You may have heard the phrase, “content is king” and in many ways, it is. The success of your website is often measured by the quality of its content. The content on your website should be meaningful, engaging, and impactful. Successful content meets the demands of your target audience and is optimized for search engines.
But you shouldn’t just start creating a bunch of content at once and hope something sticks. You’ll need to have a clear content strategy in place to plan, develop, create, and distribute content to the right audiences on the proper platforms.
It’s not always easy to formulate a content strategy, especially if you’re working with a small team, or in some cases, alone. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try! There are a number of tools, tips, and tricks, to help small teams tackle content strategy. Recently, our Marketing Team attended an event presented by Think Company and hosted by content strategist, Malaika Carpenter, all about content strategy for small teams.
In her presentation, Malaika broke down the steps to developing a useful content strategy and provided insight into how small teams can manage their content effectively.
Who’s your audience?
Before you start creating content, you need to know who you’re creating it for. This will take a bit of research but knowing who exactly you’re creating content for will help you determine why you’re creating it.
Every audience needs something different from the content their consuming, and it’s up to you to learn which type of content will resonate best with your users. Knowing your target audience in-depth will influence the way your content looks and feels in order to achieve your content goals.
Malaika suggests writing your content goals down so that they can be referenced throughout the content creation process and shared among the rest of your team.
Create a workflow
Creating a content workflow will provide a realistic overview of what it actually takes to develop content.
Your workflow should describe the time, resources, and effort needed to consistently create, deliver, and manage content.
Malaika suggests breaking your content workflow down into two sections, structure and process. The structure of your content should explain the components needed to build a specific type of content, while the process should explain the tasks necessary to create it.
For example, the structure of your company’s email newsletters might be very different from the structure of your blog posts. Each of these types of content will require different information and a different method of gathering information. It’s important to understand what each type of content needs to be successful.
Develop a framework
Developing a framework can help you produce content at scale, even if you’re the only content creator on your team!
Your framework should dictate how content is designed and include the guidelines necessary to instruct others on how to create content. By establishing a set of rules that are universally agreed upon by everyone on your team, you can eliminate a lot of confusion, questions, and misinformation right off the bat and ensure that all content is held to the same standards.
The templates included in your framework should indicate your content’s voice and tone, writing style, and organization.
Educate your team
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you’ll want to educate and engage other members of your team (even if those team members don’t consider themselves “content creators”). It’s especially important to keep stakeholders and leadership in the loop regarding content strategy practices.
Sharing relevant content strategy documents with your team ensures that everyone knows their role in the content creation process. When everyone is on the same page about how and why content is created, you can effectively avoid roadblocks and track progress and goals.
Breaking your content creation process down into clear, digestible, and manageable steps can help even the smallest teams take control of their content and better align it with core business objectives and audience needs.
Be sure to check out our other content strategy related blog posts. You can also connect with Malaika on LinkedIn and Twitter to learn more about her experience with solo content strategy.