podcasts give your site broad coverage and variety across your brand. Blogs are time-consuming to create and time-consuming to read. Short videos and podcasts aren’t necessarily easy to create, but they can drive engagement by being easier to digest and absorb. A good variety of content on your site will help create an aura of authority around your brand that more people can tap into.
“Creating a broad set of content assets can really assist in your marketing efforts. Think about creating videos, audio content, checklists and other forms of content that your audience can engage with.” Says Stuart Clayton, Founder & Software Developer at Digital Pigeon
Use the free channels
Once your content is ready to go, then you can automate your promotion channels. Applications such as Hootsuite make it easy to disseminate your blogs and content by queuing posts and updates in advance. This enables you to dedicate a set amount of time to preparing it each week or month and then leave it to do its thing. Other apps, such as IFTTT (If This Then That), are great mobile options that react to a user action by performing another action.
Twitter and Facebook have enormous user databases and it is free to promote your content. This means it can provide a great return on investment and only costs the time it takes to build a network of followers. For faster results you could also consider paid Facebook marketing or remarketing as a possible channel.
Small steps for big results
A content strategy doesn’t have to be large and complex to provide results. While it may not have the reach of a large campaign by a dedicated team, picking a few elements and doing them well will provide good results that can be built upon as your business grows and expands.
Hero Image Source: Pixabay
