Content that works for your business, your audience, your budget, and your resources.
If you have a website, or a social media channel, you have content. It’s the words, pictures, video and audio that you publish to your various platforms that your audience will (hopefully) read and (hopefully) act on. The question isn’t whether you have content, it’s whether that content is actually doing anything for you: bringing in the right visitors, answering their questions, and moving them towards becoming a customer.
What is content strategy?
Content strategy is about deciding what to produce, why, and in what format, so every piece of content has a clear job to do in support of your business goals. It’s not about producing more. In fact, more often than not, it’s about producing less. But making sure you’re producing the right things, in the right way, and getting maximum value out of each piece.
Why it matters
The problem with a lot of content is that it’s often produced in parallel to the activities of the business itself, not as an integrated part of them. It’s a box-ticking exercise, or an opportunity for your managing director to wax lyrical on the state of your industry, without actually thinking about who will read it and what they’ll do afterwards.
But if you get your content strategy right and start producing content that is based on real business activities and real audience needs, it will bring in new visitors to your site, help convert them into leads and customers, and give you expert-grade material that can feed your social media channels and attract links and mentions from third parties.
And what’s more, if you can get your content production processes streamlined and efficient, squeezing the most out of each piece of content you produce, you often find you get better results from your content and spend less time producing it.
What the Content Strategy Service involves
- A content audit across your website and your social media channels, reviewing what already exists and what it’s actually achieving
- A site structure review, making sure content is easy for visitors and search engines to find
- A content plan, based on real search demand and your business goals, setting out what content to produce, how best to produce, and when to publish across your channels
- Guidance on how to create clear briefs so that you produce consistent quality content, whoever is producing the final piece
- Efficient content production processes to help you get more value from every piece by repurposing it across formats and channels
- A regular review or reporting framework to monitor what content is working well and what is underperforming, so you can revise and iterate
Can I get this service as a standalone?
As with all my digital communications services, I can offer content strategy as a standalone service. But it works best when it follows on from a website and social media review and sits alongside SEO and AI optimisation and a good social media strategy to form part of an integrated approach.