Anatomy of a content strategy

Content is at the core of almost all digital marketing. Almost every digital interaction consumers have with your brand is driven by some kind of content. Video, blog posts, tutorials, guides, FAQs, website copy, and product pages are just a few examples of content where those interactions begin. Users discover your brand through social media or find your products through search, and it’s all because of your content.

Of course, whether or not that content converts is another story. Indeed, there’s any number of reasons why content might not convert. It could be shit. It could be reaching the wrong audience. Its messaging could be off. The price-point could be off. The product could be shit. The customer experience could be shit. Or negative online reviews might reflect any of the above.

The point is that a content strategy is all about how your brand is going to reach the right users with the right value-prop on the right channels at the right time. And in the same sense that many hands make light work, a content strategy is also something that’s greater than the sum of its parts, so the more robust its anatomy, the more effective it’ll be at driving conversions and supporting your marketing goals.

Competitive analysis

To build a robust content strategy, you need to understand the competitive content landscape. You need to understand what the competition is doing, what’s working for them and what’s not, what types of content resonates with your target audience, and what channels they’re engaging it through.

And a competitive analysis should also be data-driven. It should consider not only who you think your competition is, but who the data says it is. Whose content is ranking in Google? Whose content are users engaging on social media? What kind of content is capturing these rankings and generating that engagement? What emerging content trends are engaging with more, and what trends are on the decline?

In answering these questions, a competitive content analysis helps you understand not only how your messaging should be packaged, and how it can be bundled with value-added content that speaks directly to users’ needs. And by speaking to those needs as they evolve over time, you’ll be able to consistently engage users with your messaging and value-prop.

Understanding SEO gaps and opportunities

One of the most valuable aspects of a content strategy is how it supports SEO. Simply put, organic search traffic is some of the most targeted traffic online because those users are already one step down the conversion funnel. They’re actively looking to fulfill a need, and if your branded content ranks on the keywords they’re using to describe that need, it’ll be your conversion funnel that they’ll step into.

So your competitive analysis should also help you understand what SEO gaps and opportunities your content strategy needs to address. Which competitors have the largest search presence? What kind of content is driving those rankings? And what kinds of content drive the most targeted traffic?

Answering these questions will not only help you identify and prioritize specific high-performing content topics, but how to develop content assets that will outperform the competition’s treatment of those topics, and capture competitive rankings on topic-specific keywords.

Understanding content demand through search data

Toward capturing competitive rankings on topic-specific keywords, a content strategy should also go beyond what content topics are currently performing well in search results. It should be proactive in identifying (1) additional content topics that align with targeted search intent but that the competition has overlooked, and (2) emerging content topics that anticipate users’ evolving needs.

What content keywords are searched most? Which are on the rise, and which are on the decline? And what’s the commercial value of this traffic?

By mining the search data for these answers, you can ensure that your brand prioritizes the highest impact content topics, content that will rank on high-volume keywords that drive high-value traffic, as well as content that leverages emerging search trends to keep your brand ahead of the competitive content curve, so to speak.

Content Narrative: Data Trumps Opinion

It’s not enough to just understand what content topics your customers are engaging with online. Not only must you then determine which topics to prioritize, but also how much bandwidth and resources to dedicate to each content vertical (or content category). Ultimately, your business priorities should influence these decisions, but that influence should be guided by data.

How competitive is each content vertical? Are any of them particularly well-suited to your brand’s competitive advantage, USP, or value-prop? Are any of them already over-saturated with authority content? Do any of the verticals have a vacuum for quality, value-added content? And how likely is content from each vertical likely to convert?

By parsing the search data that you mined for content topics, you can develop a quantifiable picture of how valuable the audience of each content vertical is to your business. This is your Content Narrative: a map of what conversations your business is going to invest in so that it not only engages with those audiences on a meaningful level, but maximizes the return on that investment.

Personas based on data

Your content should speak to your audience’s needs and values. It should demonstrate that your brand not only understands their challenges, but can offer strategies and solutions to overcome them.

But your audience isn’t a single heterogenous mass. Rather, it is composed of different market segments, each with their own unique priorities, goals, and values. And so resonating with each of those segments requires not only that you humanize your content and messaging, but also humanize each of your market segments through personas. Simply put, marketing personas are:

semi-fictional representation of a group of customers who have similar goals, buyer journeys and personal profiles. Personas help you internalise the ideal customer you’re trying to attract [and] relate to your prospects as real humans.

