Content Strategy Consulting

For Profitable Marketing Ideas

Traditional forms of marketing known as ‘outbound marketing’ involve some form of outreach that interrupts your audience to pitch a product or service to them, such as a sales call or cold email mail shots, or TV commercials.But the world of marketing has moved on to a much more subtle form of marketing known as ‘inbound marketing. This method involves creating content that brings your audience to you. So, we could say, content marketing consulting is a form of strategic marketing designed to produce and publish relevant, valuable content designed to gain and retain the attention of a specific audience in order to ultimately convert them to customers.The content must represent real-world value to them, whether it be in the form of entertainment, education, or something they can use to benefit themselves or their business.

There is no monetary value attached to the content, it must be free to consume at source, but in return, the content creator and their business can benefit in many ways, not least by increased brand awareness, website traffic, qualified leads, brand loyalty, community, an audience that is educated about your products, and ultimately increased revenue.We’ll go through some key research and planning that needs to be done in order to be successful with any content strategy consulting service. However, many businesses don’t have time to do this or may not have the SEO knowledge to get it right. In that case, the safest bet would be to speak to the experts before starting. If you would like to know more about how Spartan Agency can help with our content strategy consulting service, get in contact now for a free evaluation of your requirements.

Why Is Content Strategy Consulting So Valuable?

When surveyed 81% of marketers said that content strategy consulting is core to their marketing plan, so it should be clear that it is probably the most important part of your digital marketing strategy. The fact is that almost everything else you do as part of your online marketing will depend on it being implemented correctly. Your website SEO will depend on it, your social media campaigns will depend on it and so will your paid marketing campaigns. The quality and quantity of your website content and how freshly updated is still one of the most important factors when Google is determining the rank of your website. No wonder a content strategy consulting plan should be a central pillar of your marketing.

How to get started with content marketing?

Before any content is created there are a few things that need to be researched and defined. So that you can understand the processes involved in planning a successful content marketing plan. However, if you are planning to appoint an agent like Spartan Agency to carry out your content strategy consulting on behalf of your business, you should be aware that this research and planning is included in their content strategy consulting service. Even so, it is useful for you to understand how the process works, so read on.

Define your audience

In order to produce content for the audience demographic that is your ideal customer, you need to be very clear about who they are. It is normally recommended to produce one or several ‘buyer persona’ to help to clarify this. A ‘buyer persona’ is a detailed description of a person that perfectly represents your target audience. Some of the attributes to consider when designing this are as follows:

Age
Gender
Location
Language
Interests
Challenges
Life stage

Of course, there are more, and you will have some that will be specific to your brand. By the same token, you don’t need to use all of these. You can also create more than one persona that fits your brand, but the above list will get you thinking in the right direction.

If you are selling a product to a business, you will also need to define the details of the business. But content strategy consulting is at its best when you are communicating with people rather than the businesses they own. So, although you will need to know what businesses you are targeting for B2B marketing, you should then consider the persona of the owner of that business type, because they will ultimately be the decision-maker.

Income bracket
Problems
Employment type
Preferred brands
With or without children
Preferred magazines or newspapers

Define your brand niche

Next, to be successful at content strategy consulting, it is vital to understand the brand and how it fits into the world. This is not about how your product or service works or what it provides. It is about the human aspect of how it can make your audience feel.

What life problems does it solve?

How can it change the lives of the customers for the better?

What is there about it that will make your audience inspired and excited?

There are many more questions like this, but if you can create content that tells stories around these kinds of subjects and solve these kinds of problems you will quickly build a devoted audience for your brand.

Define your objectives

Each business is unique in what it is trying to achieve by its marketing strategy, but some common objectives are as follows:

Generate qualified leads
Increase brand awareness
Increase brand loyalty
Improve customer engagement
Increase website visitors
And of course, increase sales

There are different techniques that can be employed to achieve these different goals, so it is critical that one or several of them is identified before you move to the next stage.

Identify find your keywords

Once you know who the audience is and you have defined your message to them, now your content marketing strategy requires you to do keyword research to find out what search terms they are using to find the kind of content you will be creating. This is normally done with applications like Google keyword planner this has been covered in more detail here.

For any content strategy consulting to be successful, it is critical that the keywords defined here are liberally scattered throughout all the content that you create. This will ensure that it is ranked highly in Google searches and so improve the findability of your website for your target audience.

It is likely that you will have many keywords that relate to your products or different aspects of your business. That’s fine, you will have the opportunity to embed those in many different pieces of content that are created for your content strategy consulting plan.

It is probably worth pointing out that keyword panning is one of the more technical aspects of this process and one that if you get it wrong, all the content that you create may lose its effectiveness. So, this is a good time to enlist the services of a professional content strategy consulting service like the one offered by Spartan Agency. Click here and start today!

What Sort Of Content Can You Use?

Ok, so you are finally ready to start creating content, but what sort?

