What is Content Strategy and How Do I Use It?

If you’re around savvy business owners or social media influencers, you may hear the phrase “content strategy” thrown around, but what is content strategy? Why is content strategy important? And how do you use it? Let’s dive right in and show you why content strategy is important.

Here’s an example of a CTA we use, and why:

Want to master content strategy? Learn it for free by signing up for Explorer News! or following us on social media. 

With us being a marketing agency, this CTA aligns with our business goals for you. By having you receive our news and by following us, we can hope to build a connection with you and show our marketing expertise. Like any business, our goal is for eventual leads and the best way to do that is to connect with your target audience.

An audience member who engages with our content and trusts our brand is a business qualified lead, so using this CTA helps meet our business goals. This CTA is also relevant because the main topic of the article is content strategy. For example, we wouldn’t put this CTA for people to follow our newsletter to those who have already subscribed.

Mastering content strategy is a challenge. It works best when you have a team to support you, but most people don’t. If you’re a lone-wolf out there doing your own social media and blogging, you’re certainly not alone. In a Hubspot survey, 62% of respondents run their company’s content campaign alone, which is on top of other duties.  

If you’re going to utilize social media and blogs on your own, it will take some time, energy, and money to do it well. To make it worth your while, create a solid content plan. Luckily, there are some easy steps you can take right now to create a great content strategy. 

Steps to Build A Content Strategy

The first step is to create a list of goals for your business and actions for your consumers to meet that goal.

The second step is to make content that will encourage your audience to act. The need that CTA in order to best hit your goal.

Here are a couple of examples; if you are a business, you may want to make more online sales. If you are an influencer, your goals may be to increase post engagement, gain followers, or increase sales through affiliate links.

The third step is to create great content. You need your content to stand above the rest and to reach your audience at the best times possible. These are the different kinds of content you can use in your campaign, imagine what you could make for each category:

• Photos
• Videos
• Writing
• Graphics
• GIFs
• PDF documents
• User Generated Content & Influencer Content
• Hashtags
• Polls, Quizzes, and Surveys
• Research

Keep an eye out for a new blog coming up where we break down the benefits and drawbacks of each of these content forms! 

Why is content strategy important? 

Content strategy is important because it helps you save time, energy, and money; all while getting ahead of your competition.

Any content creator can tell you that it takes time and energy to make content. A study by MarketingProfs wanted to explore how long it took to create a piece of content. They conducted a study surveying a group of experienced content creators. They reported that 28% of creators spend 1-3 hours to make a piece of content, 24% take 4-6 hours, 14% took 7-9 hours, and 11% spend 10-19 hours! 

To put it plainly, if you spend 1-19 hours to make a single piece of content and that content doesn’t help you meet a goal, then you’ve wasted your time.

Usually, it takes a bit of money to make content, whether or not you do it yourself. 

Doing it yourself is definitely the cheapest option, but you may still need to pay for creative software like Photoshop. It can get exponentially more expensive if you hire a freelancer to make your content. Quietly reports a piece of content can cost anywhere from $50-$3,000 when made by a freelancer. If you are going to put in time and money into something like social media or a blog, you want to make sure you are getting a comparable Return on Investment (ROI). 

How does Content Strategy provide a Return On Investment?

1. You Can Beat Your Competition

As an influencer or as a business, having a content strategy will put you ahead of your competition.

There is an ample amount of competition out there. A study conducted by MarketingProfs reports that in 1 minute our competition has published 1,388 blogs, 2.5 million Facebook posts, 72 hours of YouTube Content, 300,000 tweets, and 220,000 Instagram photos. 

ALL IN 1 MINUTE! 

Luckily for us, most of those people lack real strategy. A little education and application of content strategy can help your posts rise to the top relatively quickly. 

2. Content Marketing Targets Leads – And It Pays Off

If you’re an influencer reading this, you’re going to need to read through a little bit of business jargon, but I promise that you will benefit from this. If you’re a business owner, you will REALLY benefit from this— 

I’m going to briefly define what “retargeted ads” are because they are so closely related to content marketing. 

Retargeting ads are when you target ads at people who have visited your website before.

Facebook uses retargeting with Facebook Pixels. When a website installs Facebook Pixel, it tracks which computers and phones have opened the site by recording their IP address. When someone visits Facebook from the same IP address, they will be presented with ads from that website.

As you’ll see, they do this for a very good reason. 

