Content Strategy: How to Create Content That Drives Traffic

Investing in content makes perfect sense because you want to be relevant and valuable to your audience, and help them with their issues. You know that in the long run, it’s your valuable content that makes you a strong customer-centric brand that people easily connect to. 

But do you really need to have a documented content strategy to achieve all this? Nearly 60% of B2B marketers in a survey professed that they do not have a documented content strategy. Does it make a difference to brainstorm and document one and be ahead of most B2B marketers? 

You probably know the answers to these questions, but let’s get a bit technical and make a case for having a documented content strategy.  

What Exactly Is a Content Strategy, and Why Might Your Business Need One?

A content strategy is a comprehensive roadmap that guides the creation, distribution, and management of content to achieve specific business goals. It involves several key components, including:

1. defining target audiences,
2. identifying content topics and formats,
3. establishing publishing schedules, and
4. determining metrics for success.

Among B2B marketers, 40% possess a documented content marketing strategy. This figure notably rises among the most successful B2B marketers, with 64% having a documented content marketing strategy. 

As for why you may need one, here are four potential reasons:

1. Reduce customer/client acquisition costs through audience resonance.
   By striving to create content that resonates the most with your audience and delivers the most value, your organization can fine-tune its efforts to meet the genuine needs and preferences of your target audience. 
   
   This ensures that your resources are focused on meeting those needs, which can reduce the cost and effort of acquiring new customers and clients. Content marketing is known to produce over 3x as many leads as outbound marketing, while being 62% less expensive.
2. Align content efforts with business objectives.
   By identifying the goals of content marketing, such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or driving sales, your organization can develop content that directly contributes to these objectives.
3. Measure the effectiveness of content marketing efforts.
   By establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) and tracking metrics such as website traffic, engagement, and conversions, your organization can evaluate the success of your marketing strategy and make data-driven decisions to optimize future marketing initiatives.
4. Ensure consistency across all content.
   By clearly defining your brand story, voice, messaging, and style guidelines, a content strategy ensures that all content pieces resonate with your desired audience and reinforce your brand identity.

In summary, a content strategy is essential for organizations because it can reduce cost of acquisition, ensure brand consistency and alignment with business objectives, and enable measurable results in marketing efforts.

3 Steps to Create a Content Strategy That Drives Traffic, Cuts Acquisition Costs, and Achieves Business Goals

Step 1 – Determine the Needs of Your Audience

Understanding the needs of your audience is essential for effective marketing and business success. To determine these needs, it’s crucial to analyze the buyer journey, which is the process a potential customer goes through from awareness to purchase and beyond.

Here’s how to do that.

Firstly, let’s look at each stage of the buyer journey in your business: 

1. awareness, 
2. consideration, 
3. decision, and 
4. post-purchase. 

At each stage, customers have different needs and concerns.

1. During the awareness stage, customers become aware of a problem or need they have. At this point, they are seeking information and education. Provide valuable content that addresses their pain points and helps them understand their challenges better.
2. During the consideration stage, customers are evaluating their options and looking for solutions. Offer in-depth content that showcases your expertise and demonstrates how your products or services can meet their needs better than competitors.
3. During the decision stage, customers are ready to make a purchase decision. Provide clear and persuasive content that highlights the benefits of choosing your brand and addresses any remaining concerns or objections they may have.
4. After the purchase, continue to engage with customers, utilizing customer experience software to build loyalty and encourage repeat business. Gather feedback to understand their experience and identify areas for improvement.

By aligning your content with what the buyer is seeking at each stage of the buyer journey, you can effectively address their needs and concerns throughout their decision-making process. This natural, organic approach to content helps build trust, establish authority, and ultimately drive conversions and long-term customer relationships.

A strategic approach to the buyer journey can lead to higher conversion rates,” says Rothman Perreras, CRO specialist at Spiralyze, “as it ensures that all buyer needs and concerns are effectively addressed.

Step 2 – Determine Marketing Channels and Content Format

Determining the appropriate marketing channels and content formats is crucial for effectively reaching and engaging your target audience. This process involves understanding the preferences, behaviors, and needs of your audience at each stage of the buyer journey.

Let’s break it down.

1. Identify Your Target Audience:
   Begin by defining your target audience and understanding their demographics, interests, preferences, and pain points. This information will guide your decisions on which marketing channels and content formats are most likely to resonate with them.
2. Understand the Buyer Journey:
   Recognize the different stages of the buyer journey—awareness, consideration, decision, and post-purchase. Each stage requires a unique approach and may necessitate a unique marketing channel and content format.
3. Select Relevant Marketing Channels:
   Determine the most appropriate channels to reach your audience at each stage of their journey. For example,
   • For raising awareness, social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook may be effective. This is also the stage where people start using Google to learn more about their issue and the solutions available. 
   • For nurturing leaders during the consideration stage, email marketing or  webinars could be more suitable.
   • During the decision stage, sales funnels and direct email may provide tailored information and assistance, guiding customers towards confident purchase decisions.
   • And for post-purchase, platforms like Circle or Discord could be effective for building community and fueling repeat purchases. Email, automated SMS messages, and social media communities have great potential here as well. 
4. Tailor Content Formats to Channels:
   Choose content formats that align with the selected marketing channels and cater to the preferences and needs of the relevant audience segment. This could include blog posts, videos, infographics, newsletters, podcasts, or interactive quizzes, as some examples. Adapt the content format to suit the platform as well as the stage of the journey that the buyer on each platform is in.
5. Test and Iterate:
   Continuously monitor the performance of your marketing efforts across different channels and content formats. Analyze metrics such as engagement, click-through rates, and conversions to identify what works best for your audience. Use this data to refine your approach and optimize future campaigns.

