Creating fictional marketing personas and writing interesting blog posts can be a daunting task. Especially for business owners who don’t consider themselves ‘creative’. But the good news is that creating content strategy is a methodical, paint-by-numbers process.
However, manipulating a strategic template to set your business apart and do that successfully is another challenge.
Does content strategy have to be creative?
Everybody is creative in their own way, but you don’t need to be overly creative to develop a working content strategy.
First, you have to begin with customer personas. These are just fictional representations of data that you have already gained from your current customers and a little research to support your claims.
By basing these personas on your best customersyou already have a solid foundation for a content strategy. Add to it by focusing on qualities like their demographics, position in the buyer’s journey, behaviour patterns, motivations, goals and problems.
From then on, using an Excel document as a template for benchmarking your SMART objectives actually prepares a functioning content strategy document.
Bringing personas to life
Constructing and understanding your personas is enhanced when you can role play to predict how your customers will react to certain content, products and situations.
One way to strengthen your personas is to get other people involved. By having a company-wide, live strategy document, everyone can be involved and contribute fresh ideas, perspectives and solutions. When coworkers collaborate, it is common for a business to have an abundance of ideas to fill their content strategy with relevant material.
How to produce creative content
Once you have framed a content strategy template, you can refer back to the plan to compile a list of associated keywords that you’re looking to target and then generate content ideas that contain those keywords. It is crucial to identify and write to the pain points that are associated with your personas. The strategy is practically your blueprint for producing and distributing your content.
Setting your business apart through content strategy
Creating a template for your content strategy has many benefits. But since all businesses can employ this one-size-fits-all strategy, it can be difficult to know how to separate yourself from companies that are also producing similar content.
Comparing buyer personas, the unique selling points or perspectives of your product and the pain points of your customers are a few ways to identify ways to set yourself apart from competitors.
Inspiring your team with diverse ideas also ensures that your content will be different. This will be true no matter how similar your competitive business is to you. Finally, employing different content producers to carry out your strategy will always yield original material.
Successfully implementing your unique content strategy
After you’ve built your customer personas and created a content strategy, there are several things you can do to promote and distribute your content. The most important thing to NOT do is to put it in the top drawer and forget about it.
Making a living document helps your team collaborate and communicate in order to have the most effective strategy. Utilising a publishing calendar also establishes accountability amongst team members and company deadlines.
Another helpful tactic is adding a rolling to-do list to the bottom of your strategy document. As things are being checked off as finished, you can revisit and review it as a team during monthly meetings. Then think of a new list of tasks that advance your strategy. Lastly, continuing to study your company’s metrics and return to your objectives will help evolve and improve your content strategy.