A 2017 study on Dynamic Retargeting found that retargeting provided a 6200% Return on Investment!  That means that they earned 62x more than they spent on retargeted ads. That’s because their ads were focused on “business qualified leads.” A business qualified lead is a person who knows about the service or product you provide and could become a potential customer.

If only there was someplace that would have a list of people who know about your service and could become your customers…

THAT’S RIGHT! YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWERS & NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBERS!

When someone becomes a social media follower or newsletter subscriber, they become a business qualified lead. When you put out content, of course, you want some of it to be focused on bringing in new followers (aka, “leads”). But, if you want to start seeing some cash coming your way, you’ll want to encourage your existing leads to consider buying your product or service.

On average, consumers today interact with at least 10 pieces of content before they make a sales transaction with a business or an influencer. That means your followers may need a bit of convincing before they buy what you’re selling. If you are always making content for “potential audience,” but not producing content tailored for your existing audience, you may miss out on some serious earning potential. 

3. Content Marketing is an Effective Alternative to Expensive Traditional Ads

The world of marketing changed forever with the birth of the internet and social media. Gone are the days of needing a big advertising budget to be successful! Content marketing doesn’t rely on being the biggest dog in the yard anymore, anyone can start from 0 and grow massively by creating great content and having an even better strategy. 

Before the internet, marketing relied on being the biggest and loudest voice with the deepest pockets. You got ahead of the competition by buying bigger billboards, more TV slots, and more newspaper ads than your competitors. There wasn’t much room for small businesses there. 

Imagine you wanted to compete with Nike and buy a billboard just like theirs. You wanted it to be the same size and in the same place as Nike’s latest billboard. As an influencer or a small business, the bill for an ad like that may seem pretty unreasonable.  

Now imagine how this plays out in your social media feed. When you’re scrolling Instagram you will see a paid ad by Nike occupying the same space in your feed as a photo from your local shoe designer. That paid ad took up the same space as the unpaid ad, and even your friend posting photos of their dogs get the same amount of screen space! Everyone gets a chance to be seen on social media. You have a powerful platform at your disposal, use it to its fullest!

4. Content Strategy Benefits You in so Many Ways

Content Strategy provides a return on investment for businesses and influencers by doing things like: 

• Building brand loyalty
• Building brand authority through thought leadership
• Creating an engaged audience
• Increasing word-of-mouth referrals
• Increased quality of customer service
• Creating professional networking opportunities

The list just goes on, and we’ll talk about all of these in future blogs. Remember to sign up for our newsletter Explorer News! and to follow us on social media to hear about new blogs when they come out!

What Content Strategy Should I Use? 

The strategy you choose will depend on your goals. Most people will use a combination of strategies to achieve their goals as a business or influencer. Here are seven actionable strategic plans tailored for specific goals. 

The Gatherer

• Their Goal – Collect followers on their social media and/or blog
• Their Method – Making content that adds value to their followers. Including hooks for future content, and Using hashtags, keywords, and social media groups. 
• Their Most Popular CTA’s – ‘Follow this account”, “Subscribe to this channel”, and “Sign Up for this Newsletter”.

The Collector Strategy is popular with both influencers and businesses. Influencers use this because more followers equal more traffic and better deals with affiliates. Businesses use this because it brings in new leads and adds face validity to their accounts. This is especially good for businesses and influencers starting a brand new blog or social media account. 

The Collector’s Main Idea: If you want people to follow you, they need to get something worth their screen-space in return. Think about what kind of content you can make that will benefit your audience. Can you offer tips and tricks that make their life better? Can you provide engaging entertainment? Can you share free resources they will find useful?

If you use this method, continue to delight your existing audience, but keep your eyes on the prize. You should focus 1/3rd of your content on delighting your loyal followers. The other 2/3rds of your content should focus on your future audience. To reach your future audience, research relevant hashtags, keywords, and social media groups that your niche uses. 

When you publish content, it is important that the viewer knows you have more high-quality, value-adding content coming — that is their incentive to follow you and subscribe to your newsletters. Creatively give a sneak peek at what’s coming up so people know why they should follow you. This will also help retain your existing audience.  

Be careful though! Collectors are susceptible to coming off as “pushy.” It is imperative that you aren’t received that way by your audience as this study from the University of Chicago explains. If you come off as “pushy” it will actually hurt your view/engagement ratio. You may even receive unpleasant comments as a result of your pushiness.

The Entertainer 

• Their Goal – Increase engagement
• Their Method – Increasing their production quality, Personally engaging with their audience, and Using CTA’s to encourage engagement on posts.
• Their most popular CTA’s – “Like this if…”, “Share with…”, and “Tell us ___ in the comments”.