By understanding your audience and their journey, and by selecting the right marketing channels and content formats accordingly, you can effectively connect with your audience, deliver valuable content, and drive them towards conversion and loyalty.

Step 3 – Develop Your Editorial Plan

Developing an effective editorial plan is essential for maintaining consistency, relevance, and quality in your content strategy. Here’s a guide on how to determine your editorial plan:

1. Define Your Objectives: Start by clarifying your content marketing goals. Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive website traffic, or establish thought leadership? Your objectives will shape the topics and formats of your content.
2. Audience Research: Conduct thorough research to understand your target audience’s preferences, interests, pain points, and questions. Use tools like Google Analytics, social media insights, and keyword research to identify the topics that resonate most with your audience. Decide whether you want to zoom in and focus more deeply on the topics that resonate most or zoom out and keep it broad.
3. Topic Generation: Brainstorm a list of potential topics based on your objectives and audience research. Consider addressing common challenges, providing solutions to specific problems, sharing industry insights, or offering how-to guides and tutorials. Offering your reader quick wins that they can experience immediately generally makes for good content.
4. Keyword Research: Integrate relevant keywords into your content to improve its visibility in search engine results. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to identify high-volume, low-competition keywords related to your topics. Additionally, utilizing APIs like the Google Trends API can also provide invaluable data for keyword research and market analysis.
5. Content Formats: Determine the most suitable content formats for each topic based on your audience’s preferences and the nature of the information. Options may include blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, case studies, and whitepapers.
6. Content Optimization: Optimize your content to enhance its readability, ensure originality, and improve SEO. A paraphrasing tool, for example, allows you to freeze important keywords without changing their density and placement. It can also refine language, fix grammar, and align text with the target audience, making your content more engaging and convincing. If you want to take your content to the next level but don’t have the budget to hire a full-time editor, consider using assistance like the ServiceScape editing services. Professional editors will deliver expert and polished results, helping you to stand out from your competitors.
7. Content Length: Decide on the appropriate length for each piece of content based on its purpose and platform. While blog posts typically range from 800 to 2000 words (or more if it’s a comprehensive guide), videos may vary in duration depending on the complexity of the topic. Just like TikTok stands out for its entertaining and creative short videos. A good rule of thumb is that people tend to value quality, conciseness, and implementability over sheer amount of information, so don’t add length if it waters down the quality.
8. Assigning Content: Allocate content creation tasks to team members or freelance writers based on their expertise and availability. Clearly communicate expectations, deadlines, and guidelines to ensure consistency in tone and style. 
9. Editorial Calendar: Create a content calendar to organize your topics, deadlines, publishing dates, and promotional activities. Use tools like Google Calendar or project management software such as, BigTime sofware, Microsoft Project or its alternatives to manage your editorial schedule effectively.
10. Review and Optimization: Regularly review the performance of your content to identify areas for improvement. Monitor engagement metrics, audience feedback, and keyword rankings to optimize your editorial plan and refine future content strategies. More on this in the section below.

By following these steps, you can develop a strategic editorial plan that aligns with your business objectives, resonates with your target audience, and drives meaningful traffic to your brand.

Taking a Step Back: Measuring Content Marketing Success

Having a documented content strategy makes it possible for you to measure and benchmark results. Once you have identified the marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) to track, you can easily analyze whether your strategy is successful or how you can optimize it.

There are lots of KPIs you could track for content marketing. Depending on your content type and channel (blog posts, emails, videos, images, social media posts, events, courses, ebooks, etc.), you can focus on different types of metrics. Some of these are: 

• Awareness metrics: any metric that shows your content reach: views, reads, opens, organic traffic, engagement metrics such as comments, shares, clicks and click-through rates, backlinks, bounce rate, time spent, keyword rankings, etc. 
• Lead generation metrics: any metric that helps you understand how your content drives lead generation and produces qualified prospects. These include subscriptions and registrations, content downloads, form completions, cost per lead, conversion rates, unsubscription rates, and other indicators of audience engagement and interest in your offerings.
• Conversion and loyalty metrics: metrics that help you measure how well your content performs in turning your audience to customers and retaining them. These metrics are a bit more complicated to track because it’s difficult to track the source of every sale you make. Some examples are direct conversion rates, content attribution, return purchases, churn rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), net promoter score (NPS), referrals, user-generated content, advocacy content, etc.