There are a few important things to think of as you begin crafting the marketing strategy for your business, but the first area that you should tackle is your content strategy. Content strategy is defined as the planning, development, and management of any piece of content or copy that you are creating for your business.
As you begin to think about your content strategy, it’s vital that you keep these tips in mind in order to keep your strategy in line with your business needs. This blog is going to be broken down into two parts: branding and strategy. An effective content strategy starts with a strong and thorough brand before you take the time to build a strategy.
Putting Your Branding Before Your Content Strategy
Who you are is just as important as what content you create. Before you begin designing your content, be sure that you are able to answer these 4 questions.
Who is your Customer?
One important rule of marketing is to question what you “think” you know about your customer using anecdotal evidence. Everything that you create should have a specific audience in mind. In order to find out who that audience is, you have to do your research. Before you begin building a strategy, you should always be looking at who this strategy is meant to impact. If you can’t answer that question, your content will likely be interpreted as confusing for your customers.
Have you ever seen a movie poster where the words are artfully placed and they look great on the image but there’s no logical order to read them in? That’s how your potential customers feel when they read content that is confusing. Sure the poster is gorgeous, but if the customers can’t understand the words, that’s the emotion they’ll walk away with. Content created without a customer in mind should be thrown out and rewritten with your customers in mind.
Who are you?
This is, hands down, the most important of marketing your brand: you have to know who you are. If you don’t clearly define who you are for your customers you’re making it difficult for them to interact with you authentically because they don’t know the real you. Another thing that happens when you don’t take the time to define yourself is that customers will define you based on their one perception of who you are which is the exact opposite of what you want. Defining yourself can be exhausting and frustrating but it has to be done. You can start to define yourself by ask the following questions:
- Why do we exist?
- What do we offer that no one else does?
- Why should customers choose us over others in our market?
- Who are we targeting and why?
- What are the core values we want to live and operate by?
Once you can succinctly and effectively answer these questions you can begin applying these answers to your branding and the content strategy that you’re building.
Who’s your Competition?
Your business isn’t inside a vacuum so don’t pretend that it is! It’s your job to know what your users want but the best way to discover that is to learn all about how their needs are being met by other organizations. Once you have a solid idea of who you are and what you’re offering it’s time to learn about what other people are offering as well. Not only does this provide you with a roadmap of what your customers are getting from other businesses, it can also give you a roadmap on how to give your customers things that they don’t get or could be receiving more effectively.
For example, if you’re running a cantina and you plan on throwing a Taco Tuesday deal and you find out that a bar a few miles away is giving endless chips and salsa on Tuesdays, you could offer that same deal and add in that every third margarita or beer is free. Having that knowledge of your competition allows you to modify your plans and give customers something that no one else is, making your offerings both unique and relevant to their needs.
Know your Voice
This is important. Crafting a unique and effective brand voice is the best way to give your users something to connect with as they’re reading your content. Is your brand more silly and whimsical? Is it sarcastic and biting? Maybe you’re straight-laced and serious. Building effective content means having content that is distinguishable as yours. Customers love businesses that personify themselves.
Customers want to feel like coming to your restaurant is like coming to see an old friend after a long week at work. In order to give customers that feeling, you have to know what that feeling is and imbue that into every piece of content or copy that you write. If your brand is silly and fun that should translate into the copy on a website, the color scheme that you choose, the look of your restaurant, and even the way that your staff interact with customers. A great example of this is to look at Disneyland. Everything the “cast” says or does has to match the image that Disney wants to portray for their brand to keep the magic of it alive.
Building an Effective Content Strategy Using your Branding
Now that you have a better idea of who you are and why you’re in business you can apply those principles to your content strategy.
Customers want to feel like coming to your restaurant is like coming to see an old friend after a long week at work. In order to give customers that feeling, you have to know what that feeling is and imbue that into every piece of content or copy that you write. If your brand is silly and fun that should translate into the copy on a website, the color scheme that you choose, the look of your restaurant, and even the way that your staff interact with customers. A great example of this is to look at Disneyland. Everything the “cast” says or does has to match the image that Disney wants to portray for their brand to keep the magic of it alive.