The Entertainer Strategy is another popular tactic for businesses and influencers alike! You might use this if you have a good base of followers, but they don’t engage with your posts. 

Post engagement is important for growing your audience because of how social media algorithms work. If your post doesn’t receive meaningful engagement from the first few viewers, the algorithm will stop showing it to people because it assumes you’ve made a low-quality post, even if that’s not true! The algorithm can’t see how good your content is, so your great content just needs a little strategic application.

Make sure your content is of the highest production quality you can muster within your budget. Make sure you’re writing is free of spelling and grammar errors and your photos and videos are as good as they can be. 

The Entertainer’s Main Idea: When you publish content, it is important that you engage with the people who like and comment on your posts. They will be engaged once by your content, but their engagement doubles when they respond to you responding to them. Social media algorithms love this. Social media is, at the end of the day, for socializing. When you encourage socialization on your posts, the algorithm will reward you with increased views/impressions. Additionally, when you respond to commenters, they will be more loyal to your channels and your brand because you are building a personal connection with them. 

Lastly, make sure every post has a CTA to tell viewers to like, comment, or share. You can put this in the beginning, middle, and/or end of a blog, a video, or a photo caption. It may seem like people would do this on their own, but they engage more when you remind them to. Again, I must emphasize that you should avidly avoid coming off as “pushy” when using this strategy. As this study said, if you come off as pushy it will actually hurt engagement.  

Their Goal – Increasing sales and financial contributions from their followers.

Their Method – Display products & services, Encourage web traffic

Their most popular CTA’s – “Buy now” and “Support the channel by___”.

The Money-Maker Strategy is for businesses and influencers who have a way to monetize their website or social platforms. Businesses typically monetize their platforms through an online store while influencers often use affiliate markets, Patreon, or branded merchandise to make money. 

Although businesses and influencers can both use the Money-Maker Strategy effectively, their implementation will look very different 

The Money-Maker’s Main Idea: This strategy is usually pretty straightforward for businesses. It’s about showing your product, offering an incentive to buy, and watching the money roll in! You can do this on your social media in place of pay-per-click ads (PPC), but we recommend using both, at least to start. Collect data over a few months of using social posting and PPC ads and see what gets more traffic and website referrals, then use that data to adjust your plan to optimize for income. We recommend collecting data for 4-6 months before doing any content strategy overhauls, especially considering social media marketing is often a long-game strategy and returns don’t come immediately, even when implemented perfectly.

Consider offering promotion codes only available on social media. That will add incentive for followers to make a purchase and it will help easily track how many sales come from social media directly and indirectly. 

For influencers, you can’t reasonably make your whole platform one big promotion. Your audience comes to you for value-adding content, not for a product. If you’re using the Money-Maker Strategy as an influencer, you’ll need to mix in your promos more strategically. 

Use your CTA’s one at a time on a post when asking people to support you. Consider using one CTA for Patreon on your next Instagram post. After that, make another post sharing your affiliate link. Then a separate post with a link to an online store with your merch. Sharing all of your CTA’s on one post will make you seem “pushy.” Plus, when followers have presented too many options they are likely to be indecisive and opt-out of contributing altogether.

To make the most money possible, you should work a CTA into everything you post. Continue making your typical content, but incorporate a CTA so it isn’t disruptive for the viewer. You should also mix in some content 100% focused on promotion. If you have an affiliate merchandiser you partner with, or if you sell your own gear, try doing a photoshoot of the gear you sell. Sprinkle those promo photos into your feed with links to your product page.   

The Lead-Generator

• Their Goal – Increase business qualified leads
• Their Method – Increasing followers and Educating them about their product.
• Their most popular CTA’s – “Follow, Subscribe, or Sign Up”, “Buy Now”, “Visit Our Webstore”, and “Get a Quote”. 

The Lead-Generator Strategy is used the most by business owners. It’s the slower, but more effective companion to the Money-Maker Strategy. If you offer a service or product that isn’t entirely simple, you should focus hard on generating leads.

Social media is a great place to do that because every follower is already a lead! You can use social media to quickly and easily get new leads and bring them into your sales funnel. To do this well, try to meet your audience at all 3 stages of their buyer’s journey: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. 

Easily plan your content production for the Lead-Generator Strategy by committing 1/3rd of your content to target each of the 3 stages of the buyer’s journey. Content for people in the first 2 stages will focus on generating leads. Content for the last stage is going to focus on driving sales. 

