Welcome back! If you followed the advice in our previous blog, you've got buyer personas, a content audit, and some content templates for what you'd like to see in your web content. In this installment, we'll be discussing how to take that information and use it to create more a more specific content strategy for different aspects of your website.
Editorial Strategy
Your website should have a well-defined editorial strategy behind it, just like any publication. This will be strongly based off your buyer persona(s) because this is all about finding ways to create content that appeals to your core customer base.
This also keeps the content consistent, so that it has the same "feel" throughout your site. Here are a few things to consider:
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Self-reference: Will you refer to your business as I, we, or only by name?
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Will content be written with a first, second, or third person POV?
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What's your overall tone? Serious? Playful? Friendly?
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How will graphic elements be used, and for what purposes?
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Do you use content-heavy chunks of text, or short blurbs and bullet points?
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What social media content will you include?
Web Writing
Once you have your editorial content strategy defined, start looking at how it applies to your written web content. What sorts of topics do you want to cover on your site and in your blog? Will it be "strictly business," or will you talk about issues not directly related to your product? This should be aligned both to your overall business goals, as well as to your buyer personas.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is, of course, one of the fundamentals of web marketing, and you need to define how you're using it.
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Are you going to just target Google (which currently owns more than 2/3 of all searches) or will you also include second-tier search engines like Bing?
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What keywords will you be using, and at what general percentage level?
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How closely will you tie your content into social media to fish for links?
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How often will you update your sitemap?
Metadata Strategy
Metadata is easy to overlook when talking about content, because it's content that very few human beings ever see. Metadata is almost exclusively targeting the content spiders that search engines use to catalog the Internet.
In general, if it can be metatagged, it should be. Create procedures to guarantee your metadata is as rich as possible, and to decide which keywords to include in it. Similarly, don't neglect rich snippets, Google's new attempt to improve on old-style metatags.
Content Management Strategy
Whether you use a Content Management System or not, you should still have procedures in place for ensuring your content is easy to develop, upload, cross-link, and revise as needed. Content can be easily reused across different platforms, saving you time and money, if you have a good content strategy governing how it's cataloged and accessed.
Content Channel Distribution Strategy
Going beyond your website itself, what other content channels are you going to use? Each has different purposes and will appeal to different demographics. Consider, for example, what you'll post to Facebook versus what goes on Twitter. Will you have a YouTube channel, or host files on your own server? Will advanced content like whitepapers be put behind an information-gathering gateway?
Phew...
Well, that's enough to consider for one day. In the next few installments, we'll be digging into a few different aspects of your content strategy in more detail: how do deal with content management, how to future-proof your content, and how to get your content writers to write to these guidelines.
See you then!
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can create a meaningful and profitable content strategy for your company. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides businesses with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
