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Master the Building Blocks Necessary to Make Your Content Work
Marketing today isn’t what it once was. By that we mean the large sprawling billboards with catchy slogans that once graced highways and busy streets or the half-page newspaper ads with artistic creations. Without a doubt, those forms of marketing still exist and are still relevant, but they are making way for new ways of marketing particularly in the digital realm. We are talking social media marketing, content writing, search engine marketing and search engine optimisation – just to name a few.
Which is why marketers are faced with a new problem: how to effectively embrace all these various marketing mediums in a way that is cohesive, and powerful while still being on-brand. One of the ways they have reconciled these difficulties is by making use of a content strategy framework.
What is a Content Strategy Framework?
A content strategy framework is a blueprint detailing how and who you create content for. Depending on your industry, it might include details such as objectives, task flows, distribution channels, audience and any other minutiae pertinent to your marketing goals.
A well-defined content strategy framework will give extra mileage to your content. It’ll help you discover what works and what doesn’t and also ensure every member of your team is on the same page.
Content creation very often requires the involvement of different people, ranging from project managers, to copywriters, to designers and editors.
A content strategy will harness all your creative input, from content to design to brand tone, in a way that delivers the best impact.
How to Build a Content Strategy Framework?
Despite its numerous benefits, creating a content strategy framework is no easy task. Because of this, we’ve broken down the process of creating a content strategy framework into 5 easy steps: goal-setting, audience definition, content audit, content development and the last one being optimisation.
1. Define Your Goals
Before embarking on any journey, you need to have a clear destination. The same principle applies to creating content strategy frameworks. Except in this case, your business goals take the place of the destination, guiding how your content evolves.
Some of the common content strategy goals include, generating leads, increasing brand awareness, improving customer retention, engaging customers, growing traffic, and more.
Each business or industry will have different needs and goals. For example, a clinic may want to increase its appointments; a jeweller may want to get more sales; an e-commerce platform may want to entice more businesses to list their products on its website – the list goes on.
Take some time and list down each of your goals. In your notes, include how you intend to use content to achieve those goals. A good rule of thumb is to ensure your goals fall within the S.M.A.R.T index. By that we mean they should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound.
2. Understand Your Audience
They say a good salesman can sell ice to an Eskimo. What they don’t say is the level of emotional and psychological understanding required to achieve such a feat. Now we are not suggesting that you go out and hypnotise your targets; what we are trying to highlight is the importance of having a deep and intimate understanding of your audience.
Once your goals are clear-cut, your next step would be to understand your audience, their habits, preferences, how they communicate and more importantly, what goes through their mind when making purchase decisions.
3. Conduct a Content Audit
Analysis
Once you have a more precise grasp of your target audience and a more comprehensive idea of what your future goals are, the next step is to conduct a content audit.
The goal at this stage is multifold: first, you want to determine how much of the existing content aligns with your future goals, including social media posts, blog articles, email updates, product descriptions, landing pages, e.t.c.
Second, you also want to review all your content to determine which type of content is performing the best and which isn’t. The information acquired here will illuminate what resonates best with your audience.
Thirdly, you want to conduct research to identify gaps in your content strategy, figure out who your competitors are or gain inspiration for new topics to explore.
Throughout the process, you’ll come across content that falls within three categories; content that you can keep, content that you can update, and content that you might have to delete.
There’s no need to remove content that performs well and is still relevant to your goals. However, some content can benefit from slight adjustments to become more effective or current. And then there’s content that cannot be improved or will take too much time and resources to upgrade. This is content to remove.
You can leverage tools to facilitate your research or analysis, such as Sprout Social or Google Trends. Below are some of the tools we like to use:
Google Ads Keyword Planner
Google has an excellent suite of features and products that can help you narrow down topics relevant to your target audience. The Google Ads Keyword Planner, for example, can help you determine search volume for a particular keyword. Creating content around keywords with good search volume will make reaching your target audience easier as you align it with their interests. Use the following simple steps to check search volume.
Google Search Autocomplete
One less popular but powerful way to find highly relevant topics is the Google Search Autocomplete function. How does it work? When you type a word or a letter into Google, it provides a list of search suggestions based on common searches. This feature and other keyword tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner will help you uncover high-quality topics for your content strategy.
Google Featured Snippet
Google’s Featured Snippet can provide significant value to your research efforts. It is based on information that Google determines to be the best response to a user’s search request. Use what you discover in the featured snippet and pair it with common questions people ask to create highly relevant content that targets and addresses your audience’s interests. Bear in mind that the information showcased in the featured snippet may not always be accurate, and this inaccuracy could sometimes be caused by character limits and/or how the content was crawled. This is why routine content audits are crucial for organisations to maintain the integrity of the information they put out.
Google Trends
Google trends is a web-based tool offered by Google that allows users to see how often a particular keyword, subject or phrase has been queried over a specific period of time. With this tool, you can identify trending topics related to your search queries, compare multiple keywords, understand local trends or acquire insights into seasonal patterns.
Answer the public
Answer the public is another powerful tool to uncover insights on topics or questions that matter to your audience, breaking down and classifying relevant search queries into meaningful bite-sized categories.
HashTag Analysis
Hashtags serve as a critical component in a content strategy, acting as micro links that guide users towards pertinent content. From a brand’s perspective, they simplify the task of aiding audiences in discovering your material.
