successful content strategy

Planning a successful content strategy and avoiding common mistakes

Every organization is different. We all operate in different environments, and we all have different goals. So everyone's ideal content strategy will be unique. But in order for us to understand what content strategies work and which don't, we can look at some of the core components of content strategies that successful organizations share. The first is clearly defining your goals and objectives. Knowing what keywords you've researched and chosen to target, what your audiences are looking for, and ultimately, what you want them to do when they get to your site, is the foundation of everything that you'll do.

These goals will help you with reporting and measurement and put a realisticperspective on the results that you achieve. You can define lots of goals, from things like more ecommerce sales, to more leads and phone calls, to more followers on social networks. Goals can be anything, but they should tie back to your bottom line through business objectives. Second, spend the time to really understand your key audiences and their needs. Perhaps the cornerstone of a good content strategy is to research your audience and then understand them well enough to be able to market to them effectively.

Knowing your customer's role in an organization, their location, theirdemographics, their interests, and their behaviors will help you step into theirshoes and bring insights into the planning process. Third is ensuring that everyone in your organization is involved. This isn't something that you're going to be able to tackle alone, and you'll need buy-in from your CEO, all the way down to your interns. If you're a smaller organization, you might even consider outsourcing some of the work. Once you've found the people, an involved group is one that's passionate and excited to spread knowledge.

Getting the people in your organization onboard is not an easy thing, but having a plan with a good thorough reasoning and clear expectations around your goals can help persuade them to jump onboard. Fourth, you need to ensure that everyone in the organization maintains a healthy respect for online reputation management. Whenever you put anything out there on the web, it's there forever and it's there standing by your brand. You can't un-tweet something, and if you publish something an error, odds are good that some server somewhere has already captured and stored whatever it was that you didn't want up there.

Many businesses today have well-crafted and well thought-out policies forwriting and publishing content on behalf of the company, but many still don't.If you fall into the latter bucket, you'll want to invest some time to define just what people can and can't post, and what editorial procedures need to be followed. Always remember that anyone on the web can read and find your content when it goes live. Ultimately, your reputation will dictate whether customers want to do business with you or not. The last thing successful organizations do with their content strategies, is spend time monitoring trends.

The only thing that's certain about the Internet is that the online marketinglandscape is constantly changing. New competitors are popping up by the minute, old competitors are doing new things. Your business environment is changing faster than ever before, and your target audience is changing along with it. What this means is that what worked for you today, won't necessarily work for you tomorrow. And you have to embrace the fact that this is a moving target that requires your full attention if you want to stay ahead.Monitoring trends involves not only keeping a pulse on your industry, but alsothings like renewing keyword research and reviewing your content structure and strategy on a regular basis.

Maintaining industry relationships, having continuous contact with influencersand industry leaders to get the inside scoop. And finding new and creative ways to relay those messages to your followers. While successful organizations tend to exemplify these traits, this isn't by any means a complete list. Take a look at your own organization and your own objectives, and then define your own success.

Defining your audience, topics, angle, and style

Defining and understanding your target audience is the first step to writing content for them. Attracting just anyone to your website isn't so hard. It's attracting the right kind of people and offering the right topics in the right tone and style that's a challenge. A good way to start is to simply ask the question, who are the people that we want visiting our site and what roles would they play in an organization? From here we can go through the exercise of understanding how they're using online channels and where we might be able to message or engage them.

A great tool to start off with is the Forrester Technographics Profile Tool. This tool can help provide insight into how your end consumer uses different technologies today. For example, if we were targeting a group of US males between the ages of 45 and 54, we can see that the majority of them are what we call spectators. This means that they often spend their time on blogs, videos, podcast, forums and reviews, but they're reading, and not necessarily contributing. Knowing this, we might tailor our content to these formats, and we know we'll need to work harder to get any user-generated content from these folks.

Once we know what kinds of content our target audience is consuming and we've identified who they are, we'll need to dive in and look at our topics.Ultimately, users are typing keywords into search engines. And keywords remain the core and foundation of SEO. So when it comes to choosing topics, we'll want to tie them to the keywords we've chosen, based on relevance, search volume, and competition during our keyword research process. You'll also want to look at tools like Google Insights for Search to monitor industry trends and understand what's popular among your target audience.

