Planning out your marketing content is essential to making sure your marketing efforts aren’t going to waste. Knowing your strategy is key in making sure everything runs as smoothly as it possibly can.
You’ve probably heard the saying, content is king. While content marketing has been around since the beginning of time, it’s really become popular in the last decade with the internet becoming more content-driven. You don’t want to have to be coming up with marketing content on the fly. That leads to messy content that may not perform as well as it could or it could even reflect badly on your brand.
With content marketing being so important in today’s marketing strategies, it’s no wonder that content strategy is becoming a buzzword in content marketing circles. Here are some important reasons why you should be planning your content strategy too…
1. It Gives You Focus
Having a content strategy ensures that you always have content in the works. This content can come in different forms, so it can be simple things like blog posts for your website or more complex projects like eBooks. When you set out a content strategy, you’ll know where to focus your efforts and what content is most important to move forward with.
2. It Creates a Foundation
With content marketing being so important in today’s marketing strategies, content strategy is becoming more and more of a buzzword. When you have a content strategy in place, it gives you the foundation to start creating content that meets your content objectives. This content will also meet certain standards, like SEO standards or just writing standards.
3. It Creates Consistency
Content consistency is important in content marketing, especially when it comes to content promotion. When you have a content strategy in place, content creation and content promotion become much more consistent. With content marketing being all about building relationships with your audience, content consistency is key for building up that relationship between you and your readers.
You want to establish how much and how often you’re going to post. Most social media platforms recommend businesses post at least once a day to keep any sort of traction they may have and gain viewers. Remember, though, more content doesn’t necessarily equal more success. Your content strategy should be prioritized so that you can allocate your resources accordingly and ensure high-quality content is being put out there for your customers to read.
4. It Sets Expectations
Setting content marketing expectations is very important when it comes to content strategy. By setting content marketing expectations, you can make sure that content writers are on the right track with content promotion and content creation. You can also make sure that the content team is staying on top of deadlines, scheduling content for upcoming months, or even planning content that may not have a deadline just yet.
You can use content strategy to set content goals and content deadlines, which will create content marketing expectations for the future.
5. It Keeps Everyone on Track
This may be one of the most important aspects of the content strategy plan- keeping all of your employees on the same page.
Whether you have a content team or just one content writer, content strategy planning keeps everyone on track by setting content deadlines and providing content writing guidelines. This content writing guideline includes content marketing tone, content formats, content length, and content promotion. It also includes the content strategy itself, which is an important part of everyone’s content marketing efforts.
Making sure everyone has access to the plan is important so that your people can stay in the loop without having to track it down. Transparency is key when it comes to content strategy; you want everyone to know where they should be focusing their content marketing efforts.
6. It Brings Everyone Together
One of the most important aspects of content strategy is that it brings everyone together, especially marketing and content writers/promotion staff.
With content marketing playing such an important role in content marketing, content strategy gives content writers and content marketers a way to work together without strife. They can plan content creation which will make content promotion much easier. Content strategy planning is especially beneficial for content writers who are not very familiar with content promotion but need to be involved with it anyways.
It’s also important that everyone knows what the plan entails- from content marketing content inspiration to content writing guidelines. Having a happy and harmonious workplace allows for more creativity when it comes to marketing ideas!
7. It Provides Useful Analytics Metrics
This is perhaps the most important reason to make a content strategy plan!
When you have your content plan in place, it provides useful analytics metrics for tracking your content marketing efforts and content performance. You can use content strategy to set content goals and content metrics, which will provide you with content marketing KPIs (key performance indicators).
You want to keep track of engagements such as likes, comments, and shares and how they change based on the type of content you’re putting out, when you’re posting it, and where it’s being posted and shared.
Keeping track of analytics is key to making sure your future marketing is performing well. By knowing the metrics of each post’s engagement you can see what’s working and what isn’t as far as the content and the times and where you post the content.
