Content Strategy and Development; 6 Ways To Improve Your Existing Content

Here’s how a great content strategy is meant to meet your business needs while driving your goals. It is a process combining planning, creation, & management.

If you want to achieve your business goals, you need to create a roadmap that comprehensively includes all your content strategy and marketing strategy. To implement a smart content strategy, you need to organize existing content, build and monitor new content, and design your content strategy that attract and engage more customers.

Developing a content strategy depends on your goals and to increase your brand awareness, you have to implement a content strategy that focuses on SEO. It not only enhances the website’s visibility on SERPs and generates more traffic to see your product or services.

If you are a new business owner, content strategy is not just a nice to have. Instead, it’s your key to producing high-quality, valuable content that builds trust with new audiences to succeed in the long haul. It attracts prospects to your brand and can leverage a content strategy for sales enablement. 

Effective content strategy ensures a cohesive narrative with every hit published and With 70% of marketers investing in content marketing, it is critical to come up with the best content strategy to complete this journey. Every content strategy creates an opportunity to educate and serve your audience while establishing yourself as an authority in your niche market.

1. The Importance of Defining Your Goals

Like any other aspect of life, setting goals is a fundamental practice that is often overlooked in content marketing. Without defined goals and determination it is difficult to gauge this process. 

A survey conducted by CoSchedule confirms that marketers who set goals are 376% more likely to be successful and 89% of goal-setting marketers achieve their goal. Therefore, create SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals.

Make a content roadmap for content marketing campaigns and set objectives that serve great for your purpose. Set these goals in the direction of your content marketing strategy while prioritizing content creation and allocating an affordable marketing budget effectively. 

2. Regularly Update an Audience Persona

Base your content on clear, accurate, and regularly updated personas as they are filled with critical audience insights. Develop your audience persona with thoughtful analysis of relevant trends, direct conversation, and detailed customer research. They help the creative team to convey the voice of customers as they reflect your consumer’s genuine interests and intentions. The resultant persona fuels resonant relatable brand stories comprising content that your audience wants.

To create an audience persona collect accurate consumer data of your audience’s needs and preferences. Identify their experiences as a buyer and their role in buying decisions. Analyze this information, gather audience insights, and then involve your sales team and CRM data. Sales team members are at the front lines of customer interactions and have plenty of information to work on.

 3. Conduct a Content Audit

It is a process of analyzing the existing content of your websites to scale out the performance and how it supports your business goals. If your content pieces are achieving your desired goals, create more like them. For those performing below expectations, either update or delete them. 

Here are some tips to set up your content audit goals professionally. Improve SEO by checking how your existing content is performing on organic unpaid search engine results. Identify the opportunities to improve rankings. Understand the current level of user engagement and increase it. 

Evaluate the conversion goals and improve your conversion rates by lead generation, purchases, or direct actions. Set up a goal of achieving a least 200,000 visits per month and any of the first three ranking positions on the Google Index. 

4. Decide the Content Types and Channels

Now decide the content type e.g., videos, infographics, videos, and the channels you will distribute your content. These channels include websites, YT videos, social media platforms, and emails. Choose the content types and channels based on your audience’s preferences and experiment with different formats and channels to measure the effectiveness.

5. Conduct Competitor Analysis

Identify your competitors and analyze their tactics to benchmark your performance. Uncover their strong and weak points and figure out the relativity of your content. Analyze the competitor’s content strategy, understand their baseline, and know where you stand in the industry.

While auditing your competitor’s content, keep some questions in mind like the opportunities your competitors missed and you can take advantage of. What do you like and dislike about your brand, and how can you improve your competition? Completing the content analysis requires a hectic amount of manual qualitative work. Therefore, divide the task into bits and do it at least once a year to stay updated.

6. Choose the Right Topic for Your Content

After knowing your audience and their intentions, pick a relevant topic. Choose the topic according to the needs and challenges of your potential customers, their common search terms, and content published by your competitors. You can also use Google Trends and Google News to find trending topics. 

Use these resources to gather the information and create a repository of topics by considering the content roadmap that you already created. Create a digital library and add useful links to the relevant categories. Choose content formatting and select the content distribution channels to promote your content. Create a content calendar of how and when you will publish your posts and inform your team about the process.

Conclusion

Set SMART goals to improve your existing content and develop a robust content strategy to achieve your business goals. Since this is an ongoing process, regularly revisit and revise your content roadmap and compare it with the latest industry trends, your audience needs, and your competitor’s progress.