A detailed and organized plan for marketing

United States President Dwight Eisenhower once said, “No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without one.” This is great advice for battles at war, planning a family vacation, building a business, and even managing your website. Once your website is up and running, you will want to go back to the site, regularly, to make updates and refinements to the content. Doing this will help with your search engine ranking and help to keep visitors engaged and drive sales. A Content Strategy for your website and digital marketing is your battle plan for all things marketing on your website. A content strategy for your website is a detailed and organized plan that lays out how to create, maintain, and provide great content that is relative to your specific audience. This plan will include things like the planning and creation of content, timing, distribution, and more. 

Define Your Goals

Without knowing a target end goal, you could easily start creating content in all the wrong ways. By establishing your goals, be it to secure a higher search engine ranking,increase sales, customer retention, or any number of goals, you will have a clear target to focus on. With these goals, be sure to make each measurable and truly attainable. If your goal is to rank in the first spot for your desired keyword, know that it won’t happen overnight. If your goal is to sell $100,000 in product, you likely will need to first sell $50,000. 

Once your goals are established, you’ll be able to start piecing together the content strategy and steps needed to reach those goals. A content strategy aimed at increasing sales might focus more on the user experience and ways to create strong Call To Action (CTA) buttons on the site. If the goal is to rank higher in search results, your strategy will likely focus on creating new page content and videos and landing pages. 

Conduct a Content Audit

Once you have your goals in place, you can review the current content on your website and review where your website currently stands for completing your goals. You can review and assess the performance of your current content and website and identify areas that are working well, and more importantly, the areas that need focus. When doing this review or audit, you can determine where your website and content has gaps or shortcomings that need to be addressed and field in to best reach your goals. 

With the sections of content that most need improvement, you can begin moving into actionable steps to add in that missing content. If there are sections that are working good or even great, you can always find new ways to add more and better content to them. If your CTA buttons are working great, it might be worthwhile to add more of them. 

Content Creation

In the Content Creation step of the planning process, you’ll start outlining the exact content you’ll be adding in. This content could be anything from blog articles, videos, graphics, case studies, CTA buttons, whitepapers, or simply expanding text. In your plans, you can outline what pages need what content, what pages could benefit from new or more content, and what timeframe you’re looking to add the new content. 

Your strategy and plans can also include topics like establishing the tone and style of your content. Will the new content be written to be a more sales oriented piece of content or will it be geared for SEO? Depending on the tone, you can identify words or phrases that you might want to incorporate or avoid all together. 

If you know a section of your website is lacking, you can always review a competitor’s website to see what they’re doing. If they have a section that you feel is better than yours, use it as inspiration to garner new ideas. This by no means implies you should steal or plagiarize the content, simply gather more ideas. You can also find the tone they are using to help determine how you want your content to feel.

This section can be outlined in a simple spreadsheet. You can outline the pages, sections, and timeframe for which to complete the work all with different columns. When your work week begins, review the document to see which pieces of content are scheduled to be written that week, and set plans to complete and implement the work.

Measurement and Analysis

Once you have set your goals, reviewed your site, created and implemented the content, the final step should be to measure and analyze the progress. This can be completed through Google Analytics, SEO measures, sales data, or even customer feedback. If your final review shows that your improvements and content strategy worked for the set of goals, you can establish new goals to strive for. If the work didn’t meet the set goals, you can go back through the content strategy guide and dive deeper and more fine tuned into the content until you reach those goals. 

A carefully crafted content strategy for a website will make sure that all efforts are aligned with your business goals helping drive your overall business success. It provides a battle plan for creating continuous great content and success with your website. Just like no battle is ever won without the plans, no website is ever successful without the plans.