Content performance tracking data will also give your content writer’s content marketing goals to work towards. This is especially true when they are on an SEO content writing side of things because you can see what content comes up on the first page and work that into their content strategy plans for content creation.
8. It Provides Useful Content Marketing Inspiration
When you have your content strategy in place, it provides inspiration for upcoming posts and future content. If you’re struggling to keep your content fresh, planning out your current strategy will allow you to see what might be missing and where you can add new ideas in.
With content promotion becoming such an important aspect of content marketing, content strategy provides a way to stay on top of things as far as what’s working and what isn’t so that the content team can come up with content marketing content inspiration for the future.
9. It Creates a Better Content Marketing Workflow
When you have content strategy in place, it creates a better content marketing workflow and content writing process that everyone is familiar with and understands.
If your team lacks communication and content promotion skills, content strategy planning can help to bring them up to speed and increase content marketing performance. Content strategy planning will allow content marketers to stay up-to-date on content promotion as well as content marketing content inspiration.
10. It Provides a Clear Vision of Your Content Marketing Strategy
When you have your content strategy plan in place, it creates a clear vision of where your business is going with content marketing.
Content strategy planning allows content marketing content inspiration to be shared and put in a content marketing content writing format for future content marketers to follow. This provides a clear vision going forward so that everyone knows how content promotion is supposed to work.
When you have a content strategy in place, it will allow everyone on the content team to know the content writing style and content marketing content writing tone. It makes content writing processes easier and content marketing content inspiration more obtainable.
11. It Can Help to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking
To increase your search engine ranking, you need to have good content on your website- content that provides the right information to the people who are searching for it.
Content strategy planning allows content marketers with content writing skills to produce better content that is optimized for search engines.
This is because content marketing content inspiration and content promotion strategies are laid out ahead of time so content writers can focus on writing quality content that provides the right information- rather than trying to find a way to promote it afterwards.
12. It Keeps You Organized so You Can Manage Content Marketing Projects More Effectively
When content strategy planning is in place, content marketers can keep organized and manage content marketing projects more effectively. This makes content marketing content writing more efficient and content strategy easier to follow for everyone involved. Being able to prioritize different projects allows your employees to put their best efforts into each project, ensuring that you always get the best content for your marketing plan.
Having a content strategy in place allows content writers, editors, and content managers to organize content according to different types of content.
13. It Keeps Content Marketing Projects on Schedule
Content strategy planning allows content marketers to keep their content marketing projects organized and on schedule, instead of throwing things together at the last minute when they have a strict deadline for content writing.
Content strategy tells whoever is working on it when exactly to post it and where. It makes sure that there is a schedule and nothing gets skipped over or forgotten.
However, it’s important to make sure your schedule can be flexible if need be. You never know when something exciting will happen, or maybe you had a new idea that you want to implement either immediately or within the next couple of weeks. A little bit of wiggle room can go a long way, even if you never need to use it.
14. It Assigns Responsibility and Creates Accountability
If content strategy planning is in place, content team members can be assigned certain responsibilities and become accountable for the content they post.
This helps content marketers keep content writing projects on time by having content marketing content inspiration to go off of when it’s time to write a blog post or article. This also helps content marketers with content writing skills to blog more efficiently.
You’ll know exactly who to talk to about certain content projects, whether it’s fixing a problem, giving feedback (both positive and negative), or asking their opinion on an upcoming project of a similar caliber.
Once you have your content strategy in place, it’s time for the next step: creating content. It’s important to make sure that your content is up to par before publishing it. Hiring professional companies like C&I Studios is one way to ensure content quality standards are met. We have an extensive portfolio that you can look to for ideas on what we can create together. It’s important to us that the content we create for you is highly personalized and up to your brand’s standards and aesthetics.
It’s also crucial to your strategy to make sure you’re promoting content effectively, which requires a content marketing plan. We can also help with that and any other marketing service you require!
Not sure where to start when it comes to content strategy? Contact us today!