The Lead-Generator’s Main Idea: Make content for buyers in the awareness phase by introducing them to the problem your service or product solves. You can also display the product or service you offer, but it isn’t always necessary. Use hashtags and social media groups to get your content in front of the people who need to see it. This content should be aimed at reaching out to your potential audience, so use your CTA’s to encourage people to follow your social media pages or sign up for your newsletter.

Use 1/3rd of your content to meet people in the consideration phase by educating them about how your product or service solves their problem. Show real examples of how your problem has solved people’s problems in the past. Share testimonials. Make educational videos and blogs about your product or service. Be sure to convince your audience that you have the solution to the problem they are experiencing.

This content should be geared for your followers who are still getting to know your brand. Use your CTA’s to encourage comments and likes on your posts — this will build a relationship with your lead and make your future content appear higher in their social feed. Getting them to see more of your content helps them move them through the consideration phase and into the decision phase. 

Finally, use your last 1/3rd of your content to drive those sales! Your followers in this stage have been thinking about buying something you offer, they just need a little extra push. Offer discount codes, limited-time offers, and other incentives to help your viewers make the purchase they’ve been thinking about. Use a CTA like “Buy Now” and enjoy the profit that comes from your excited new customer! 

The Shepard

• Their Goal – Increase their authority and become a thought leader in their niche
• Their Method – Publishing authoritative content on their blogs, Providing commentary on their niche, and Engaging with others posts and articles.
• Their most popular CTA’s – “Share your thoughts in the comments” 

The Shepard Strategy is one of the most work-intensive strategies you can implement, but if you’re committed to it, the benefits can be dramatic. When done well, this strategy will help your pages rank on search engines, your professional network will become bigger and better, plus it will build brand authority and customer loyalty. 

The Shepard’s Main Idea: What you need to do is use your social platforms to start conversations about your niche. Comment on articles and posts that are controversial and share your own opinion. When we say controversial, we don’t mean politically divisive. We mean you should provide additional information and a unique perspective about what people are saying within your niche. Use those controversial topics as opportunities to flex your expertise and show people you truly are an expert in your niche.

Share articles and leave your own commentary as well. You should encourage conversation among your followers and engage with them personally when they comment on your comment. You can even bring other experts in your network into the conversation by tagging them in a post or comment!  

If you have a website, you should publish blogs to enhance your website’s SEO for competitive keywords. Google likes pages it discerns as “authoritative” sources. You may think, “How can Google think my page is authoritative if I don’t have any blogs up yet?” Luckily for us, Google looks for quality more than quantity to calculate a page’s authority.

To increase your page’s authority, write articles on topics relevant to your niche, cite studies from reputable sources like .gov or .edu websites, and consider conducting your own studies and publishing your findings. Use data and cite your sources to flex your authority for Google and your audience. 

The Relationship Master

• Their Goal – Build 1 to 1 relationships 
• Their Method – Engaging with their audience members individually, Using social listening, and reducing reply latency.
• Their most popular CTA’s – “Follow”, “Reach Out”, and “Contact Us”.

The Relationship Master Strategy is great for a lot of brands, especially B2B businesses, influencers using Patreon, and businesses focusing on increasing brand loyalty and customer service. 

The key to using the Relationship Master Strategy is remembering that your followers are all real people. Each follower is a business qualified lead, many of whom are probably already your customers.

The Relationship Master’s Main Idea: You should continue publishing content to delight your audience as per usual, but don’t use social media as a “selling” platform. Use social media to provide a platform where your audience gets the privilege to engage with you and your brand personality. Coincidentally, people contribute more money to brands they feel individually connected with. 

When a follower comments on your content, treat them like a friend. Provide warm and engaging responses to your followers. Feel free to use humor if it is on-brand for you! Respond as quickly as you can to DM’s, comments, and mentions so that people know you really care about what they are saying.  

You may find social listening platforms like Sprout Social or Hubspot useful. They have the ability to ‘hear” what is happening on your social media. You’ll have all of your engagements across platforms displayed in one place. You’ll have the opportunity to respond to dm’s, comments, and mentions from the social listening tool.

You’ll see who is using your hashtags and you can reach out to them personally to thank them! You get to “hear” your competition too, as well as your whole niche through things like hashtag tracking. For a Relationship Master, social listening tools can make life a whole lot easier, so research a few and see if using one will work for you. 

