A content strategy is a plan that guides your content creation, distribution, and management to achieve your business goals. It helps you align your content with your audience’s needs, preferences, and stages of the buyer’s journey.
On the other hand a content audit is a process of evaluating and analyzing your existing content to identify its strengths, weaknesses, gaps, and opportunities for improvement.
An effective content audit can help you optimize your content strategy by providing insights into what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to be changed or updated.
In this article, we will discuss the key elements of a content strategy and how you can use them to improve your content audit.
In Summary
- Organize your business/personal goals by priority. What’s your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan?
- It may seem obvious, but these questions are the core of a useful content strategy. Look at high-level business goals, notes from meetings, and notes from your team, then do some solo research to make sure your goals have staying power.
- Consider content channels and platforms as the highways and vehicles for your content delivery. Your choice of these channels and platforms plays a pivotal role in how well your content reaches and engages your audience. During a content audit, think of them as checkpoints to ensure your content travels smoothly and consistently across these digital routes.
- Use the SMART framework to define goals.
- Collect data and analyze it to find patterns.
- Use your research to refine buyer personas.
- Find topic and formatting gaps.
- Review content for quality and relevance.
- Look for repurposing opportunities.
- Create a content workflow.
Let’s get started.
Goals and metrics
The first element of a content strategy is to define your goals and metrics.
What are you trying to achieve with your content? How will you measure your success?
Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Your metrics should be aligned with your goals and reflect the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to your business.
For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might use metrics such as traffic, social shares, and mentions.
Likewise, if your goal is to generate leads, you might use metrics such as conversions, bounce rate, and email subscribers.
By setting clear goals and metrics, you can use them as benchmarks for your content audit and evaluate how well your content is performing and contributing to your desired outcomes.
Audience and personas
The second element of a content strategy is to understand your audience and personas.
Who are you creating content for? What are their pain points, challenges, interests, and motivations? How do they search for, consume, and share content?
Creating audience personas can help you answer these questions and create a detailed profile of your ideal customer.
Audience personas are fictional representations of your target segments that include demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and contextual information.
By creating audience personas, you can use them as guides for your content audit and assess how well your content matches your audience’s needs, preferences, and stages of the buyer’s journey.
Content types and formats
The third element of a content strategy is to determine your content types and formats.
What types of content will you create to achieve your goals and reach your audience? What formats will you use to deliver your content?
Content types are the categories of content that serve different purposes and objectives, such as blog posts, ebooks, videos, podcasts, webinars, infographics, case studies, and more.
Content formats are the ways of presenting your content, such as text, audio, video, image, interactive, and more.
By determining your content types and formats, you can use them as criteria for your content audit and identify what types and formats of content are performing well, what types and formats of content are missing or underutilized, and what types and formats of content need to be revised or repurposed.
Content channels and platforms
The fourth element of a content strategy is to choose your content channels and platforms.
Where will you distribute and promote your content to reach your audience and achieve your goals?
Content channels are the mediums of communication that you use to deliver your content, such as email, social media, search engines, websites, blogs.
Content platforms are the specific sites or applications that you use to publish your content, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, WordPress, Medium, among others.
By choosing your content channels and platforms, you can use them as parameters for your content audit and evaluate how well your content is optimized, integrated, and consistent across different channels and platforms.
Content governance and workflow
The fifth element of a content strategy is to establish your content governance and workflow.
How will you manage, maintain, and update your content? Content governance is the set of rules, roles, and responsibilities that define who creates, approves, publishes, and edits your content.
Content workflow is the process of planning, producing, reviewing, and publishing your content.
By establishing your content governance and workflow, you can use them as standards for your content audit and ensure that your content is accurate, relevant, timely, and compliant with your brand guidelines and best practices.
Content governance and workflow
The fifth element of a content strategy is to establish your content governance and workflow.
How will you manage, maintain, and update your content?
Content governance is the set of rules, roles, and responsibilities that define who creates, approves, publishes, and edits your content.
Content workflow on the other hand is the process of planning, producing, reviewing, and publishing your content.
By establishing your content governance and workflow, you can use them as standards for your content audit and ensure that your content is accurate, relevant, timely, and compliant with your brand guidelines and best practices.