A solid content strategy drives actions that differentiates a company and delivers results. Since we live in an opt-in culture, the only way to get the good-kind-of-attention is to create content that is relevant, informative, and on-brand. Intruding into the user experience with an inconsistent brand no longer works. That era is over. Take charge of your content now, before it gets increasingly more difficult to catch up.
Here are some ideas:
1. Write what matters now. Not what was going on in 2010. Unless you’re the next Aaron Sorkin with a storyline better than The Newsroom.
2. Create grains of viral marketing influence:
Combine influence with content over a long period of time to achieve a state of criticality with your audience such that your ongoing efforts create more and more avalanches, with the full understanding that the content you’re writing today might have almost no impact or might create a giant landslide.
I think that last sentence needs to be “no foreseeable impact.” Everything has some amount of impact, whether its big or small. Not to get all new-agey, but we’re all energies that ebb and flow. It’s just a matter of what energies becomes consequential.
3. SEO and SEM are important and should be kept in mind while creating your content. Good content strategies have these built in. If you’re not sure why or how they all go together, read Why Content Marketing, Social, and Search are the Winning Trifecta.
4. Create or curate your own valuable and compelling content on a consistent basis. Think about how often relevant content can be posted to the blog, or start a weekly podcast series. Be realistic but also get out of your comfort zone. Posting content only once every few months doesn’t cut it.
5. Add visual media to your content strategy. I see many businesses still using Flickr, which is ok if you’re a professional who wants to maintain copyright and control of your brand. There’s also instagram for sharing more personal photos. And Think Stock is top-notch for high-quality images.
6. Get together an engagement team to enable a creative idea-sharing culture. Ask questions. And listen. Make it your sounding board for generating new ideas.
7. Implement a plan for how to create, deliver, and manage content. Creating and managing content isn’t easy, but someone needs to do it.
8. Streamline the process. Create a system that’s efficient and easy. You’ll know what works best for you and your organization.
9. Make sure quality control is baked into the process. Don’t release content for the sake of releasing it. Make sure it’s compelling and valuable and true to your brand. If you’re not sure what it offers your audience, or it isn’t consistent with your brand, don’t publish it.
10. Be flexible. A solid strategy allows for flexibility to adapt to opportunities that arise along the way.