Building a Content Strategy for your Brand
What do you want your brand to be known for? Can you think of it in three words or less?
Planning content can be as simple as restructuring how you think about the concept itself. Write down every word you want your brand to be known for. Highlight the one that best suits what you're going for. You can even get creative and draw the ideas out if you're more of a visual notetaker or learner.
Whether you are creating content for your brand alone or have a team you need to guide, content planning can be intimidating and time-consuming, but these tips can smooth out the process.
Know Your Audience
Before you can even begin planning your content, you need to know who the content is for. It's possible that there is more than one type of audience for your product or service. What type of content are those specific audiences expecting from your brand?
Once you figure out who your segmented audience consists of, you will notice that there is a difference in tone, needs, and overall expectations of your brand from each segment, and you want to make sure that you are appealing to each of them.
No matter what content you create, focus on providing value for each audience type so your audience has a reason to continue engaging with you. Consumers go through different stages before they make a purchase. You will want to create content that considers each of the buyer stages.
Awareness Stage: The buyer is just discovering they have a problem. Here, you can provide content that is understanding and relatable to them.
Consideration Stage: The buyer understands their problem and is considering ways to solve it. Here is where you can provide solutions and support.
Decision Stage: The buyer is ready to decide on the best way to solve the problem. Here, you can position your business as the key to solving their problem.
Want to know more about how to connect with your audience? Check out this blog on the Power of Human-Centered Branding
Content Type vs Social Media Platform
Now that you have identified your target audience(s), you will want to know which social media platforms they use and would expect to receive your content on. For instance, they may want to see pictures of your product or service on Instagram but want your Facebook content to be short videos. This is where research comes in. You should understand which platforms are best suited for content, such as:
Blogs: Good for LinkedIn and Facebook.
Videos: Good for Instagram and Facebook.
Photos: Best on all platforms!
Text: Good on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Knowing the content that is appropriate for each channel will help you best reach your audience.
Competition and Industry
Hot Tip: Strategize your content by checking in with what your competition is up to on their social media platforms. You could learn a lot from what they are doing well and what they are not doing well. Try to incorporate some of the things they excel at in reaching their customers. On the flip side, take a page out of their book and eliminate any practices they aren't seeing results from.
Do some digging into your industry, as well, not just competition. What are some best practices in your industry? What are some expectations in your brand's industry? What can you do to innovate or think ahead in terms of trends? This will help guide your business to stay relevant.
Content Management System
Develop a content management system before you begin creating content. It will make it easier for each person creating posts and blogs to stay organized and on-brand. It makes it more efficient to collaborate, edit, store, and publish. You won't have to reinvent the wheel every time; everyone will know how to access and edit content easily.
Content Calendar
Content calendars can help in your planning process as well. Map out how many days you would like to post and what type of content and platform you want to post on. It helps visually organize your strategy for content by tagging with color or title different content pieces. This will keep your content fresh and not repetitive. It also helps with keeping you on track and organized. Time can slip away from all of us, especially when you are busy building your brand! Having a content calendar helps maintain consistency and keeps your audience engaged.
Here are some more ways to get a brand strategy that really works.
Optimization
You will want to ensure that your content is written in a way that will maximize the opportunity to reach the largest possible target audience. The idea is to gain organic traffic from your content through search engines by using targeted keywords in your headlines, metadata, and subheadings. When you post, don't forget to use a solid hashtag strategy specific for each platform!
We understand how strategizing and designing all your content can feel overwhelming, especially when trying to accomplish it on your own.
We specialize in building brand experiences that drive loyalty for companies of all sizes all around the globe. Contact us today for help strategizing and building your content plan! You don't have to go it alone.
