Every website needs a content strategy that will enable it to target its ideal customer with laser focus. In a recent conversation with Coach J, of nonstoplifestyles.org he mentioned that he was preparing to add more articles to his website. Before I realized it, I was on a rant about content, keywords and editorial calenders.
Since it is such an important topic, I want to share these tips with other owners of small and Christian businesses to help them understand that content for their web properties can be:
videos
graphics
podcast
and other visual resources that can speak to customers needs using fewer words. Only a few people will stick around your website for more than a few seconds listening to a talking head. Even fewer website visitors hang around for more than a few minutes. So it’s important to plan your content and make sure it’s organized well enough that the main facts can be scanned with just a few passes of the eye.
Some of other things that will get tossed around during this discussion on the how-2’s of effective content strategies are:
Keywords
Developing a Content Strategy
What Is Effective Content
Where To Find Sources Of Content
Selecting The Best Keywords For Your Content
The chief cornerstone of your content strategy are the keywords and phrases that are associated with the landscape of your brand, business and products. They are the language of your customers.
Each of them must speak to their needs and your task is to determine the best way to mold them into your products so that they align to accomplish your marketing and business objectives.
Resources For Content
By engaging prospects, customers and website visitors, you can uncover juicy tidbits about your market’s strength, weaknesses, and the challenging issues. These are the best sources to mine facts for building a strategy, content and keywords.Crowd sourcing
Social media,
Forums
Blogs and other places online,
If you are not familiar with any of the terms above don’t worry we will delve into them in later post. By using this method of obtaining real time data it will not be long before you can compile a hefty list of key words and phrases that resonate with your audiences and have plenty of hot topics to discuss online, offline or anytime.
What Is Content Strategy
The strategy is the overall focus of the subject matter and topics used in articles, videos and other creatives in order to accomplish the marketing goals and plans of your brand/business.
It should embody 3 important characteristics:
1. It should be information that is useful to your ideal customers.
2. It must improve them or a segment of their lives.
3. Show better and faster methods to accomplish a task.
How To Create Effective Content
To create an effective content for your website/business track the buzz or relevance of keywords and kw-phrases. Then identify the days, months and weeks that present the greatest sales opportunities throughout the year. This will give you prompts about what products to promote and when to promote them.
The best examples of an effective content and strategies being played out is by taking a look at retail markets. It may seem uncoordinated, but the entire effort is planned from start to finish with every minute detail being brought into compliance with the overall goals. Retailers continually push the envelope on when they start displaying Christmas related content. Which seems to get earlier and earlier each season.
It’s estimated that 23% of customers participate in the weekend shopping spree called Black Friday and Cyber-Monday. Notice how marketers have crafted stimulating keywords and keyword-phrases out of ordinary days of the week. The online marketers are milking these terms by designing and releasing a huge volume of content about Black Friday and Cyber-Monday to spurn customers into a shopping frenzy.
It’s so effective that in 2011, according to an article on Atlantic.com/business,
" in-store purchases increased about 7%. But online, Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Cyber-Monday sales jumped by 39%, 24% and 33%, respectively".
In addition to the regular ads being run in the media you’ll find a bevy of articles about, how much money is spent during these two days, who spends what, what the shoppers are buying ect.
They run the gambit from the 5W’s and the H to videos, photos and graphics produced of shoppers camping out and sitting down with their mobile devices waiting for sales to begin, that adds credibility and support to the mass of content being planned and released released.
Defining a Content Strategy
After you have armed yourself with a few relevant key words and phrases you want to focus on creating your content to solve some of the many challenges that exist in your marketplace. You strategy must show how your product performs when used to solve a variety of challenges.
Design your content to stress benefits not features
It should show how customers will benefit directly from your product
Your strategy should also address some of the how-to’s that your customers need to know.
If you apply these valuable tips on content strategy it will boost the effectiveness of the online, offline and written communications used in your small or Christian business. I’m sure Coach J and other B.Y.O.B (build your own business) website owners like him will come away with a few nuggets that will help them master this key issue for their website.
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