7 Questions That Your Content Strategy Must Answer

To protect your business site from changes like Google Penguin, Content Marketers need to have clear insight so that they can design an accurate content strategy. Your content strategy needs to work well with the search engine crawlers so that your website remains optimized and ranks high in SERPs. But we do that, isn’t it? Lots of long-tail and short-tail keywords, generating backlinks and getting the contents published on sites having high Domain Authority is what we have been doing all through. What’s missing? Maybe the idea to have good content is not understood fully. The customer’s perspective is often missed while developing a content strategy. And as you can expect, with only 44% of B2B marketers having a documented content strategy, the industry is lagging behind in providing the users with the most accurate information. This approach may have worked in past, but with search engines moving towards delivering the most accurate results, your content should best answer the questions that your users have. To find a key to this problem, let's ask ourselves if our content strategy addresses these concerns:

“What” Is Your Content Going To Be?

What kind of content is going to create? From web blogs to podcasts, the expectations of customers and the limitation of the content publication platform are different. Is your content strategy consistent with the type of content and the place where the content is going to be published?

“Why” Is Content Essential For Your Site?

Understand the goal before you begin. Why are you serious about the content part? Is it to increase the traffic to your website and improve the conversion rates, or to create large followership by building trust? Is your content strategy aiming towards higher visibility on SERPs, or promoting your products and services? In any case, you need to check if your existing content strategy is answering your customers' questions and addressing their pain points.

“How” To Get Where You Want To Go?

Once the objective is decided, it is also important for all the team members to stay on the same page. In case, you have outsourced the content to another firm, you need to make sure the content developers know what exactly you are aiming at.

“When” Do You Begin? Now! And...

Making realistic plans is crucial to its success. How much time do you allot for the content strategy? What are the barriers that need to be overcome? Analyze your previous content strategies and based on that, you can settle in for a time frame for the execution of your strategy.

“Where” Is The Content Distributed?

Your content strategists need to understand that content distribution determines how much amplification your content is going to get. For greater amplification and larger popularity among your audience, you can use social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Sharing on these sites can take your content to a larger domain, also capture the attention of your passive audience.

“How Often” Should I Produce Content?

How often should you blog? Monthly? Weekly? Daily? Before committing to any frequency, ask yourself whether you have enough resources to meet the deadline? Staying more active is a good thing as the users get more content to read but unless you are consistent in posting content, the effect is diluted.

“For Whom” Is The Content?

Who is going to read your content? If your content is for everybody, then it is for nobody, right? Your content strategy should keep in mind the audience segment that you are targeting? Make the buyer personas and ensure that your content strategy is consistent with the buyer journey. In particular, your content should be developed to take the audience to these three buyer's journey steps:

• Awareness Phase

Is your content informing the audience about the opportunities they can have? Is your content suitably placed to explain the key issues, risks? Apart from informing the audience, ideal content should also provide precise solutions to optimize and improve the user's life situations.

• Consideration Phase 

How is your content providing the available approaches and methods that can solve the reader's problems? Through expertly written guides, troubleshooting tips, whitepapers, your content can help your audience, hence building trust and engagement simultaneously.

• Decision-Making phase

Most of the existing content on the web is informative and provides useful solutions to the readers. But where they lack is that they do not clearly tell the audience what to do next. How is your content helping in defining a specific call to action? Create comparative studies, product literature, and the pros and cons of various approaches and methods to encourage the users to make a purchasing decision so that their decisions remain more informed and intelligent. This is one aspect that content strategy can never ignore. By getting content published on good sites, and on your own website, you can attract the attention of your targeted audience. But that’s not the end of your content strategy. Go back to your goals, see how are you motivating your audience towards the goal. You wanted to increase the conversion rates, how is your content encouraging the visitors towards sales? You want to build trust with your audience, check for the email subscribers’ behavior to derive actionable insight.