The importance of a website content strategy

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At time4design, we are proud to offer a variety of different services, our focus, developing high quality websites.

We understand the importance of originality, and something a little different to what your competition might be offering. For that reason, we will be covering the importance of devising a website content strategy, an area too often ignored by 63% of companies.

Quality content in most cases will be completed by a professional digital marketer, averaging 62% less than other traditional marketing strategies – yet can produce as many as three times the number of leads. If deciding to create something independently, that can be more of a challenging experience. Those in professional industries such as education, law and healthcare will understand how important it is to be accurate, clear and explicit, yet, without a sound strategy, a clear focus of objective is lost.

Taking a positive leap forward, we recommend that you try and implement as many of the following ideas as you can.

Why do you need a content marketing strategy in the first place?

1) Google is much more likely to respond well with a company that creates original content that is clearly valuable, unique and engaging. Good content will be informative, tailored with optimization techniques designed to drive further engagement within your search results. There are quality guidelines provided by Google on exactly how to do this.

2) Helps build a genuine kind of relationship and authority with your target audience. A focused strategy will help give them a reason to come back, instead of merely a onetime visit.

3) Being able to give people more information instead of an affiliate-driven sales pieces adds more to your company value. As an example, the average amount of words in a general blog post will be around 2000 as found by Moz/Sumo. Anything under 1000 words tends to not have a huge impact within search results. Of course, the quality of material will be always be at a forefront.

4) Another key reason why you need a sound content strategy is that, put simply, your competition. If you cannot keep up, then you are much more likely to suffer consequences. With more than half of marketers producing at least one new piece of content per day, it’s imperative that you don’t fall behind or reduce production standards.

Understanding what strategy means for content creation

The term website content strategy can mean more than a few different things. Once you plan key factors to building your content strategy, you’ll have a better idea of what, where and when you’ll market yourself.

• Think about what makes your business different. A quick glance at where you might be going wrong is hugely important. Decide what you can offer as a company where your competition mostly cannot. This should be a primary part of your targeted marketing message across a websites entire content strategy.
• A content strategy should clearly break down who the content is created for. The easiest way to write up quality content is to quite simply work on creating content that has a direct, ‘ideal’ reader in mind. Who is your primary audiences? Not every business has just one audience, so who will you be looking to target primarily?
• Once you know who you will be targeting, it’s important to make clear on what problems you will offer to solve. Through your content, you should be looking to pinpoint a few common errors that people in your industry suffer from. How can what you offer help them to overcome said problem? This will be a primary part of your strategizing.
• Understand the content platforms you will operate on. For example, some industries will fare better if you spend more of your content budget on creating videos to explain complex processes. Others will benefit more from long read articles, listicles, fact-driven pieces and other media like infographics, podcasts or similar.

Have a website content strategy plan in mind

Start off by creating a clear plan of action. Work towards creating a plan that is going to work within your long-term strategy. It’s important that you take some time to do some research on your industry. Create profiles of the kind of age brackets, income groups and interests that you will target. For example, someone in education might be looking to target anyone from young parents to students looking to learn in a second language.

Remember that targets change over time. As your business grows and you feel like you are fulfilling certain objectives, you can begin to slowly shift your focus. Make sure your strategy has some much-needed ‘wiggle room’ or it can be hard to make your strategy stick for the long-term.

Analyze the competition that you will come up against daily. This will help you to make sure that you are not just copying their present ideas, and it can help to differentiate and alternative from the competition out there. it’s always important to run a competitor audit, and then look closely at the content you already have: what mini angles can you target your competition has ignored?

Keep an open mind with your web content strategy

The best thing to do is keep an open mind and you should be able to find some cohesive content strategies that make a lot of sense as a company, and to your target audience. Of course, as time goes on, plans should be continually reviewed, adopting new techniques and creativity. Your website matters, so ultimately, take the time to do it right!