Why Your Business Needs to Create Content & How to Formulate a Strategy in 3 Easy Steps

Katie Batchelor

Katie Batchelor

​If you’ve got a question, who do you normally ask? Your friends? Family? Colleagues? But what happens when they don’t have the answer?… Most people normally Google it. (Or use a preferred search engine).

This is why content is key. Your customers have problems waiting to be solved and questions waiting to be answered by your content. Whether you use your website, social media, blog etc to publish your content, it’s all about making your brand appeal to your audience. You need to engage them by informing them, answering their queries, entertaining them or aim to help guide their decision making.
Content Marketing Oxfordshire

So, how should my business create a content strategy?

1. Set your content goals first

  • Your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound. 
  • For example. Increasing organic traffic to your website by 25% within the next 3 months is a SMART goal.
  • Each piece of content you create should be aligned to help you achieve your goal.

2. Tailor content to your buyer’s journey

Each of your potential customers will follow a buyer journey made up of an awareness stage, consideration stage and decision stage. For your content to be effective, it’s important that you use different content tailored for each stage. This will mean that every visitor to your website or social channels will feel like they are receiving relevant and useful information.

Here’s a guide to the best content formats for each stage of the buyer’s journey:

Awareness: Blog post, ebook, infographic, tip sheet, quiz

Consideration: Podcast, template, webinar, comparison matrix

Decision: Free trial, consultation, coupon, demo

3. Promote your content

In an ideal world, people would flock to your blog after every post you upload. However, in reality, especially when you’re starting out, you’ll need to find ways to encourage people to consume your content. Because after all, what use is content if nobody sees it?

Think about where your prospects spend their time online? What time of day do they use particular platforms? What email subject lines will draw your audience in?

Paid promotion

  • This is a great tool to target specific demographics and characteristics so that you are targeting the correct parties. 
  • Ads can be run on social media, search engines and websites yielding a great ROI.
If your business is not yet benefitting from content creation or you would like more advice on how to develop your content strategy, send us a message!
Let's chat!
Oxfordshire Marketing

So, why is content creation so important?...

Content marketing can generate up to 3x as many leads as traditional marketing but costs roughly 62% less.

SMBs who use content marketing get roughly 125% more leads than those who do not

61% of online purchases are a direct result of a customer reading a blog ​
Social Media Marketing Berkshire

When deciding the format of your content, ask yourself these questions:

  • What stage of the buyer’s journey is this content aimed at?
  • Is it easy for my audience to consume this content?
  • What social channels do my customers use to find information?
  • What format can we create on a consistent basis?

Social media

  • You need to find a balance between self-promotion, informative material and entertaining content when sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest a YouTube.
  • Not all platforms will be useful, use the ones which your audience are most likely to be using.

Email marketing

  • Everyone on your email list has opted in to hear from you so you can guarantee that they will receive your messages.
  • Segmenting lists is a great way to improve your open rates by sending relevant content to targeted customers.

Repurpose your content

  • When you’ve created a great piece of content, don’t just share it once! Reuse it and transform it into various formats so that it can be more widely consumed.
  • This will help you to spend more time getting your content noticed by your audience.
  • For example, that informative blog post that you wrote would also look great as an infographic or a video for Instagram.
  • If you’ve had great success with a piece of content, try to think of all the other ways you could reuse that information which could be just as effective.