Know your Goals
Every piece of content needs to have a clear and well-defined goal. That goal coordinates with your overall goal for your business. See, we told you branding would be important! You should already have an idea of what your business goal is at this point so now it’s time to think of how to achieve that goal. Let’s look back at our Taco Tuesday example. We’ll say the goal is to increase the amount of drink sales in your cantina for the quarter. Now that we know that, let’s think about the event. Is your goal to grab more customers than the bar down the street for your Taco Tuesday event? Maybe your goal is to improve your Taco Tuesday sales by making your margaritas look irresistible?
Whatever content strategy you create has to answer this question. If the focus is on grabbing customers you might look into creating advertising strategies near that bar that advertise your Tuesday special. If you’re looking to make your drinks look irresistible you may lean more into social media and creating dazzling video content that is interactive and makes customers want to lic their phones.Every choice that you make with your content has to have a reason and that reason has to fall under the umbrella of an overarching strategy created with your short-term and long-term goals in mind.
Know your Customer’s Needs
Great content resonates with customers on their schedule and connects them with your business. If you are running a coffee shop, your content posts will have a completely different timing than a bar that’s open late. If you are running a coffee shop your content will resonate better in the morning and the mid-afternoon whereas a bar’s content will resonate more in the evening. Using that same train of thought, a New Year’s Day special won’t resonate well with a coffee shop that sees most of its traffic during the morning rush hour as customer’s are on their way to work, but a New Year’s Eve special event for a bar could be extremely profitable.
Knowing your customer is more than just knowing who they are, it’s knowing their habits and their calendars so you can mold your events to fit their specific needs so you can increase participation and profits. Creating events to celebrate, like holidays and even monthly birthday celebration events, are a great way to keep your customers engaged and interested in your business. If customers know they can rely on your pub for trivia every Wednesday night or know they can visit your cantina on the last weekend of every month for a birthday celebration and free tequila shots, it not only increases customer engagement, it makes your business look like a well-oiled, consistent machine.
Know your Metrics and Analytics
The key to any fantastic strategy is adaptation. Coming up with strategies can seem difficult and overwhelming, but the real task is molding that strategy once it has been deployed. Let’s say you know your customers are active on your social media page and they interact with your posts regularly. Using metrics you can discover what post styles work best with certain events.
Let’s say you decide to do Taco Tuesdays and you’re looking at making your margaritas pop off the screen for your followers. You may find that a short video panning along the salt-coated rim of the glass is more engaging for your users than a still image with text and your logo across the bottom. If you know the metrics are better with video, you may decide that every Tuesday at 4pm you’ll post a short video of that day’s margarita special and you’ll save the still images for a different time of the day.
The next step would be looking at those metrics and comparing the to event attendance in the bar and looking at how many the margarita special we sold that night. Knowing that information can help gauge how popular an event will be and even influence how many people you have on staff for that night. Knowledge is power and knowing your metrics and analytics are invaluable to maintaining and evolving your content strategy.
Bringing it all together
Content strategy is vital to any marketing strategy because it gives your marketing efforts an anchor to look to that relates directly back to goals of who you are and what you are trying to accomplish. As you begin to build your strategy, keep in mind that this strategy is not built within a silo, it is connected to who you are, who you’re talking to, who you’re competing against, and what your purpose is. Once you have these things in mind you can begin building content that speaks to your goals, your customer’s needs, and is informed by data.
Your content should meet users in the middle, whether that be on a social review platform like franki or on a social media site like TikTok. Every strategy that you come up with has to be user-centric and provide them with something that will bring them one step closer to achieving their goals and yours. It can sometimes be difficult to decide on a content strategy direction, but if you keep these tips in mind you will surely grow your business in the direction that you are looking to.
