According to Kristin Halvorson, author of Content Strategy for the Web, “Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” A content strategy then becomes a business asset that you can use and reuse to keep your audience engaged and find new ways of influencing them. The content strategy you develop for your website can be reproduced in other platforms, like social media, blogs, and vlogs in order to generate increased leads and sales. However, the Content Marketing Institute found that 88% of B2B businesses said they were using a content marketing strategy, but only 30% of those businesses felt their strategies were actually effective.
An awesome website can only go as far as its content strategy, one that tells users how to successfully navigate and use it. Every component of the website should be consistent with your brand and voice as well as serve your users’ needs; these needs make up the objectives in your content strategy. When you invest in a new website, you are also investing in a sustainable digital strategy that you can utilize as your business and your online presence grows.
Components of a Dynamic Content Strategy
Chocolate might be the most enticing ingredient of a chocolate cake, but so many more ingredients are required to make it the delectable dessert that it is. Content works the same way. Your heading structure or calls to action might be witty and engaging, but if your homepage takes 20 seconds to load and you have an outdated design, you’ll already have lost your audience’s attention and trust. Content strategy takes into account a variety of details to determine who your users are, what they need from you, how to speak to those needs, and how to get them to act on their needs. With the help of design, development, and SEO best practices, you’ll be able to find your audience and maintain their trust as online trends change and your business grows.
Step 1: Get to Know Your Audience
Before you start developing your content strategy, you must first determine who it’s for. Your current website’s audience and target audience might differ. You might be getting a lot of traffic and calls from your website, but they might not be the primary people you want to be servicing or selling to. Establishing a detailed user persona will help you really hone in on an audience and speak to them in an effective, engaging way to get those leads or sales you want. A user persona is a representation of your ideal client or customer, including their age, income-level, location, but more importantly, hobbies, habits, likes, dislikes, hopes, and dreams. Let’s say you’re selling air conditioning installation and repair services to the Des Moines area. But who in the Des Moines area? You’re getting calls from a wide range of customers, but more of those calls might be coming from stay-at-home mothers. Think about it; these women will be at home during the summertime with their kids, so they want to be comfortable. Should they need a new air conditioning system or repairs, you want to be the person they call.
Step 2: Figure Out How to Effectively Talk to Them
Once you know your audience, you then need to figure out how to talk to them. This is where knowing about their lifestyles, goals, hobbies, and more will come in handy. Considering the stay-at-home moms example, what are their lifestyles during peak season in your industry? If they’re at home with the kids or driving them around from activity to activity during the summertime, a broken air conditioner could really throw a wrench in their day. By identifying this lifestyle, you can then determine how to best serve these customers and give them exactly what they need. These women need a repairman/woman whom they can trust and rely on.
Now consider what makes you different from your competitors. Your audience needs to know specifics on the website, like windows of time you promise your clients you’ll arrive. They need to be able to rely on your timeliness when you say you’ll be there during a specific window of time, allowing them to carry on with their busy day. Credibility and safety are also some important points to cover. These mothers need to be able to trust the person coming into their home, especially when their children are home during the summer and their air conditioning breaks, so background checks and photos of all your service techs can put them at ease. This is the start of your content strategy. You’ve determined your target audience and how to talk to them.
Step 3: Show Your Audience Where to Go
In a content strategy, you must also be able to effectively guide your audience through your website to the most important pages. This step involves developing a sitemap and information architecture in order to guide the user from page to page, telling them what they should pay attention to first. Information architecture is the technique of designing how your information, or content, will be displayed specific to your audience, their needs, and your goals. Design and development become the major allies in this step of your content strategy. You might have a really strong draft of content to fill each page of your website that is relevant and informative for your users, but how will you convince them to read that content and what to do with it?
A sitemap displays the hierarchy of pages and their relationship to one another. You’ll need to figure out how to guide the user through your website using this hierarchy. The navigation, which represents the sitemap, is the literal roadmap for your users to navigate the site. Every page is grouped and categorized for a specific reason to achieve a specific goal. The navigation must be designed and built in an intuitive way for your user base.
Based on the user persona of the stay-at-home mom, what type of navigation would be easiest and most useful for her to use? Are drop-downs the best option for organizing sub-pages, or should something else be considered? Figuring out these elements of your website’s design and functionality will be vital to getting your target audience to interact with your website and ultimately, in this case, call you for HVAC services.
You can also decide how to structure the body copy, designing the website in a way that will make the content easy for your audience to digest. On your website, how can you design a page to highlight a specific paragraph of text or display a bulleted list in a more eye-catching, user-friendly way? Paragraphs, bullet lists, numbered lists, call outs, pull quotes, images, graphics, and videos are all pieces of content to be arranged and rearranged to provide the most useful experience for your audience.
Step 4: Tell the Audience What to Do
Using your content strategy so far, you have identified your target audience, determined how to effectively talk to them, and told them where to go; now you need to tell them what to do. Using the content, design, and development of your website revolving around on your goals, you can direct your users to how you want them to interact with your business on your website.
This part of your content strategy and information architecture requires you to encourage users to accomplish the goals you set for each page at the beginning. This is where calls to action and internal links tell your users to go to a new page, contact your business, request a quote, etc. If you have useful information in your blog that might further convince a user to call you for services, then featuring the latest blog at the bottom of every page or in the sidebar is an example of telling the audience what to do. You’re highlighting this content in a way that will grab your audience’s attention, and direct them toward the behavior that will make you profitable.
Step 5: Track Your Success
A content strategy cannot truly be effective if you don’t monitor and adapt it over time to meet your users’ changing interests and needs. There are a variety of tools you can use to track this kind of data, including Google Analytics (a must-have), social media insights, Hotjar, call tracking, and more. These types of tools allow you to see how many people are visiting your website, specific pages of your site, how long they are spending on each page, organic traffic versus referral traffic, and even from where your users are accessing the website. And with Hotjar, you can see how users are actually interacting with the website with session recording and heat-mapping. Learn more about what you can discover when you add Hotjar to your site!
Using tools like these and checking in on user traffic each month will help you assess if your current content strategy is working the way you intended. If not, then you can re-evaluate it based on the data you’re finding. For instance, you wanted your users to fill out a contact form to contact you about your install and repair services. However, now you’re seeing that users are not leaving your website at the contact page but instead your services page. With further digging and analyzing your call tracking data, you find people are calling your company directly rather than filling out the contact form. This information can help you consider whether your mobile design and information infrastructure should be more streamlined and direct for your users to find what they need before clicking the phone number to call. Otherwise, if you want people to fill out the contact form instead of call, create easier and more frequent opportunities for users to fill it out. A fly-out contact form might be an option or a contact button on every page. A content strategy can’t fall by the wayside after the launch of your website. Remember, your content strategy is also part of your marketing strategy that needs to be monitored and updated for your users in order to be successful.
Why Your Website Needs a Content Strategy
With each of these steps, you can successfully display and share your brand across your digital platforms to achieve your goals in leads, sales, marketing, or all of the above. The major takeaway from this guide is that content is essential on your website, and a strategy behind it is even more important if you want a return on your investment. You may have a really cool website, but if no one is finding it or interacting with it, then it isn’t serving your needs as a business. With a comprehensive and flexible content strategy, you can join the 88% of businesses with a content strategy and help raise the number from 30% to someday 100% of businesses who think theirs is effective.
