Content Development (Web) Strategy

To capture attention today you have to think more like a media company–producing content, valuable content that resonates with your target audience. In this article we give you some pointers on doing just that.

What is content startegy?
Why Have a content strategy?
Rules of the content strategy
Make content relevant to people
Make content more useful for machines
Make content effecient to produce
Make content comprehensive
Bonus thoughts and questions

What is Content Strategy

The world of marketing has changed. No longer are consumers responding to the interruptive approach to advertising. Now it’s about adding value, engaging, and providing a well rounded solution for your target market.

A content strategy starts with a goal to reach a target audience. From there your strategy should define key themes, messages, topics, purpose, metadata and frameworks.

The main goal of a content strategy is to use words, data, and visuals to create content the supports your marketing efforts and creates meaningful relationships with your target audience.

Why Content Strategy

Sean Corcoran from Forrester Research a new media thought leader has done a great job of defining the difference between earned, paid, and owned media. As a company or individual looking to market in today’s world you have to find a way to market in each one of these channels of marketing communication.

Creating content that resonates with your target market is a form of earned media. Here at WebBizIdeas we use the term touchbase marketing. Essentially creating a series of content interactions that allow you to have multiple touch points with your target market.

Rules of the Content Strategy

Before you write a line of content, create a video, or decide to do a podcast it’s essential that you start with having a solid strategy. A well thought out and planned content strategy that reaches your target market and can be accomplished by you or your organization. A few questions you want answered from this strategy are:

What are your overall goals of your content strategy?
Who are you making your content for?
What type of content are you creating?
Where are you releasing this content?
How are you creating this content?

Before you write a line of content, create a video, or decide to do a podcast it’s essential that you answer the above questions as much as possible.

Make content relevant to people

The first step and stage of any content strategy has to focus on the audience. Before you focus on any other effort or think even think about things such as search engine optimization or call to actions your first call to arms so to say is to create content for the consumer. The consumer of the content, be it video, text, or visual.

Picture this, someone reaches your content through a search engine because they are doing extensive research on your industry or your product. Since they have been doing an extensive search they probably already have a good understanding of what is good and what is not.

That’s why you first want to create content that is engaging, unique, and gets to the heart of what your target market cares about.

We use a few guidelines when we create content. One of them is what is called the inverted pyramid. This is a method of writing or creating content that focuses on value. Given the time pressed nature of your audience this is one element you want to include in your content creation.

Also if you are writing for the web we suggest you read how users read the web and the primer on writing for the web.

Make Content More Useful to Machines

Why is it important to make content useful for machines? These days more and more information is being read and sorted by machines. The big one is the search engines. Google alone is one big algorithm that scours the internet and works day and night trying to figure out what your content is about.

Generally after you’ve created your content for a person you then want to focus on modifying it for machines. Adding elements such as keywords, meta tags, and supporting meta content.

It’s also worth mentioning that at times you might create content based on what machines have told you. For instance, we noticed that one of our blog posts on creating a brand story consistently received traffic, views, and was climbing in the search engine results.

We did a little analysis and found that that a “brand story” is a popular term that people search for. So we created a content strategy and schedule around the term “brand story”. We did posts such as How to Tell a Brand Story, Elements of a Brand Story, Branding and Story Telling, and The Brand Story Primer.

After we created these posts we then spent a little effort in tuning these content pieces for search engines.

Make Content Efficient to Produce

Create a content friendly environment, often overlooked but one of the most important elements of a content strategy. If content is not easy for you or your organization to produce it simply will not get done.
This can be as simple as putting content production on your scheduled calendar of, your team, or other members of your organization. This is something we actually highly suggest. Beyond that your next step is to create a very efficient structure of tools, support, and creativity.

For each element of your content plan you should plan what type of tools you should use, for example:

Text: Blog solution or other Content Management System (CMS), Social Networks, writing production, editing, supporting images
Video: production staff, production tools and equipment, Video Editor, and hosting solution
Audio: production staff, production tools and equipment, audio editor, audio hosting solution

Make Content Comprehensive

So you’ve written your content for humans, made it easy to produce and release—your next step is to make an extensive library of content. Have you watched Star Trek? Which one? The Original (with Kirk), Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or the theatrical movies—or all of the above?

You could say that the Star Trek universe is rather comprehensive. One concept all started with…
“Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Need more proof that the Star Trek universe is extensive (to the point of almost exhaustive) view Memory Alpha a Star Trek wiki.

You should view your content strategy in the same way and same fervor. Your content strategy should be something that your organization can speak to and on from now until the end of the time.

To bring this conversation back to earth let’s say you run a company that makes strollers. What type of content could you create? What about an ongoing series of the latest on raising your children. There are always new studies, research, and trends in regards on how to raise your offspring.

Would this type of content be of interest to a young parent? Would this content be of some value to this market? I would argue it would. The more relevant and unique content you could create for this audience the more they will look to you and your company as the solution for tools that help in the growth of their young ones.

Bonus Thoughts and Questions

shelf life of content To take your content strategy to the next level here are some additional things to think about or discuss with your team:

What is the shelf life of your content? Will it still be relevant tomorrow, a week, in a month, a year, or forever? When you start thinking about that it really does open up a can of worms for content creation. It might even change your perspective on the type of content or how you create content.