Introduction to Content Strategy: If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail

A perfect definition of Content Strategy does not exist. It’s a broad term, and as such, it can mean many things to many different people. For the sake of this article and in the absence of a universally agreed definition, I’ll share a paragraph from the ‘Talking Toucan Content Strategy Analysis Questionnaire’. This is the questionnaire that we ask each one of our blog writing clients to complete. The questionnaire helps us design a content strategy for their business.

“Content Strategy is about ensuring the content your business produces aligns to your business goals. It’s about understanding who you want to reach and ensuring the content you produce is relevant to your audience. Although the answers to some questions in this document may appear obvious, writing out the answers ensures we know what we’re trying to achieve and helps us avoid creating generic content that will not help you achieve your goals.”

The Five Stages of Content Strategy Planning & Analysis

In simple terms, Content Strategy can be broken down into five different stages.

1. Knowing the long-term goals of your content marketing
2. Knowing your audience, their needs and their wants
3. Knowing your unique story and what you can give your audience
4. Knowing how best to deliver your content
5. Content Planning

The first four stages focus on ensuring that your content supports your business objectives. To be certain that our content and objectives align, we create a high-level roadmap specifying what we want to achieve. We ask ourselves some of the following questions:

• What do we want to achieve?
• Who are we writing the content for?
• What does our target audience want from us?
• What does our target audience need from us?
• What can we offer our target audience that nobody else can?
• What is the best format to create our content in?
• Which channels do we intend to use to distribute our content?

The final stage is the practical content planning stage where our high-level roadmap is transformed into a low-level one. The first four stages heavily influence the fifth stage because many of the strategies chosen early on will shape our planning decisions.

1. Knowing the long-term goals of your content marketing

The first stage can be as simple as writing down your long-term content marketing goals. For example, you may want to:

• Start reaching a new audience
• Develop your existing audience
• Educate your existing customers
• Increase customer loyalty
• Develop your brand recognition
• Boost your brand’s image
• Win new customers

There are many goals to choose from and you can target more than one at a time. However, be careful not to spread yourself too thinly by selecting too many goals. It’s better to achieve one or two goals then it is to make a poor attempt at achieving six!

This stage is about understanding what you want to achieve. Once you have defined what you want to achieve, you can plan your content strategy with a clearly defined goal in mind.

2. Knowing your audience, their needs and their wants

To know your audience, you need to map out your ideal audience persona. You should consider factors such as demographics and behaviours.

Try to figure out your audience’s wants and needs. Only by understanding your audience will you know what to offer and how to make your content marketing effective. Some questions to consider may include:

• Do they need step by step instructional material?
• Do they need to be educated?
• Do they need real-life case studies?
• Do they want/need to be inspired?
• Do they want to be entertained?
• Do they want serious content?
• Do they want light-hearted content?

The only way to answer these questions is to know who your audience is!

3. What does our target audience want or need from us?

By knowing your own unique story, you can decide what you’re best placed to offer your audience through your content. Ask yourself the following question:

“What can I give my audience that nobody else can?”

You must ensure that your identity and backstory align with what you’re offering. Everything needs to hang together in a congruent narrative. For example, it wouldn’t make sense for a sports company to start releasing content recommending the best places to eat ice cream.

At this stage of the analysis, you should also consider what you want your audience to think about your business. What perception do you want to give? Formal? Relaxed? Light-hearted? Studious? Think in terms of personality. Ask yourself this, “What personality do I want my business to have?”.

4. Knowing how best to deliver your content

Before moving onto the detailed planning stage, you should consider how you want to deliver the content. Your method of delivery will be influenced by a couple of factors.

Firstly, which platforms you are already using. It makes sense to play to your strengths and build on the work you’ve already done. Your blog and email newsletter are the natural first choices.

Secondly, which platforms are the most suitable for reaching your target audience and which platforms will deliver the content most effectively. For example, if you’re targeting younger audience members, Instagram is a good platform. However, Instagram would be a poor choice if you’re for targeting people over the age of 50. Alternatively, LinkedIn would be a good platform for targeting working age business people, but it would be a poor choice for targeting teenagers.

5. Content Planning

The content planning stage is where you bring all of the information together. Based on your answers from stages one to four, you will create a low-level roadmap detailing exactly what you intend to do in order to achieve the business goals you have just defined. The low-level planning may involve activities such as:

• Deciding what topics to write about, e.g. selecting an overall theme for the content series and selecting topics for each individual piece of content.
• Deciding how to write the content, e.g. writing style, length of the content, whether to include images, whether to include quotes, whether to include references, whether the content should be presented as opinion or factual research etc.
• |Deciding which format the content will be delivered in, e.g. blog post, images, videos, eBook, infographics, podcasts, online courses etc.
• Which distribution channels you’re going to use to deliver the content, e.g. your blog, other people’s blogs or websites, which social media accounts etc.

Conclusion

Content strategy analysis and planning is not a one-time activity. Your content strategy plan is a live document and should be frequently updated.

Like everything else in business, everything is constantly moving. For example, any of the following factors could change, and as a result, your content strategy would need to be updated accordingly: your business goals, your ideal audience persona, your typical customer, the nature of your business, which social media sites are popular, which content types are popular etc. Even if nothing major shifts, it is sensible to review your strategy every few months solely to take inventory of what is working and what is no longer relevant to your business.

At its core, content strategy is all about good planning. It’s very hard to achieve anything if we don’t have a good plan, after all:

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”