And what's being searched for and discussed. Matching your topics to what's popular and being searched for will maximize the size of the potential audience that you're catering to. Next, you can employ the concept of filling in the gaps. Odds are good that someone else already wrote something about your topic. And the last thing the Internet needs is more pages talking about the same old thing. Instead, figure out what's missing out there and fill in those holes. Monitor what your competitors are writing about, but more importantly, monitor what they're not writing about.

These are great opportunities for you to offer unique perspectives and even more value. Once we've identified who we are writing for and what we are writing about, the last thing we need to do is define our content angles. This is really nothing more than the approach to writing your content, and it should be consistent and appropriate to the audience that you're speaking to. Are you writing technical articles for rocket scientists to read, or lighthearted commentaries on the state of the entertainment industry? There are very different tones for each. And above all, remember that while we're doing all this to support our business objectives and ultimately some kind of sales, no one wants to read a blatant sales pitch. We need to offer up something of real value, content that's compelling and useful to the reader.

CONTENT

When you're deciding how to angle and position your content, you will want to consider a couple more areas of importance. First, be original. Whatever you write, take the time to make sure that it's unique and that it comes from your own voice. You want to bring something new to the table that will excite your readers, that they can't find anywhere else. Whether you decide to be humorous or put a creative twist to your content, it needs to keep them engaged or even entertained from beginning to end. When they're done reading it, they should be thinking, I now know something interesting that I didn't know before. Or even better, they'll be thinking, I need to share that with my friends.

From a format perspective, you'll want to think about the style of content that you're putting together. Will you be writing a blog post or informative-style articles? Are you taking a comparative style where you contrast product A with product B? What about discussing a before and after scenario, or a how-to walk-through? And remember that content isn't just text; pictures are worth a thousand words. And you can even use video to capture sights and sounds to convey complex concepts or to make something more tangible to a user.By understanding who you're writing for, what you're writing about, and whatstyle you are writing in, you'll be cementing the foundations of thoughtful,unique, and relevant content that will wow both human readers and searchengines alike.

Understanding different types of content

You might think that content is just text on a page, but these days that's not the case. Content can take many forms, including presentations, images, infographics, and even video. Let's take a look at the different types of content out there on the web. First, lots and lots of content out there is in textual format. These are the words we read on pages, blog posts, articles, and more, and as we've seen, the text we choose and how it relates to the keywords we want to target with out SEO strategy is extremely important.

But don't forget about other file formats. PDF files, Word documents, and even presentation slides are all forms of content we interact with day in and day out, and they can all be published on the web. While you can usually bring the content from document formats into an HTML format for the web, many people don't think about their presentations. If you have a slide deck that you recently presented, why not host it on the web and share it with the audience after the session? More and more speakers and companies are making a habit of uploading their slides to slide hosting services like SlideShare, before they even give their talk.

They can then provide a link to the deck that can be downloaded, so thataudience members can follow along on their laptops and share thepresentation with others. This can provide a catalyst for sharing and buzz from content that you've already created. Using images can be a great way to tell a story visually or to help readers envision exactly what the text on a page is describing. And images are quickly evolving as their own kind of content all across the web. Think of the popularity of sites like Pinterest that are completely driven by groups of images arranged by and commented on by people all over the world.

And search engines are indexing image content too. Head over to google.com and search for your company or brand name in Google Image Search. Does it return the results that you'd expect? While users expect images to be part of the online experience, and you can help search engines understand pictures as part of a page with the proper code, image search brings a new way of searching for and discovering content in and of itself. Another popular piece of content that is popped up is the Infographic. Infographics represent a concept or a large set of data in a visual way.

And they can help people absorb and distill a lot of information in a meaningful way that can quickly be understood. Infographics are typically just image files, and they're often found on pages with plenty of context around them, so they can certainly be indexed and searched on in search engines.And well-designed and constructed infographics on popular topics have the added benefit of getting shared around and referenced from other sources.Just a few short years ago, you would have been crazy to put video up on your web pages, because it would have meant that your users needed to have a high-speed connection and have some fancy plug-in installed in their browsers.

These days, video is everywhere, and not only do most of us have high-speed data connections to our computers, we also have them for our phones and tablets too. Video production has never been more economical, and telling a story with sight and sound can help you get across a message that text and images simply can't convey. And remember that video content can be optimized for search engines. By syndicating your video through popular services and properly selecting your video title, description, tags, and categories as you do, you can position your videos to be found in search.