If designed correctly your content will attract an audience that is naturally in tune with your product or services. Most content marketing consists of the following key types:

Your Website

This will be the center of your content strategy.

Landing Pages

These allow you to create focused content that is not part of your main website

Blog

This is one of the most important places where you can explore different topics that are relevant to your audience.

Video

69% of consumers prefer to learn about a product or brand through video.

Audio

Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular and can be consumed while driving or working for many people who don't take the time to read.

Images and graphics

Great to liven up social media posts and draw in an audience with inspiring images of people, products, and places.

Infographics

These are the latest way to deliver complex information and ideas in a single image, great for social media and website giveaways.

Apps

This can be a way to deliver information to your audience and create a much tighter connection with them.

How to distribute your content?

If your content is correctly designed your audience will find you through organic Google search. In fact, this is one of the main reasons for generating SEO-friendly content on your website, to increase the rank of your website in Google searches.However, as part of your content strategy consulting plan, you will also post links back to your content across all your social media channels. Good quality content will not only improve your standing on those social media platforms but also improve your Google rank as well. There are 3.6 billion social media users worldwide, so this has to be the front and center of your content distribution plan.

Social media will also be where you post your images, graphics, and infographics, of course, with links back to a relevant part of your website or a landing page.
Video will be hosted on one of the streaming platforms like YouTube. However, there are now many others springing up that cater to more niche audiences.

The same applies to podcast platforms. There are the heavyweights like Spotify but lesser-known platforms like PodBean boast 600,000 podcasters and 10 billion downloads.

Planning

You should not underestimate the importance of planning your content strategy creation and posting schedule. It is recommended that you use a diary and plan out several months in advance at least. This will ensure that you are getting the content you need in advance of when it needs to go out. And it allows you to produce content that fits together into a larger narrative to tell the story of your brand and the people that use it.

If you are working with an external team to generate your content such as Spartan Agency, then the content planning calendar will keep everyone in the loop as to the bigger picture and when content needs to be delivered.

How to efficiently measure results?

As part of setting your goals, your content strategy consulting firm will identify the KPIs (key performance indicators) that will be used to measure results.

Of course, this goes much further than your bottom line of increased revenue. It is possible to identify key points along the way to getting a sale, such as a website traffic, engagement with media content, and downloads and information requests.

One key application used for measuring these and many other statistics is Google Analytics. This will give you detailed reports so you can understand how your audience is interacting with your content and who and where they are. You can read more about that here.

Get Started with Spartan Content Strategy Consulting.

As you will have seen some of the aspects of content marketing can be technical but the biggest problem most businesses have is the time it takes to consistently generate content to fill a properly designed marketing schedule. Also, it takes marketing, business, and SEO knowledge to create the right content in addition to a proper understanding of your business and its target audience. So, to get this right it would be advisable to speak to a professional agency that can research, plan, and execute your content strategy consulting plan.

Spartan Agency has a professional team of marketers and content creators, that will be able to do this for your, so you can concentrate on what you do best, running your business! Get in touch with us today for a free evaluation.

faq

What are the 3 components of content strategy?

Content strategy consulting experts will tell you that an effective content strategy must have three important elements to be successful and effective: brand focus, user experience, and content distribution. For more info on how content strategy can help, contact Spartan Agency.

What does a content strategist do?

A content strategist’s job description includes planning, designing, creating, editing, and publishing relevant content based on the company’s business goals and client base. The strategist’s main job is to develop a content strategy that sets out to achieve the designed business goals of the company, while also re-evaluating the strategy on every large milestone reached. Contact our content strategist experts today at Spartan Agency.

What are the four components of content strategy?

The main core components of a good content strategy are:

Setting Goals (according to your brand’s standards)
Form A Unified Web Presence Across All Platforms.
Create a Trusted Brand People Can Turn To.
Evaluate and Improve The Needs Of Your Potential Users.
Test and Re-evaluate Your Strategies Regularly

What are the 5 steps on developing content strategy?

5 steps to developing a successful content strategy are:

Define your goals and support them with great content. The more problems it solves for your users, the wider the content that your brand provides will reach
Get to Know your Audience and Assess How Can You Help.
Optimize and Audit Your Content Frequently
Develop Content Themes
Assign Your Content To Separate Marketing Funnels

What should a content strategy include?

Each separate content strategy should include:

A plan of your brand’s goals and a list of your user’s needs.
Analyze your audience and communicate with them with the right tone and through the appropriate digital channels.
Be clear with your content and your message
Your content should be useful
Stay up-to-date, relevant and focus on facts.
Be accessible to all digital users
Stay consistent, half of the battle is just showing up
Position yourself on all channels and reach more exposure.

Why do you need a content strategy?

A content strategy helps you define your brand’s marketing goals, set the right tone of voice for the right audience and set priorities. It allows you to plan your work and ensure that all marketing effort is goal driven and can be tracked. With a documented content strategy, you can ensure that every bit of effort put in by your team transforms into measurable and effective results.