A good Content Strategy offers a great opportunity for brands to build a rapport with their target audience and increase customer engagement on their digital platform. By delivering relevant and valuable content to the audience businesses can improve their reputation and build a community of their customers which helps them increase brand loyalty which in turn is very beneficial for any business.
Creating a good content strategy comes with loads of benefits, saving time and money, keeping the work process more organized, helps you maintain consistency in your communication with your audience so on and so forth. The content strategy however does not mean only creating and distributing content on a platform. It is the entire process and approach that allows businesses to attract and interact with their target audience to ultimately generate profitable relations with them.
A well planned and effective content strategy must consist of 4 core elements to be successful:
Proposition
Your content has to provide value to the life of your audience, it should stand out and the reader should have something to take away from it. Otherwise, it is very difficult to retain space in the reader’s memory.
Strategic Planning
You should first know the audience you want to reach and how you can deliver the right content for the right audience while keeping a balance with the brand guidelines. Most importantly, you must have a solid strategy to achieve the set goal.
Brand Positioning
Identify the brand’s unique personality and traits and find answers to how you wish the brand to be perceived by the target audience. Again, identify what makes the brand different and better from other competitors.
Business Care
Understand the end goal of your content agenda and what is it that you wish to achieve with the content strategy. Also, understand how the content strategy will help the business grow.
Once you identify and understand the 4 core elements of creating a good content strategy it becomes very easy to create rich and enriching content that would definitely break the ice between you and your audience.
Now that we know about the core elements and principles which need to be taken care of, here is how you can make a positive impact on your customers and ensure that your content is engaging enough for the audience to come back for more.
It is very important for content writer and content strategist to be aware of the 6 W’s and H of content strategy
1. Why?
Why are you creating content?
It is of utmost importance to have a concrete and relevant answer to why you are taking up a particular project or writing task. You must be clear about why you want to write for a particular brand and what is it that draws you towards generating content for the brand you have chosen to write for. There has to be passion and motivation for writers to create great content and in order to attain that one must know the basics of why they wish to write for a product or brand.
2. What?
What message does the content convey to the audience?
Content is a very effective way to reach out to the target audience to convey what the brands want to communicate. One must make a note of the main agenda of creating content, identifying, and working towards what is it that you wish to tell your audience is very important to ensure that your content is on point. A layout of what you want to communicate and how you want your content to be perceived by the audience is important. Once you have an answer to whether you want to create sales content, marketing content, informative content, etc. you will be in a better position to generate relevant content and implement the same.
3. Who?
Who is the target audience?
The final consumer of the content you create is the audience who are associate with the brand you are writing for. Identifying your audience and the kind of content they would be comfortable consuming is very important. Geographical location, socio-economic background, the language of comfort, etc. are a few aspects that need to be noted in order to create content that the readers can associate themselves with. This is vital to break the ice and build a rapport with the readers.
4. Which?
Which platform are you writing the content for?
Websites, applications, blogs, advertising campaigns, magazines, etc. are a few platforms where content is published and made available to the audience. Every platform is unique and has a different agenda to communicate with the audience. There is a different style of writing for different platforms too, you can define the voice and tone of your content based on the platform you are writing for. While writing for an application one should note that the content needs to be crisp and small because of the space available, but if you are creating content for an advertising campaign on the other hand you can have a bubbly and fresh content strategy to ensure you make a mark on the readers. So, knowing the platform you are writing for and the limitations it has helped in creating relevant content.
5. When?
When will the content be launched and made available to the audience?
The time when specific content is made available to the readers helps writers innovate new strategies. For example, if a particular advertising campaign is going to be released around some festival, content can be created keeping that festival in mind which helps in making relatable content which makes a lasting impact. You can use the timing and the events that revolve around that timing to your advantage and make the most of it to create interactive content strategies.
6. How?
How should the content be structured and presented to the audience?
Compiling important content and editing the unwanted and irrelevant content can be time-consuming but is a very vital pillar for a good content strategy. A good and well-planned structure for content management can either make or break the deal so utmost care should be taken of how you want the content to be presented to your target audience. What should be placed where and how should certain content be linked with others should be looked at before publishing the final content to your target audience?
The Five W’s and H works as a checklist to help content writers create relevantly and well-structured content strategy. This technique of answering the above questions and then creating a content strategy involves a lot of brainstorming but you should not worry about if your ideas are being expressed perfectly or if your answers are good enough or not. They are always trials and errors that happen along the way while creating a good content strategy.
In conclusion
To achieve the ultimate goal of creating a good and effective content strategy, finer details should be considered and given adequate importance. Building a strong brand identity through content is helps businesses build a rapport with their customers and have them coming back for more which increases brand loyalty. Building a rapport with the target audience, breaking the language barrier, and keeping customers engaged are a few challenges businesses face which can be handled well with a well-planned content strategy in place.