And don't forget to transcribe your videos into text that can be used for closed captioning or subtitles, and that search engines can read. YouTube is one of the most popular video hosting services out, there and it allows users to upload and share videos online for free. It also happens to be a Google property, and you've likely seen YouTube videos showing up in search results. If you're producing video content, then at the very least you'll want to make sure to get yourself a YouTube channel and post your videos there, filling in all the metadata that can help your content show up when your potential customers are searching.

When it comes time for content creation, it's important to keep in mind thattext is not your only option. Different audiences will consume different types of content, and search engines are capable of indexing and returning all kinds of things. Knowing what types of content are out there will not only help you think more strategically about what to publish, but it will also keep you on your toes and above the competition.

Getting ideas for writing content can be tough, and many people struggle atthis stage of the game. While only you can figure out what content will accomplish your search engine optimization goals, there are a few things you can do to get the creative juices flowing. First, think of your website in terms of some very broad themes, and then think of the different ways you might be able to present those themes. Content can be classified in many ways, and thinking about the style you could write in, may shake some ideas loose and start you down a path.

Here are a few broad types that you can refer back to when you need that spark. Educational pieces can be used to show your users how to do something or to teach them something that they didn't know before. You could take a statistic fact or a figure from your industry and expand upon it, offering value from the perspective of an expert opinion. You can get technical and focus on details or advanced topics that appeal to savvy users or other industry experts. Procedural content can be a step by step how-to type of article that walks a visitor through a certain process.

Informational content doesn't have to be groundbreaking or Pulitzer Prizewinning. Just putting up a page of driving directions to your store orbiographies of your key executive team are both content opportunities that may be missing from your pages. News is simply an informational page that references something that happened at a specific moment in time. This could be industry news that you're reporting or commenting on. Or it could be company news about who you've hired, or a recap of the conference that you just hosted.

All of these can be applied to a broad array of themes, and there are certainlymany more not included in this list. It might help to have your target keywords in front of you as you run through this list. The combination of specific phrases and types of content can often be the source of a great idea. The second thing you can do as a source of inspiration is scan your competitorsto see if you're missing something, or if there is a hole out there that you can fill. Do a quick search on some of your keywords and click on some of your competitors. You can spend some time on their sites and take a look at their blogs or their FAQ sections.

What kinds of things are they writing about? Are there categories that you canoffer new, unique insights into? Are there hot topics that you can expand upon, or burning questions that you can answer? You can also take a look at your competition in social media. What are they tweeting and posting about? Maybe they got the industry scoop that you missed, and that might be something right for a commentary piece. Third, the people that you work with each and every day can be hidden sources of fantastic content. Customers are often happy to leave reviews and provide feedback if you ask them to, and there are lots of ways that you can ask.

Calling up or having a face-to-face conversation with your best customers canlead to a case study or a testimonial that you can put up on your site thatshows real customers having good experiences. For a search engine, that can represent both good content and authority. You might ask a customer to do a thorough review of one of your products or services for posting on your website, or run a contest where customers write about their experiences for a chance to win a sweepstakes or a prize of some kind. And don't stop with your customers. As an organization, you have a network of people that you work with that could all provide some kind of content for you.

Call up your vendors and ask them to write a joint case study that you canpublish on your website. If your peers give you an award or an industry partner gives you a certification, you can be creating content around it. And don't be afraid to reach out to your professional networks. Your industrycontacts might just be willing to author a guest blog post if you ask them.Coming up with content ideas can be hard, but remember, that means it's hard for your competitors too. Looking at the kind of content pieces you can write, taking stock of your competitors in your industry, and leveraging the people you touch day to day can help you come up with the content that might just attract your next customer.

Promoting your content with social media

Social media can be a great way to let the world know that your content is outthere, and can even be a source of referral traffic in its own right, helpingpotential customers find you. But social media is still pretty new, and many businesses have jumped into it without really knowing how to use it effectively. The first thing you'll need to do if you want to leverage social media to help get your content out there is to make sure that your company has a presence on at least the top social media networks. We're talking about the ones with the largest number of active users, Twitter Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube.

Every one of these networks is a chance to get your content in front of moreeyeballs, attract more links, and encourage more sharing. Once you've established a presence on these networks, you'll want to make sure that they are integrated on the pages that host the content you're creating. Lots of companies maintain a blog with an RSS feed, because it's a great way to get the word out to qualified visitors. They're actively subscribing to your content.You can do a similar thing with social media by placing the various sharebuttons on your pages, and these allow users to quickly pass on content they've found useful to their own networks.

