Online Content Strategy – Where To Start

3 Minutes
Mark Gregory

As with everything, planning ahead pays off in the long run and it’s no good having content which no-one can find because you haven’t put in the effort beforehand.

Creating great content for your website isn’t easy, especially when you have your actual job to do and customers to service. By taking a step back and preparing an online content strategy, you’re giving yourself a much better chance of success.

So how do you go about creating a powerful content strategy? Hopefully this blog article can help you with that.

It’s important to find a balance between creating content which is informative but also self-promotional and it’s no good using loads of keywords which don’t relate to what you are actually selling.

Our Tops Tips for Content Strategy

  • So first up, do some research. Check out what your competitors are putting out there, what information they are including, how its presented, what they might be missing and how you think you can do it better.
  • Define what it is you want your online content to do, what the message is you want to put out there and what your goals are. If you have a clear understanding of this then it will be much easier to plan content topics.
  • Be clear on who your audience are. You may have multiple audiences that require different tones of voice, so in your blogs and case studies, think about whether you should be using a friendly, conversational tone or a more business-like voice that includes technical jargon and insights.
  • Look at how your content is set out. Is it logical? Easy to navigate? If your users have a difficult time finding what they want, they will easily give up and go elsewhere. So have a few different people try out the site to see what, if any, hiccups this throws up.
  • Prepare a style guide. This will lay down guidelines so as to ensure consistency, both for now and the future, across the website and should include uses of fonts, colour, formatting of texts and images, logo variations etc. This will keep everyone focused and on the same page so include as much as possible including tone of voice, target word count and so on.
  • Once this is done you should create a ‘Copy Deck’, which is like a road map for each page and includes text, graphics, links and advertising.
  • Build images and video clips into your content where these add value to the topic in question. Remember that Google loves ‘great’ content. That means its user friendly, it provides informative, interesting and engaging experiences. Ideally, this also makes your content shareable on social media platforms.

When you are up and running and content has been thoroughly tried and tested, you need to designate someone with the responsibility for keeping content up to date and ensuring regular contributions are posted. This content maintenance person needs to be continually updating or adding to content. Keeping the site active and refreshed will help search engines find you, as well as keeping users interested.

Also don’t forget to publish any relevant new content on social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, this will encourage traffic to your website and strengthen your brand image.

And finally, do some monitoring. Use analytical tools like those available free from Google to try and ascertain what has proved successful and what has failed, who has looked at what and for how long. And then adjust your content accordingly.

At Wish Agency, we can help guide you with any of these steps. We’ve worked with numerous businesses in various sectors and we love nothing better than seeing a content strategy paying off. Just give us a call to discuss your goals and we’ll be happy to help.

View