Why Your Business Needs a Content Strategist
By our guest blogger Sêan Reid
In today’s digital age, your business needs to have a content strategy to help define and complete its goals, and that will be beneficial to your customers’ needs. It’s likely your competitors already have a solid strategy in place, catching the attention of your customers and growing their business in the process.
To further understand how and what you need for your content strategy, you need a content strategist.
What is a Content Strategist?
Ultimately, a content strategist leads and determines the direction of defining your brand’s voice. The content you create should resonate with existing customers and draw in new customers through an engaging and consistent tone, voice, and style across all brand content.
Your content strategist will define goals for your content, through analyzing and measuring data to see what is and isn’t engaging with your customers. This will help them create a buyer persona to have a better understanding of who your customers are and what they require from your business.
The strategy you take will vary from business to business, and depends on the needs of your business and customers. Through measuring and analyzing existing data, you can define appropriate platforms and buyer personas to target with your content strategy.
Awareness is vital to your content strategy. Potential and current customers need to be aware of what your company is about, the brand’s voice, and the values of the company.
How To Become a Content Strategist
It’s commonplace that a detailed knowledge of content creation and management is required to become a content strategist. For a content strategist to fulfill their role successfully, they will require the following skills.
- Solid Copywriting
If you can’t write engaging content, it doesn’t matter how or where customers will see it. The writing process is the most important aspect of content marketing. Content creators need to understand and define a brand’s voice. You will need solid copywriting skills to direct, plan, edit, and design resonating content.
- Content Presentation Skills
Once a content strategist has approved the content, it must be determined how it is to be presented. There are various types of content (ebooks, video, audio, guides, flyers, etc.) and each of them have a specific purpose aimed at specific buyer persona. This is determined by analytical research.
- Content Delivery
After your content is put into production, you should work with other digital marketers to determine the best channels to distribute your content. To deliver the content to the appropriate channels at the correct time and at the right people, it is advised to create a content calendar. This can also assist in when to review your strategy.
- Organizational and Multitasking Skills
For many companies, the content strategy is executed by one person. As a content strategist, you will be expected to use your initiative and independently take charge of multiple projects and content campaigns at once.
In addition, you will be required to work alongside other departments to help determine your content strategy. Collaborating with others is key to managing budgets, design, research and planning as your content represents the company’s brand voice.
- Highlighting and Maintaining Company Goals
A great content strategist must always put the company’s goals as their main priority. Being passionate about the company and its targets is crucial to a successful content strategy.
Creating a Content Strategy
- Content Audit
To begin your content strategy, is ideal to analyze content you are currently running. You should measure this against your competitors and your business goals. A content audit will help define your strategy going forward.
- Understand Business Requirements and Customer Needs
As mentioned previously, the requirements of your business and its customers are vital to your strategy.
In addition to measuring previous content, you should speak to company stakeholders and survey new and existing customers to understand what they require from the business:
- What outcome do they want?
- How do we differ from competitors?
- What do they like/dislike about the brand’s voice?
- What channels do you use to communicate?
- What Does Your Content Strategy Involve?
After analyzing the needs of your business, its customers and competitors, your content strategy can begin to take shape. This can be executed by the following:
- Determining the company’s brand voice and tone.
- How they meet business goals.
- Determining engagement objectives
- Selecting topics for content.
- Deciding how and where to distribute content.
- Types of content to produce:
- Blog Posts
- Social Media
- Ebooks
- Videos
- Case Studies
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Web content
- Print media
- Whitepapers
- Courses
- Testimonials / Quotes / Customer Reviews
- Reviews
- Defining a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategy.
- Defining Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) – Measurement of traffic, sale conversions, views, engagement.
A Content Strategy Is Never Finished
Although we have looked at what a content strategist is, how to become a content strategist, and what a strategy involves, it’s important to understand it’s an evolving task and role. Your strategy must always be improving, reacting to the changes of your business and the needs of customers.
This ever-evolving strategy requires you to regularly review the KPI’s determined and the criteria to meet them, needs to be reevaluated.
It is clear that for any business to succeed a content strategy is essential. Your content strategist needs to be flexible, organized, and cooperative with the ability to prioritize the needs of the business and your customers. This will prove to be a huge asset to the long-term future of your business.
