A practical walkthrough to creating your content strategy

I know, you heard the word strategy and your eyes glazed over….but they shouldn’t. A content strategy shouldn’t take hours to prepare, nor should it feel overwhelming and restrictive. 

These five easy steps will help you create an agile strategy to create cohesive, relevant, on-message content across all of your platforms.

Why do you need a content strategy?

A content strategy is the backbone to everything you create. It’s how we make sure that we stay on message, on brand and relevant to our audience.

It’s tempting to just dive into content creation, after all we’re busy and we want to just get going. But without a content strategy you’ll adopt a scattergun approach. Highlighting the messages that shout loudest or that are easiest to communicate. 

Your content strategy’s job is to make sure that all the content you produce directly supports and moves you towards your business goals. If your content isn’t doing that, you’re wasting your time. 

What should your content strategy include?

Your strategy needs to include your goals, how you’re going to measure them, who your audience is, what your key messages are going to be. 

Then that can be fleshed out in more detail to start looking at the relevant CTAs, the imagery, the wording, the platforms, the frequency.

You don’t want your content strategy to be so lengthy nobody reads or remembers it. The trick is finding the balance between brevity and workable details. Whoever picks it up needs to be able to quickly absorb the information and make it work without having to ask too many questions.

I like to think of the format as more a quick FAQ or bullet point style. Keep everything succinct, snappy and short.

How to write a content strategy?

Your content strategy shouldn’t be complicated, in fact, at the top level it shouldn’t even take you that long to do. Yes, when you start to translate your strategy into a detailed plan that can take time to make sure the right message is in the right place at the right time, and if you’re doing that right it will take longer. But because we’re keeping our top-line strategy simple I break it down into five easy steps. 

Step 1: What do we want to be known for?

In the upcoming quarter, 6-months or whatever time frame your strategy covers what’s the one priority? What’s the main business goal? 

It might be an increase in revenue for a specific service, in which case the one thing you want to be known for is that one service. 

That doesn’t mean we won’t talk about other things when appropriate, it simply means that we’re focusing on achieving that one business goal in this time frame. When you try to promote or talk about too many things your messaging becomes weaker and more confusing.

Think about what you want to be known for, and that’s our content anchor.

Step 2: What three areas can I talk about in support of that?

While we’ve got one focus we want to approach it from different angles, what those angles are is down to you.

It might be that you have clear pain point relating to that service and you’re going to use three of those to highlight. 

Or it might be that you’re going to talk around the subject more widely and bust some myths, use some external studies to evidence your point and then use client stories and testimonials. 

You can look at your previous content and what your audience has responded well to and trial that. To a certain extent determining what these three areas are is guess work, but the more you reflect on previous content themes and performance, the more you’ll see a trend about what your audience is interested in.

When you’ve got your three topics I want you to list out as many individual ideas you can think of relating to that topic. You might have a case study addressing that challenge or a testimonial that references that topic. Perhaps you’ve got pain points that relate to those, or new studies that correlate to it, or maybe just fears and hearsay you’ve heard. You won’t necessarily use all of those ideas but this is the start of your content vault. 

Step 3: Identify a content big hitter for each of the three areas

Now we’ve got our overall content message, we’ve got some supporting topics and we’re going to develop a, what I like to call, content big hitter for each of those three areas. 

It might be a lead magnet, a more in-depth blog than normal, an email sequence, an ebook, anything. The topic should be something in that area that your audience cares about, maybe it’s a challenge or a new way of doing something. It needs to be chunky, have depth, and be super relevant. 

These big hitters will be drip fed throughout your content plan, helping drive action and building your audience at the same time. 

Step 4: Divide things up

This is where frequency starts to come into play. We need to decide how much of what we’re publishing and when. We don’t need to get into exact dates (unless there’s something which is genuinely time sensitive), we’re still talking top level. So in month one we’re going to talk about these five ideas, across these platforms. In month two, we’ll talk about these five.

Go through your content vault ideas and see what naturally fits together and list those out. You can also start dropping in your content big hitters to fit in with what other things you’re talking about. 

As you go through you’ll start to see patterns emerge. Grouping ideas together to capitalise on these patterns will help your content feel more cohesive, and that in turn will result in better engagement from your audience. 

Step 5: Plan it all in

You’ve got your strategy now. You’ve identified your priorities, your key messages, your topic areas, your ideas, your big hitters. You’ve started to flesh out a rough plan and now you can bring that plan to life.

Start by looking at your month by month plan, working out what goes where, what do you need in terms of video, imagery, written content. Do you have enough in-house resources or do you need to outsource anything?

What are the key deadlines? What information do you need from other people? Taking an hour to plan out the logistical considerations around your content and setting deadlines and tasks to keep you on track is the most important step to stop your content strategy from becoming obsolete before you’ve even auto-saved it. 

What next?

Get to work. A strategy is only as good as the action you take. But it’s easy to be on it for a month and then for you to forget about your strategy once you get busy. Allocate an hour at the start of every month to go through your content strategy and plan and take the necessary steps to bring it to life. You can also use that hour to rejig things if needed. 

A great content strategy shouldn’t just be a tick box. It will save you time, it will improve the quality and relevance of your content, it will help you push back when you need to. 

Stop making excuses, stop being overwhelmed and follow these five steps to create a workable content strategy that makes your life easier. 

If you still don’t know where to start then my content strategy service is just the ticket.