Content Strategy
Before rushing to write our content it’s important to level-the-playing-field across our entire team by properly defining the strategy for content creation which should include a pre-defined goal, it’s objectives and measurable metrics, the content-types we’ll be creating, the roadmap and schedule and of course our brand identity and voice.
Defining a Goal
Our goal defines what we aim to achieve via the content we’re creating i.e what will be our endgame. Goals generally fall under one of these categories:
Acquisition, Engagement, Branding, SEO
Acquisition refers to visitors clicking through the article via a call-to-action (CTA) and registering to our service or purchasing a product. it’s generally measured via two different metrics: the click-through-rate (CTR) indicating how many visitors click through the article via the CTA out of all visitors landing on the article page; And Conversion rate indicating how many visitors register to our service or buy a product out of all visitors landing on the article-page.
Engagement refers to visitors staying on our website and reading our articles, it is measured through metrics such as Session duration- the average time visitors tend to stay on our website, pages-per-session, time-on-page indicating at each article’s engagement level, and bounce-rate indicating at how many visitors leave after visiting just one page.
Branding refers to visitors sharing and engaging with our content on our own website as well as available distribution platforms and is measured by number of sessions and unique visitors indicating at a growth in brand-reach, as well as user engagements such as comments, shares, likes, retweets etc. on the various distribution platforms we’ve published to.
Search Engine Optimization i.e SEO refers to our domains ranking in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) per specific keywords. While SEO-work is widely based on content creation, there’s a lot more to it, so we’ll be touching this specific goal separately at the bottom of the course.
Defining OKRs
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a set of objectives accompanied by metrics often called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure their empirical success, e.g:
Branding and Awareness
- Visits
- Unique Visitors
- Engagements e.g likes, shares, retweets, etc.
- Referral Links
Engagement
- Session duration
- Pages per session
- Time on Page
- Bounce Rate
- Comments
Lead Generation
- Form Completions
- Email Subscriptions
- Blog Subscriptions
Acquisition & Conversion
- CTR
- Conversion rate
- Sales rate - Online / Offline
- Sales Volume
- Upsell / Cross-sale rate
Retention
- Product Retention Rate
- Retention Sales rate
- Retention Sales Volume
- Content Retention Rate
- Existing-User Engagement
The above lists various different goals for the sake of example only, it’s important to set the specific goal and point-of-focus for your content.
Defining Content Segments
After we’ve got a well-defined purpose, goals, objectives and metrics to measure the success of our content, the initial phase of content development will be ideating the article-types we’ll want to be producing. Optimally at this stage, we’ll also decide on the approx. word-count and the call-to-action (CTA) per content-segment which will define the objective the segment serves as well as guide the writing towards an end result.
You may also think of these as article-series, For instance:
| Content Segment | Word Length | Call to Action |
|---|---|---|
| Positive product case studies | 500 words | Register Now |
| Positive/negative industry case studies | 500w | Read More (Pos)Register Now (Neg) |
| Team-member personal story | 300w | Read More |
| Product-based and how-to’s | 300w | Read More |
| Market Research | 500w | Read More |
| Testimonials | 300w | Register Now |
| How-it-works | 750w | Register Now (basic features)Purchase Now (premium features) |
| Lists | 300w | Read More |
| Reviews | 300w | Register Now |
| Opinion | 500w | Read More |
| KOL (key opinion leader) Interview | 1000w | Read More |
Once we’ve got our content segments all lined up, our content creation and ideation process should run much smoother.
Scheduling a Content Roadmap
Once we’ve mapped out the types of content we’ll be creating it’s time to ideate our initial article topics and develop a weekly scheduled framework for our article postings.
Schedule
A recurring weekly schedule of articles to-be-posted by type is essential for a fluent and predictable workflow
Backlog
Our backlog is a list of all our ideas for new articles, it should contain URLs for inspiration, possible article titles, their article-type according to our pre-defined content segments, the approx. word-count for the article, and the article CTA.
Defining our Brand Identity
Alright, so now we’re well established on the content workflow, schedule, and backlog, but we still need a unified voice across our entire team, we need a brand to follow.
Here’s a great example of how our copy-guidelines might look like. While this example is of high-detail and 8 pages long, your copy-guidelines can be much shorter and generalized.
The important thing being that it’s coherent in making all our articles across our entire content-writing team have a unified voice and personality adhering to our brand’s message and mission.
Case Studies
The fact is theory alone just won’t do in getting you closer towards project and professional success. The following real-world stories featuring brands traversing the thickets of organic content marketing are an integral part of your learning process towards becoming an industry practitioner.
Make sure to read and understand each brand’s journey through thick and thin as well as visit their homepage & blogs, tracking back their post history and researching them via SimiliarWeb in order to explore and understand first hand exactly how they managed to attain their current market positioning.
Groove tells the story of how they remodeled their failing content strategy.
Groove is a helpdesk ticketing platform, in this case study, Groove’s Founder & CEO, A. Turnbull tells the story of how they pivoted their entire content marketing strategy from focusing on nice looking, industry-related content to shifting in focus to customer real-world pain-points, resulting in exponential growth.
Read the full case study on Groove
Kevin D. Explores Content Quantity vs. KPIs
In his experiment ‘5 posts in 5 days’, Kevin D. explores the tradeoffs involved in posting more content per week, in terms of copywriting, overall user-engagement, engagement per content-piece and first-glance-reputation. Enlightening.
Read the Full Case Study on BeABetterBlogger
SlideBean’s content effort at promoting their slide and pitchdeck platform
Slidebeans provide a business facing solution for pitchdecks and presentations, In their self-written case study on how they achieved success, Co-Founder & CEO, Jose Caya, doesn’t shy away from laying out all the data, hard-truths, and professional terminology.
Read the full case study on SlideBean
Justin C. explores the success and acquisition of an affiliate marketing brand for Agoda.com
In this affiliate venture, an independent travel content brand website was established and populated with quality content, targeted links and CTAs aimed at customer actions (i.e purchases) which referred to Agoda.com’s flight and hotel booking platform where they got paid a 60% commission per action or purchase.
Within their brand domain it was made sure that no irrelevant links such as curated content or social platforms were available in order to keep the users either engaged in organic brand content or referred to Agoda.com’s content-related destination for conversion.
Just from referral traffic with 60% commission per action (i.e purchase) and zero cost per lead, the brand had managed to create a revenue stream of 28,000 dollars per month within one short year and eventually sold off for 160,000 dollars.
While the case study is rather old, 2012, and the links it directs to are now irrelevant, the case study tells a powerful story of how an emerging brand in the highly competitive niche of travel managed to not only provide leads but high-levels of conversions as well as high volume-per-action indicating at their high-quality content. Inspiring.
Read the full case study here.
How PTC expanded beyond their own audience into that of their industry
PTC provides business facing engineering solutions. In 2011 they launched a product named Creo which provided a CAD solution comparable to SolidWorks or AutoCAD. In order to engage this previously untapped audience they started a specialized blog aligned with a strategy to engage CAD-industry problems without focusing the selling-points of their Creo solution. Within four short months, they managed to surpass the 100,000 blog visitors, with 70% of the traffic being first-time visitors.
Groove explores how story-driven content increases user-engagement.
Groove is a helpdesk ticketing platform, in this article they explore why and how story-driven content-writing works both for the writers and the audience.