6 Ways to Improve Your Content Strategy
If you’re looking to improve audience engagement and significantly impact your ROI, it’s time to improve your content strategy. Not having — or having an ineffective — content strategy is one of the most common mistakes a content marketer can make. But with some strategic planning, you can ensure you are meeting your targeted customers at the right place and time and are delivering value-packed content.
Whether you’re working on your first content strategy or not seeing the desired results with your current one, these six tips to improve your content strategy will put you on the right path.
1. Start Using a Content Calendar
It’s challenging to stay on track with your content objectives without a plan. Creating a content calendar is one of the best ways to stay organized and intentionally use a variety of content to help guide your customers through their journey. Devising a calendar requires you to reflect on your business goals and creatively find the best types of content and ways to reach your audience.
2. Use AI to Improve Your Content Strategy
At this point, every marketer has at least thought about how artificial intelligence could simplify content creation.
While pitfalls do exist and there is still room for improvement, using AI intelligently has many benefits. Implementing AI in your content strategy can make content more targeted and personalized, improve the user experience and automate content marketing processes. How can you get started? You can implement AI through chatbots, trigger-based automation, dynamic content and curated email newsletters.
3. Conduct a Reader Survey
No content strategy stands a chance if you don’t truly know your audience. A little audience research can go a long way, and an affordable option is a reader survey. Improving your content strategy with a reader survey can help ensure your content and its delivery channel(s) resonate with readers and inspire them to take action. In addition, you can measure reader interest, engagement and satisfaction by asking specific questions related to your publication, blog or other communications program.
Other information you can glean with a reader survey includes:
- Understanding reader impressions of your content
- Confirming reader interests, likes/dislikes, and what they want to read/learn about in the future
- Gauging how your content affects reader awareness of and affinity for your organization
- Documenting actions readers take as a result of engaging with your content
Useful topics to include on the survey include demographics, reading habits (e.g., how much content they read and how frequently), content accessibility, topics of most interest and brand awareness.
4. Try Reverse Publishing to Improve Engagement
A growing content trend, reverse publishing is the practice of publishing content online and then later repurposing it in a print format. This is a cost-effective option to improve your content strategy because blogs and social media are a low-cost or free way to test your efforts. Seeing what content gets the most interaction can inform what makes it to your print channels.
Ready to learn more about reverse publishing? GLC’s Ultimate Guide to Reverse Publishing will give you all the tools to get started.
5. Start Planning Content with the Cluster Model
Improving your SEO results can significantly impact content strategy success, and one method to try is the cluster model.
The cluster topic model is a framework to organize your website by having a one-page content hub and multiple pages with related content branching off it. Search engines may favor pages that follow this model and rank them higher for the topics they cover. Implementing a cluster model brings many benefits when improving your content strategy. A cluster model:
- Helps you demonstrate why you are a thought leader. Having a whole section of your website dedicated to that thought-leadership topic can make a major impact.
- Allows you to thoroughly cover one topic in smaller, digestible chunks. It also lends itself to a variety of content formats, such as audio and visual formats.
- Makes content creation more streamlined. Planning and creating a set of complementary items of content on one topic requires less time and effort than planning and creating disparate pieces.
6. Make Your Content More Efficient
Chances are that your organization is already creating great content. But if you have departmental silos or inconsistent messaging, that great content isn’t making the impact it could. A clear process for planning, creating and distributing your content is essential to improve your content strategy and make it more efficient.
Spend some time defining your voice and devising a collaborative plan for each department that creates content. Then, look across your channels to see where the content can be repurposed.