Due to their widespread usage across multiple platforms, strategic hashtag utilisation can significantly enhance your content endeavours.
Tools like RiteTag offer insights into user engagement with specific hashtags on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.
Other platforms such as Keyhole, Brand24 and Sprout Social, on the other hand, in addition to hashtag analysis, allows you to monitor your hashtags’ performance and make necessary campaign adjustments for optimal results.
Competitive Research on Social Media
Another excellent source for content ideas is your competition. Analysing your competition’s content will help you uncover content gaps and shed light on your flaws and strengths. It will also help you understand what drives your customers to pick them or you.
Keep in mind that while it is possible to visit your competitor’s page to look at their socials, ads are often missed unless you know where to look.
Social media ad libraries serve as an excellent starting point for competitive research. They can unveil your competitors’ new product and service offerings, disclose their promotional stratagems, and grant you a glimpse into their marketing and communication tactics. On top of that, gaining insights into your competitors’ social media content strategy and advertisements allows you to fortify your own social media content pillars.
Here are a few social media ad libraries worth investigating:
Facebook Ad Library
The Facebook Ad Library contains a database of active ads running on Facebook. It also includes information such as the brand serving the ad, creatives used, as well as the platforms on which they are running.
TikTok Creative Center
The TikTok Creative Center offers a similar feature; the only difference is you can only view ads from creators that choose to make their campaigns public. At the moment it is pretty limited, however, it’s a great tool for advertisers looking for content and ad inspiration.
LinkedIn Ads
With LinkedIn ads, it’s pretty simple; all you have to do is visit your competitor’s LinkedIn page. Once you arrive, click on posts and then filter based on ads.
Conceptualisation
This is the stage where you start giving form to the insights you’ve so far generated from all the analysis. An excellent place to start is deciding your brand voice and brand tone.
Brand voice represents what values your brand stands for and its unique perspective. Brand tone, on the other hand, is how your organisation speaks with its audiences – communication style, emotional tone, word choice, e.t.c.
You’ll also need to determine which content types to use as a vehicle for your content strategy, whether it be blog posts, social media content or infographics.
Keep in mind to always keep your brand voice consistent across all channels. Brand tone, however, may vary due to the distinct audience demographics, behaviours and expectations associated with different platforms.
4. Develop New Content
At this stage, you’re almost but not quite ready to start developing your own content. It helps to have a promotion strategy in place, as well as content themes based on results from the content audit. It would be best if you also had a content matrix to account for the user journey and an editorial calendar to plan your delivery.
Content Themes
What you have so far gained during your research and content audit will help you develop the main themes of your content strategy. Take the information gained in your audience research and pair it with your brand’s unique selling points to create meaningful content.
It helps if your message and voice is authentic; consumers today can pick up phoney statements and platitudes from a mile away. Ask yourself difficult questions such as what new things can your brand bring to the table? What platforms will allow you to deliver this content with more impact? Based on your research, what does your audience care about, and what type of content are they consuming?
Build a Content Matrix
When building a content strategy framework, it is not enough to plan a general direction and fulfil it with broad content. You need to dive deep into the behaviours of your audience, particularly as they journey across the consumer funnel from awareness to consideration, conversions, loyalty and advocacy.
Throughout each of these stages, identify the needs of your customers and lay down a plan on how you intend to deliver content that addresses their concerns. This matrix that you create will serve as the spine of all your future communication. It helps if you break down your content into three groups: hero content, hub content and hygiene content.
Hero content speaks to your general content, while hub content acts as a support to the narrative you are trying to paint. Hygiene content, meanwhile, is content that answers all the burning questions your customers might have.
Build an Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar is a necessary part of your content strategy framework. This is where you begin to plot your content; it needs to show what content should go out and on which platforms. It needs to show what needs to be created and the people in charge. It also needs to show deadlines for delivery. These measures will have your operations running without a hitch.
Be sure to leave room for quality control. It is always best to have someone or a group of people responsible for ensuring all that material published meets the direction and guidelines conceptualised in your content strategy framework. They can also help pick out grammar issues or damaging faux pas. After all, there is a difference between ‘man eating chicken’ and ‘man-eating chicken’.
5. Track, Measure and Improve Performance
Your work is never truly done, even after the completion of your content strategy framework. If you’ve based your content strategy on the SMART index, you should have a good idea of how you intend to measure the performance of your campaigns.
Set weekly intervals to measure and analyse the performance against the original goals you set for your content. This will help you determine whether you need to adjust your content accordingly.
You can use tools such as Google Analytics to track conversions. Social media analytic tools like Facebook page insights, Instagram insights, and LinkedIn Page analytics can provide valuable perspectives such as audience demographics, user interaction patterns, page traffic, all of which can help guide your content strategy to better resonate with your audience.
Final Thoughts
Creating a content strategy framework will challenge you in ways you never expected. You’ll have to dig deep in your creative wells and spend countless hours researching and refining a detailed plan of execution. However, once complete, you’ll find that the results more than justify the amount of time and effort spent.
We’ve prepared a spectrum of digital marketing resources to facilitate content marketing goals, from content writing to creative design, Google Ads, Google Analytics, SEO, SEM, social media, and so much more.
If you’d prefer a professional digital marketing agency to handle your content marketing so you can focus on growing your business, then you can always send us a message or reach us via Whatsapp.