In other words, personas are basically psycho demographic profiles of the average buyer or consumer in each of your segments which, in turn, allow your brand to understand each of those segments beyond their functional needs (i.e. for your products or services). Indeed, personas help your brand understand (and appreciate) the psychology and human experience of the average decision maker in each segment. And in doing so, help your brand tailor its content and messaging in a way that will speak to each of those segments on a human level – i.e. on a level that truly connects and resonates with them.

Of course, the problem with most persona work is that it’s often based on assumption or anecdotal experience/evidence, and sometimes is outright aspirational – i.e. ‘this is who we think our target market is based on what we want to be or represent’. And as the man said, “assumptions are the mother of all mistakes.”

To prevent such costly mistakes or assumptions, it’s important to build your personas on a foundation of reliable and actionable data. Specifically, when your brand conducted its Content Narrative, it mined search queries to understand what problems or challenges that agents in the marketplace are actually trying to overcome.

So the next logical step is to map those data-based challenges against humanized versions of your market segment – i.e. your personas. From there, your brand can determine which of your segments are most proactively looking for solutions through content, and prioritize your content marketing efforts accordingly.

Planning TOFU, MOFU, BOFU Content

An effective content strategy guides the consumer further down the conversion funnel, bringing them closer to a purchasing decision. Three content funnels are crucial to any content strategy: Top of Funnel (TOFU), Middle of Funnel (MOFU), and Bottom of Funnel (BOFU). Each vertical plays an integral part in the consumer journey, effectively communicating the value-prop of your product or service. In many instances the lines between the three funnels are blurred and intersect.

Top of Funnel (TOFU) is designed to educate and inform your audience about your products and services. At this stage, your brand attempts to expand its reach and brand awareness before focusing in on qualified leads as users continue down the conversion funnel. Typically, TOFU content is engaging, visual, and informative and should appeal to a broad user-base.

Middle of Funnel (MOFU) as the name suggests, acts as the middleman between TOFU and BOFU. Here, content bridges the gap between initial curiosity (TOFU) and the final sale (BOFU) and inspires qualified leads to go one more step down the conversion funnel. MOFU content is all about generating engagement with content that effectively highlights your brand’s USP.

Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) is where qualified leads are converted into sales. Simply put, you have a problem – our brand has the solution. BOFU content is typically product-specific and is tailored to a highly-targeted audience. In other words, consumers are as close as they could be to making a purchase and it is up to you to close the deal. Product-specific FAQs, product pages and archives are all examples of BOFU content.

Content Repurposing

Repurposing is not about reposting content. Sometimes it’s about repurposing data, knowledge, and messaging by bundling it with new content or repackaging it for a new channel. Content repurposing ultimately helps your brand maximize its ROI of its content by extending both its reach and lifecycle.

Whether it is transforming a blog post into an infographic, or neatly packaging your product page into a social slide, repurposing increases the shelf life of your content and expands its reach beyond the initial scope. This reduces the need for investing more time and money in producing additional content assets, maximizing the ROI content marketing budget.

Of course, to do that effectively, repurposed content should blend seamlessly with the channel or platform it appears on. Social media is particularly effective for sharing and extending the lifespan of repurposed content, however, each platform comes with its own set of intricacies and best practices.

Social Media seeding/syndication

As you repurpose content, social media offers your brand to hyper-target your audience and share it across the appropriate channels. Indeed, different social media platforms are better suited for different types of content and audiences. What works on Instagram may not work on Facebook – and vice versa. By that same token, certain social media channels are tailored for particular industries, while for others, they are a mere afterthought. Once your brand has pinpointed where its audience is, the type of content you need to create follows shortly thereafter.

Facebook

Memes, video, links, statuses, and sponsored content. With 2.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the oldest and widest-reaching social network – and Meta’s flagship property. Consequently, Facebook can be an extremely powerful tool to drive engagement and target a far-reaching audience with branded and value-added content. This platform offers brands the ability to target certain segments and demographics with the utmost precision.