The Attentive

• Their Goal – Increase customer service and get more customer feedback 
• Their Method – Answering commenters, Reducing response latency, Using social listening 
• Their most popular CTA’s – “Tell us what we can do better” 

The Attentive Strategy is a winner for business owners who prioritize customer support and get feedback from customers. A benefit of using the Attentive Strategy is an increase in brand loyalty. As you solve more inbound customer service requests and make changes recommended by your audience, customers will feel more connected with you and the service you provide. Using social media for customer service can save you time and money by reducing the workload on you and your team if you’re plagued by customer service requests. 

The Attentives’ Main Idea: Use social listening tools to have all of your company’s social engagement activities shown in one place. Work on responding to your customer service requests as quickly as possible, especially on fast-paced platforms like Twitter. Consider getting notifications to your phone or hiring a social media manager who will focus on community management for all of your social platforms. 

Use content like polls and surveys to get customer feedback about satisfaction, public sentiment, product ideas, constructive feedback, and data to advise general business decisions. You may even find that you’ll receive some powerful testimonials when employing the Attentive Strategy. When customers feel heard, they aren’t shy about sharing why they love your brand. 

By now, you’ve probably got a few ideas for how you will implement your content strategy, but how do you get started? Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered. Here’s how to implement your content strategy in 3 steps. 

How do I implement my Content Strategy?

1. Content Planning

The first step is to make a content topic list. Then, decide what content type that you’ll create. Lastly, you’ll make a calendar for production and publishing. 

We have blogs coming up soon about how to build the perfect content calendar to make content production and publishing easy. For now, here’s your basic steps and need-to-knows:

Step 1: Make Your Topic List

Your topic list should start with the general topics that your niche craves. Break those topics down into more specific topics that will later become individual chunks of content. This is a great time to do keyword research or explore hashtags you would like to use.

We like using a spreadsheet so we can continuously add new broad or specific topics. It also makes it easy to sort topics by things like keywords or hashtags. 

Step 2: Decide Your Content Types: 

Once you’ve sorted your topic list, determine what kind of content you will make for each subtopic. Will you make long-form content like blogs or articles? Will you be making videos? Infographics? Write these ideas down in your topic list or in a different spreadsheet.

After you’ve figured out what kind of content you’ll make for each subtopic, determine where and how you’ll publish it. We call this our “Content To Make” list! Can this content go on your website’s blog? Can it go on YouTube? Instagram? LinkedIn? Can you break down long-form content into smaller chunks to distribute over time across platforms?  

Writing so much in a list can get messy, so we made Content Topic List Template to help you keep it all organized.

Step 3: Build Your Content Calendar:

Once you’ve worked out what content you’re making, it’s time to build your calendar! Get your “Content To Make” list and write down when each piece of content will be published. This can get complicated if you are making a large intricate production. If you made a blog post with a YouTube video, infographics, and photos; you should set publish dates for each form of content you’re making.

For this page, we set a publish date for the YouTube videos, publish dates for graphics on Instagram, a publish date for the articles and publish dates for micro-blogs for LinkedIn made from sections of our articles. 

After you’ve set the publish date, set a date for when you’ll begin production and a production deadline. Set your deadline before the publishing date, which will assure that you’ll have your content ready when you need it.  

2. Content Creation

Use your content calendar to advise when you need to begin production for your content. Give yourself plenty of time to create, but try not to take too long in production. It can be easy to obsess over details in your blogs and photos. Instead of nitpicking your content, your time may be better spent managing your business or producing more content.

As time goes on, you will refine your content production systems. Your production quality will increase, and you’ll spend less time working on the production. Be compassionate with yourself and allow time to learn how to create great content, but don’t let being a beginner stop you from posting.

Your followers’ will provide feedback — even if they are a bit harsh sometimes. Even internet trolls can be helpful sometimes when perfecting your content creation process. Don’t take their feedback personally, but try and hear the core of what they are saying. Keep your head up, work hard, and keep creating!

3. Content Analysis

Use analytical data from social media and Google to see how well your content is performing. 

Make notes of what has changed since the beginning of your latest content campaign. Have you seen progress toward your goals? Regression? Look into the best and worst pieces of content you’ve made and research why your content is performing that way.

If your content is not performing well and you can’t figure out why to consider hiring a content marketing consultant like Explorer Marketing to help you understand your analytics and revamp your content strategy. 

We have a lot more resources coming to help you grow your brand or business using content marketing, so follow us on social media and sign up for Explorer News! so that you can get updates when new articles are published! 

Thanks for reading our article! We hope you learned something valuable. Please share it with anyone trying to grow using social media and content marketing. We hope to see you here again soon!