How To Learn Planning A Long-term Content Strategy

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Content Strategy

Content strategy is the high-level planning, execution, management, and ongoing management of the content lifecycle to support key business endeavors.

Essentially, it’s your brand’s game plan to drive traffic, leads, engagement, sales, and other business results through content.

Content strategy is one of the most important components of your marketing strategy because it dictates who, what, where, when, and how you plan to connect with your audience.

How To Create An Effective Content Marketing Strategy

It’s much broader than a list of content formats and topics. It includes buyer personas, journey maps, editorial calendars, audits, and content management.

A well-executed strategy establishes a culture of content within your business that drives bigger investments.

Content Marketing Guide: Everything You Need to Know And Tools To Use

Furthermore, it provides a framework to measure content marketing ROI, maintain responsibility, and ensure ongoing predictable results.

But it takes time and money to create great content. So whether you outsource blog posts or develop videos in-house, it’s critical to have a well-organized plan to get the outcomes you want.

How To Plan Strategic Management For Digital Marketing

To communicate with your audience, you need to produce content. Content delivers the message of your inbound marketing strategy. Content is what you’re trying to deliver to your visitors, leads, customers, and promoters.

There are a lot of different ways you can deliver content: blog posts, emails, website pages, social media, print collateral, and beyond.

Content strategy vs. content marketing strategy

Content strategy is a higher-level business activity than content marketing. Content strategy is the roadmap that guides your content marketing.

It’s the decision-making that underlies whom your content will impact, how your content will cut through all the noise, and the expected results.

On the other hand, content marketing is the process of organizing, scheduling, creating, publishing, and promoting content pieces.

Content marketing is the tactics that follow the content strategy.

Your content strategy defines:

• What you’re trying to accomplish

• Who you’re trying to reach

• What types of content you’ll publish

• How your content will support the brand

• How your content will be differentiated

• How you will promote and amplify your content

• The metrics that define success

The content strategy ensures that your content marketing efforts point you in the right direction. Without a well-defined strategy, you may waste a lot of time writing content that doesn’t get the audience impact or the business results you want.

Planning A Long-term Content Strategy

How To Learn Planning A Long-term Content Strategy

So why is long-term content planning important to your business? To start, planning provides a roadmap for your content. You wouldn’t get in a car and drive without an end destination; you’d be wasting gas. This is probably why 86% of highly effective organizations have someone steering the direction of their content strategy.

When it comes to creating content, you want to remain as reactive and agile as you can to do your best to make the most of your time. Having a plan will give you and your team the ability to remain reactive to upcoming initiatives, stay organized, and proactively manage content required for your marketing tasks.

Think of your long-term content plan as a savings account. If your goal is to retire someday, then

you need a plan, and you need to be consistent with your contributions.

The more consistent you are and the better you are with contributions, the more you’ll get on your return on investment. But to retire, you need to be consistent month after month; otherwise, you’ll miss your goals and the ability to retire.

The same can be said about your content. If you make a plan and are consistent in your approach, then you’re giving yourself the best chance at achieving ROI from your content efforts. You’ll have the opportunity to grow an expansive library of content, making you and your business content-wealthy.

Obstacles and roadblocks will come up along the way, but at least you’ll have your goals and

direction set. Having a plan will make it that much easier to regain alignment, as well as understand bandwidth and priorities for what needs to get done and when.

Another reason why you should have a long-term content plan is it helps you stay organized.

Often, marketing teams place a focus on more than one initiative at any given time. A long-term

plan accounts for all upcoming initiatives and gives you the ability to be agile in your content

creation process.

Being organized will also help you align your content marketing goals with the overall goals of the business. In essence, it gets the marketing team in line with the current initiatives of the entire organization.

Content is not just about supporting the marketing team; it should be about supporting the sales

team, customer service team, product, and services team, and so on.

By aligning your content marketing goals to the overall goals of the organization, you can rest

assured that your focus will provide an immediate impact where it matters most, attracting and

attaining the attention of your audience.

Lastly, long-term planning helps you tell a story by leading your audience down their buyer’s

journey. Remember, content is the fuel that keeps the inbound methodology running. Having a

relevant content approach like this allows you to answer your prospects’ questions

and meet them at their point of need.

5 Steps for Creating a Long-Term Content Strategy

1. Educational Content as Opposed to Branded Content

Businesses love to talk about themselves and how great they are. Here’s a secret: That content is only helpful for people who are familiar with your business. If you want to attract new website visitors, you need to create helpful content about your industry that educates and inspires them to continue learning.

2. Create Clusters of Like-Themed Content via Links

Think of your website as a tour guide—it’s in charge of navigating people to where they want to go. The most effective way to do this is to use links and calls to action strategically.

3. Guest Blog on Authoritative Websites and Build Inbound Links

You can have the best content, but unless Google deems your site an authoritative resource, then your content may never be found via search engines. And that would be a shame.

You can increase your website’s authority by increasing the number of inbound links pointing to your website; an inbound link is a link to your website from another website that serves as a vote of confidence.

An effective way to increase your website’s authority, while spreading your thought leadership across the internet, is to guest blog on authoritative websites.

