Content creation is a key aspect when it comes to digital marketing and social media marketing. It is one of the most time-consuming responsibilities for digital marketers in today’s day and age. Creating great content is the best way for you to engage with your audience.

What Is Content Creation

Content creation is where you conduct research, put together strategic ideas. You would then take these ideas and turn them into high-quality content such as blog posts, social media posts, email newsletters, etc. Creating content online takes different forms. When people mention content creation, their minds automatically go to graphic design. This is not the case. Like we mentioned above, content creation takes different forms such as social media posts, blog posts, infographics, billboards, advertisements, emails, newsletters, brochures, the list is endless.

Content Creation Strategy

Why Do You Need A Content Creation Strategy?

Creating content for your brand is not only about promotion, but you also want your audience to be engaged with the content that you are creating. Developing a content creation strategy can save your brand and business as the content you will create for your brand will push it out into the world.

Set Your Content Goals

Your content strategy should focus on what your marketing goals are for your business. Some of the goals you should think about are the likes of how you are going to attract more visitors to your website, social media pages, gain more business, and have more people buy from your business.

It Is Easier To Set Goals By Using The SMART Goal Strategy

S- Specific. You want your goal to be clear and specific to your business needs. When thinking about your goal ask yourself the 5 W questions. What do I want to accomplish? Why is this goal important? Who is involved? Where is it located? Which resources or limits are involved?

M- Measurable. It is important to ensure that your goals are measurable. This is so that you can track your progress and stay motivated enough to complete said goals. When measuring your goals, you should ask yourself these questions: How much? How many? How will I know when it is accomplished?

A-Achievable. One of the most important things is that you need to be able to reach your goal. There is no point in setting unachievable goals. When setting your achievable goals, you will want to ask yourself questions like this: How can I accomplish this goal? How realistic is this goal based on other constraints such as financial factors?

R-Relevant. This is just ensuring that your goal is relevant to what you want to achieve and to keep you on track. You also want to ensure that your goal aligns with other relevant goals. It is important to retain control over your goals. Ask yourself these questions when thinking about how relevant your goal is: Does this seem worthwhile? Is this the right time? Does this match our other efforts/ needs? Am I the right person to reach this goal? Is it applicable in the current socio-economic environment?

T-Time-Bound. Every goal you set needs a target date. You need a deadline to focus on. Ask yourself these questions when thinking about the timing of your goal: When? What can I do 6 months from now? What can I do 6 weeks from now? What can I do today?

Once you have sorted out your SMART goals. Sort out each piece of content that should be aligned with your goals. Always determine your goals before you begin to create content.

Now You Will Want To Create A Buyer Persona

You want to create an image of what your ideal buyers/ target audience looks like. When creating a buyer persona, you need to be aware of your target audience’s likes, dislikes, pain points, challenges, fantasies, etc. Remember that you are marketing towards humans, not robots. When it comes down to creating a buyer persona, you will need to do a lot of research, some guesswork, and a bit of tweaking.

Look at The Buyer’s Journey

There are three main stages to the buyer’s journey. These three stages are the awareness stage, consideration stage, and decision stage. You should create content for each stage of the buyer journey. This is to ensure that no visitors get left behind. Everyone that visits your site feels like they are engaging with relevant information. You will also need to tailor each stage of the buyer’s journey to a particular person’s needs.

Awareness stage: This the likes of blog posts, infographics, eBooks, games, quizzes.

Consideration stage: Podcasts, webinars, worksheets, templates.

Decision stage: Demo, product guide, coupons.

The Next Stage Is To Perform A Content Audit

A content audit is looking at the work and content you have already produced and organising it to fit into your new content plan. This will more than likely involve some re-writing. To perform a content audit, you would:

Identify Your Main Goal

You will want to think about what content problems you want to address the most. For example, your goal may be to determine SEO effectiveness.

Look And Identify The Content That You Want To Include

Usually, a business or brand needs a content inventory, this means looking at every piece of content you own. This could take a while, but it is worth it as you do not realise how much work you may have done and how beneficial this has been for your website or social media pages.

Define Your Audit Characteristics

Have a look and define the characteristics of your audit. These characteristics would include, website URL, social media handles, content summary, target audience, etc.

List The Content That Needs To Be Audited

If you are auditing a website, there are web-scraping tools that you can use that will make this process easier. One of these tools that we use here at Lumos Digital Marketing is Screaming Frog.

Audit The Content In Your Inventory

During this process, you will look at all your website’s pages, social media channels, all of the videos you have created for your business, your point of sales materials, everything that goes into creating a brand online. Take notes on each piece of content and look at what is and is not doing well and how you can improve what is not doing well.

Once You Have Completed Your Content Audit, You Will Want To Think About A Content Management System

To put it simply, a content management system (CMS) is a website or an app that is used to manage content. You can have your team create, edit, and publish pieces of content through these tools. Some content management examples are WordPress, Squarespace, Wix. It is a good idea to invest in a CMS, this will do wonders for your business.

The Next Part Of A Strategy (Probably The Most Important Part), Think About What Kind Of Content You Want To Create

There is so much content that you can create such as social media posts, email marketing posts, blog posts, podcasts, the list is endless. Think about what content is suited the most for your brand and create your content around this.

Brainstorm Ideas For Your Content

It is important to brainstorm ideas for your content. If you prefer, you can always do a google search for inspiration. However, several tools can help you with your brainstorming session. Some of these tools are BlogAbout, BuzzSumo, Feedly.

Finally, Publish And Manage Your Content

It is important to schedule your content. It is a great idea to schedule your content, so you have great content going out daily. There are many scheduling tools that you can use such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and Facebook Business Suite.

We hope this helped creating your content strategy that bit easier! To read more blog posts about digital marketing, content creation, social media marketing click here.

Tools Mentioned:

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog crawls any website that you want so you can improve your onsite SEO by extracting data and auditing for common SEO issues.

WordPress

WordPress is a content management system that allows you to host and build websites. On WordPress, you can customise any website to fit your business.

Squarespace

Squarespace is a website building and web hosting website. They allow you to use a pre-built website for your website. You can use drag and drop elements to create and modify web pages.

Wix

This website allows users to create websites and mobile sites through online drag and drop tools.

BlogAbout

This is a blog title generator. This tool gives you an endless supply of blog topics.

BuzzSumo

This tool helps you to discover the best engagement, content, and outreach opportunities across social and search.

Feedly

This tool compiles news feeds from online sources so users can customise them to share with others.

Buffer

This allows you to manage multiple social media accounts. You can schedule content weeks in advance to ensure you never miss an upload.

Hootsuite

This is a social media management platform that allows you to create and schedule posts weeks in advance.

Facebook Business Suite

This is a free tool that allows you to manage your Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger pages in a single place. Facebook Business Suite makes it easy for you to view notifications and respond to messages quickly.