Key Stats:

• time spent per user per day: 33 minutes (Oberlo)
• Gender: 44% female, 56% male (Sprout Social)
• Male users between the ages of 25 and 34 constitute the largest demographic group (Statista)
• The highest engagement days on Facebook are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday (Sprout Social)

Instagram

Influencers, shopping, video, reels, stories , memes, and more. With roughly one billion active monthly users, Instagram is all about building community through value-added visual content, and is quickly growing into the social media platform of choice for millennial users, with 71% of people aged 18 to 29 having active Instagram accounts.  your products and services for the world to see and is quickly growing into the social media platform of choice for users with 71% of people aged 18 to 29 having active Instagram accounts. An effective social media strategy will respond to this growing demand with carefully curated visual content for Instagram.

Key Stats:

• time spent per user per day: 29 minutes (Oberlo)
• Gender: 52% female, 48% male (Statista)
• Users aged between the ages 18 and 24 represent 75% of active users. (Backlinko)
• The highest engagement days are Wednesday & Friday mid morning and Saturday nights between 6:00 PM and 8:00 PM (Kicksta)

TikTok

Duets, stitches, influencers, listicles, and serial videos. Tiktok’s sudden emergence and rapid growth has provided brands with an unprecedented opportunity to set the pace in their respective industries and engage their audiences through bit-sized video content. Indeed, the platform is ideal for brands repurposing a range of content, from listicles and how-to guides to serialized video and influencer product placements.

TikTok’s meteoric rise (source: the economist).

Key Stats:

• time spent per user per day: 32 minutes (Oberlo)
• Gender: 60% female, 40% male (Backlinko)
• Users aged between the ages 16 and 24 represent 60% of active users. (Wallaroo Media)
• The highest engagement times on Tiktok ultimately depend on the day content is posted. (Backlight Blog)

Pinterest

Branded pins and boards, an online marketplace, project inspiration.  Pinterest is often forgotten in social media campaigns, but with over 400 million monthly active users, a brand cannot afford to ignore the importance of this platform. Consequently, Pinterest can be used to reach new users with keyword rich pin and board descriptions and content. 

Key Stats:

• time spent per user per day: 14 minutes (Broadband Search)
• Gender: 77% female, 15% male, 8% unspecified (Statista)
• Female users aged between the ages 25 and 34 represent 30.4% of active users (Hootsuite)
• The highest engagement times are on Fridays and Saturdays in the late hours between 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM. and then in the middle of the night from 2:00 AM. to 4:00 AM (Oberlo)

Twitter

Breaking news, viral tweets, comments, and retweets. Twitter is a de facto, realtime news feed with over 211 million daily active users. While content such as infographics, blog posts, and video can easily be repurposed for highly compelling Tweets that generate engagement. Simply put, your Twitter feed is a detailed record of your brand’s narrative and community over time, and how those have intersected and evolved day-to-day. 

Key Stats:

• time spent per user per day: 31 minutes (Oberlo)
• Gender: 30% female, 70% male (Statista)
• Users aged between the ages 25 and 34 represent 38.5% of active users (Statista)
• The highest engagement times are Wednesday at 9:00 AM and Thursday at 9:00 AM and 8:00 PM (Content Cal)

Linkedin

Thought leadership, actionable insight, and success stories. Linkedin is the preeminent business social network, offering brands the ability to connect with over 700 million professionals from across the world, from candidates to prospective clients and partners. Whether through sponsored posts, videos, or DMs, Linkedin puts your brand in front of industry peers and influencers.

Key Stats:

• time spent per user per day: 11 minutes (99 Firms)
• Gender: 43% female, 57% male (Statista)
• Users aged between the ages 46 and 55 represent 37% of active users (Hootsuite)
• The highest engagement times are on Wednesdays between 9:00 AM and 10:00 AM and on lunch hour at noon (LinkedIn)

Content Strategy: Greater Than the Sum of its Parts

Content is an investment in your business’s infrastructure. And like any infrastructure, the whole is greater than its parts. After all, a city isn’t just a collection of roads, buildings, electrical, and plumbing. Rather, it’s a series of interconnected markets and communities made possible by that collective infrastructure. And the value that those communities and markets are able to generate because of that infrastructure stifles the initial investment required to establish it.

Content marketing works very much in the same way. Indeed, most of the ways your brand communicates with consumers (and especially its target audience) is through content – whether it be video, product pages, FAQs, blog posts, or some other kind of asset. And the more robust that content infrastructure is, the more value it can deliver to both your target audience and your bottom line.