Here’s a list of guest blogging pro tips :

• Make it a best practice to insert links naturally into your content. The goal should be to focus on the reader’s experience first. The links you add are meant to enhance the reader’s experience in case they want to learn more about the specific text you hyperlinked.

• If possible, include your most valuable inbound link near the top of the page. Search engine bots crawl through a page’s content the way a human would read it—left to right and top to bottom. Links that are found near the top of the page pass more authority to the page they’re linking to. Each link thereafter will have slightly less value.

• Syndicate your educational content. It takes a lot of time to create a valuable piece of educational content. An efficient way to get the most out of your guest blogging efforts is to first create a valuable piece of content on your website, then repurpose and package it to provide new value and meaning for someone else. And when I say repurpose and package, I don’t mean simply copy and paste. Use snippets from your original content as a framework to build a new narrative.

4. Promote Your Content Often via Social Media

If you fail to promote your content, don’t expect it to perform well. Simply put by content marketer Salma Jafri, the mantra of smart marketers is “create less, promote more.”

However, there’s nothing more boring than seeing a company promote the same social post over and over with the same message, which is usually the title of the article. You can do better than that.

5. Repurpose Your Content

It takes a lot of time to create effective content. If you create a piece of content that’s performing well, then consider recycling that content into a new format for a different channel. By putting it on a new channel, not only are you able to reach a new audience, but it also allows you to claim more search engine listing real estate if the channel is SEO friendly.

Your Business Needs Long-Term Content Strategy

1. Long-Term Content Makes Readers Think

To keep readers interested and engaged for an extended period, you need to offer them comprehensive, in-depth content that helps them address concerns and solve problems.

2. Content Changes All the Time

As search engines and readers progress, the demand for quality, informed, relevant content increases all the time. Because of this, a long-term content strategy is the best possible weapon.

Designed to insulate marketers against change and help them maintain their traffic and readership despite changing SEO, content, and marketing requirements, long-term content marketing allows space for the strategy to absorb and adapt to changing trends, thus ensuring more effective content and a more adaptive strategy that doesn’t have to scramble to keep up.

3. Long-Term Content is Synonymous With Cornerstone Content

Every good house needs a solid foundation, and every good marketing strategy needs cornerstone content it can rely on to provide long-lasting value and relevance to readers.

Since short-term content strategies are largely aimed at ranking well for a specific keyword or phrase, they all but neglect cornerstone content entirely. Unfortunately, this leads to a less valuable and less relevant website for users of all types.

4. Long-Term Content Doesn’t Turn Off With a Hard Sell

In today’s marketing environment, there is virtually nothing customers hate more than being hard-sold. Nobody wants to know why they can’t live without your product or why it’s critical for them to “buy now!” More often than not, these approaches simply alienate the customer and make it harder for your company to sell products naturally. Unfortunately, the hard-sell is often a tone taken by short-term content.

Long-term content strategies, on the other hand, do no such thing. Because they’re not designed to elicit an immediate response from readers, they seek to provide value and relevance rather than insistence and immediacy.

5. Long-Term Content Strategy is an Effective Way

Did you think writing about trending news items and industry events makes you a short-term content strategist? Think again. Trending-content-focused blogs are extremely important, and it’s a mistake to think of this as only a short-term strategy.

When you focus on using trending, to-the-minute news pieces as a way to enhance and strengthen your long-term content strategy, it’s easy to see how you can improve your company and boost your business overall.

6. Long-Term Content Promotes Itself

Failing to promote your content is one of the most dangerous mistakes in the entire content marketing industry and, unfortunately, it’s one many marketers make. While short-term content needs aggressive promotion to succeed, long-term content essentially promotes itself.

When you create high-quality, in-depth, well-researched, long-term content and push it out to your followers, it’s easy to rank well for your chosen keyword phrase. Because long-term content is meant to garner clicks and shares over time, it’s often a great way to build steady, long-term rankings that can help boost your SERP placement and improve your standing online over time.

7. Long-Term Content is Good Content

Part of the difference between long-term content and short-term content simply comes down to priority and intention. As a general rule, people who commit to the pursuit and development of content for the long term are much more in love with content than people who specialize in short-term content.

While all types of content are important, creating good long-term content requires a different mindset and series of priorities than creating short-term content. Because of this, long-term content strategies often boast better content that caters more effectively to readers.

8. Long-Term Content is an Effective Way to Build an Audience

When it comes to building an audience, you don’t want to aim for building the largest audience possible. This naturally results in a massive but unengaged group of followers.

Instead, you want to build an audience of people who are genuinely interested in your concept and your content and will engage with it actively when it comes out.

Fewer people have the attention span for long-term (or long-form) content today, and by making it a large part of your content strategy, you can build a better audience and earn more qualified leads.

9. Long-Term Content is Best for SEO

SEO is a complex mix of strategies that companies need to succeed online. In addition to optimizing content correctly, companies that want to utilize good SEO also need to ensure their content is high-quality, relevant, and useful to their readers.

While this can be difficult with a short-term content strategy, a long-term content strategy suits the goal quite nicely.

In addition to the fact that long-term content is written with the mind reader, it’s easier to target a group of keywords with a long-term content strategy than it is a short-term content strategy.