That said, you'll want to choose your social share buttons carefully. Don't fill your pages with 20 different buttons that take two-and-a-half days to load;you'll want to pick the ones that your audiences are active on. For example, if you've got a strong presence on Twitter and Google+, make sure you put the Twitter and Google+ buttons on your pages. If you're trying to grow your Facebook or LinkedIn following, placing those buttons there might be a good idea as well. But if you don't have a MySpace or Orkut page, and you don't target users of those social networks, you may want to leave those off and make it simpler for your consumer base to make their selection.

Keep in mind also that many of these Share buttons are configurable. For example, you could optimize the default tweet to include your Twitterusername, to encourage recipients of that tweet to follow you. On Facebook, you can control which image thumbnails to use as a default. As you build and grow your presence on social networks, you'll find topics that you relate to that are guiding conversations in the social sphere. On Twitter and Google+, hashtags are commonly used to tag certain conversations, and people that are interested in those topics can choose to listen to tweets or posts that contain specific hashtags.

You can find existing hashtags by searching keywords on Twitter about your industry, or by following influencers who tweet regularly, and seeing which hashtags they use. For example, the Web Analytics community uses the hashtag #measure in their tweets. Many of the experts converse and share interesting content with one another using this hashtag. So if you're creating content that fits the bill, you can use that hashtag to get your content in front of a very specific group of people. Remember though, this is a self- regulating community. Your content must be useful and valuable to that group, and if it is, you'll be rewarded with further shares and retweets.

A good thing to do when planning your content strategy is to identify how you plan to share that content across your social network once it's been pushed live. Which networks will it go out on, what will the message say, what hashtags will it use, who is going to do it, who is going to monitor and respond to the activity and keep the conversations going? These are all questions to keep in mind with each piece of content that you publish. Last, the popular social media outlets of today are not likely to remain constant forever. Remember, Friendster, MySpace? How about Netscape and AOL? In this industry, companies rise and fall faster than ever before, and you'll need to keep an eye on the networks that matter for your audience and respond to them accordingly.

Whichever networks you choose, and however you choose to leverage them, spending the time to get the word out about the content that you've worked so hard to create will be well worth the effort.

Measuring content performance

Measuring the performance of your content is essential to determining thesuccess of your SEO efforts, and to help guide your content strategy. By looking at how your content performs, you'll be able to understand what yourvisitors want, and provide more of it to them in the future. When you evaluate your content's performance, it's important to ask these questions: What content are our visitors looking at? What's our most popular content? Are our visitors engaged with our content? Are our visitors sharing our content with others? And, is our content generating quality business results? If you haven't already, you can install a free tool, like Google Analytics, to collect data that you'll need to help you get the answers to these questions.

Visitors are considered more engaged the longer each of their visits to yourwebsite is, and this can be measured by both average time on site, and the number of pages they view during their visit. The bounce rate is a measure of how often a visitor lands on your website and then leaves without seeing any other page of the site. Generally speaking, the lower the bounce rate, the more your visitors were enticed by your content to dive deeper into your site.Next, let's look at whether or not our content is being shared online.

Well you can use a slew of social media tools to measure how often your tweets and posts and pluses and shares are re- shared throughout your social networks, tools like Google Analytics can also be configured to track interactions that are happening both on and off your site. Google Analytics can track how many times people are clicking your social media sharing buttons, or leaving comments on your blog, and it can even go out and find the public posts across a number of different social networks that have been used to share content from your site. Of course, the flip-side of this is that when content is shared via social media, the recipients of those tweets and posts can come and visit your website.

You can use campaign tagging and Google Analytics Traffic Sources reports to see how many of your visits are coming from all of the sharing. Perhaps the most important question of all is whether or not all of this contentproduction is driving our business goals. A properly configured web analytics tool is focused not just on counting pages, but associating all of that data with business outcomes. Do the visitors who came to our site as a result of particular piece of content end up buying something? Calling us? Did they submit a lead form or download a white paper? Did they sign-up for a product demonstration? Did they follow us on a social network, or did they share our content with others? Did they sign up for our newsletter? Each and every one of these goals has a real business value.

And by understanding what content drives these conversion actions, we can answer the biggest question of all: What did we get back for our investment in SEO? Whether you use Google Analytics or any other analytics tool, monitoring and measuring the performance of your content will help you understand the value you're creating and help you plan for and continually improve the content you'll be focusing on next.