Annie is a Content Manager at Express Writers.
Developing a content strategy can easily seem like it can be a futile exercise.
Many people don’t have a clue about where to start when it comes to putting together a detailed plan for what their content should do and what sort of demographic it should be aimed at.
The truth of the matter is that overthinking content marketing can be dangerous.
Instead of focusing on the minor details, what you should be aiming for is to see the big picture.
It’s only through that you will actually be able to experience the true power of content marketing the way it was meant to be used.
The Blank Slate Theory & Your Content Strategy
As artist Joe Madureira says, a blank slate is as exciting as it is daunting. What we propose to do through a blank slate comparison is to see how a company starting from no website or content marketing strategy can utilize the tools of developing a content strategy to be successful. In this fictionalized case study we will be utilizing a two-phase plan for the creation of a detailed content strategy that can be used to improve a website’s ranking and visibility.
Methodology Behind Our Experiment
Utilizing a free tool like Google Analytics allows us to easily track the key performance indicators (KPI’s) that we’re interested in. Indicators such as number of visitors and unique visitors over time allow us to gauge the success of our content marketing strategy. If we want to be more specific we can set up funnels in Google Analytics in order to track clicks from what content leads to which page to determine the most popular content for attracting users. The numbers from Google Analytics will be our guide to how well our content strategy is doing, just like in real life.
Time to start working on that content strategy, if you haven’t already!
Content Strategy Phase One: The Basics
There are a handful of things that a basic content strategy should have in place as a jumping off point. These form the framework for your future content production and also aids in your SEO compatibility and your search rank score. These things are the very basics but even though they seem to be unnecessary at the start, they are a powerful means of attracting traffic and formulating leads. The basic start for a website’s content strategy comes from incorporating these key elements:
1. META tags: META tags aid in helping to describe a page’s content to a search engine. Including META tags in your site setup ensures that you are able to include the most important elements that you would expect to get your page noticed. The more relevant information you include in your META data the better your search relevancy will be. This translates into increased traffic from search engines, as relevancy is extremely important to users. No one wants to click a page and end up somewhere they didn’t expect to be.
2. Keywords: These are words that describe the content on your page and allow a user to be aware of what the site they are visiting is about. Used in combination with META description tags, your keywords form the backbone of your content strategy in the realm of SEO. You don’t want too much of your keywords cluttering up your page since search engines are usually wary of too high a keyword density. Ideally, your keyword density should lie between 3% and 5% for any particular keyword set.
3. Product Descriptions: These give your site the look and feel of a professional company and also gives Google something to reference. Your product descriptions should also have keywords considered and should conform to the limit of 3% to 5% as well. Keeping this figure is enough to satisfy the search engine that you’re not keyword stuffing just to make your content more popular. The descriptions should be meaningful as far as possible and written for the user. It’s a true test of balancing your content writing in order to appeal to both search engine robots and the average user.
4. Basic Content: Basic content gives your site a barebones for further development of content as time goes by. Through your basic content you are trying to attract users and at the same time get them to do something. Whether it’s subscribing to an email list or clicking over to a product page, your basic content should be original and should appeal to the customer. It should bring value to the customer’s life in some way. That is the hallmark of good content.
Content Strategy Phase Two: Advanced Operations
After setting up the initial barebones on the blank slate website, we can now proceed to monitor it for a period of time to see how it evolves and develops in terms of traffic. This sets a benchmark from where we can go on to the advanced part of the exploration and the key motivator for developing a content strategy.
Does content really make a difference in generating leads and increasing visits? Let’s find out by utilizing the major vehicles of content marketing:
1. Blogs: Blogging has long been accepted as one of the ways to generate traffic and to keep your website fresh to attract new visitors. Search engines enjoy blogs because they tend to deal with a particular niche and once the search engine determines the niche the blog is in it’s easy to direct relevant traffic to the site. Blogs allow for a company or website to focus on creating high-quality content that appeals to their target demographic. Through this content the company can generate new leads or conversions, or develop customer loyalty by focusing on providing useful content to their users. Blogs need to be updated regularly in order to remain relevant. Updating too much can cause useful information to be lost. There’s a fine balance to walk here, but doing it well is worth the effort.
2. Social Media: The newest way for websites to interact with customers directly and to generate leads is through content marketing on social media. The use of memetics and other content that attracts users to like or share allows a company to spread the word far and wide and to get a much more diverse outreach than with simple SEO marketing. The virality of social media content is what makes it attractive as a medium for content marketing. All it takes is the right combination of images, words and emotions to make a piece of content that could theoretically reach hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. Websites such as Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter have made it even easier for content marketers to share great content with their followers.
Expected Results
As is expected with a fledgling content strategy, it would take some time for the users to reach a trickle. Ideally, we would run this blank slate website against another website that has nothing on it as a control to see the difference in traffic between that control site and our site over a period of a few months. Because of our SEO work (META tags and content descriptions etc.) we expect to see a decent amount of traffic at the end of the first six-month period. At the end of this initial setup period we can then average the amount of visitors daily and keep that score as the benchmark against which our second phase can be tested.
Introducing the second phase allows us to see how much better content marketing is compared to a site that operates without it (presented by the data from our six-month phase-one trial). Because of the nature of content strategies and the methodology used, it can take a couple months before noticeable changes start happening.
This would be the case if and only if the chosen method of content marketing is done as intended (blogs updated on time, social media accounts focusing on a target demographic etc.). Over the next six months the performance of the site would increase quite a lot based on the use of content marketing.
Conclusions
If performed properly and under the best of conditions, this experiment would prove decisively if content marketing is truly beneficial to a company or brand.
Real-life case studies are readily available where brands tout the awesome capability of content marketing to drive traffic and generate leads (GE Reports immediately comes to mind). However, the real world is rarely as cut and dried as test situations.
Many times when companies undertake a content strategy, they try to minimize the cost and maximize the impact.
Although this strategy is admirable, there are some things you shouldn’t cut corners with. Updating regularly is one of them. Generating high quality content is another. The best way to ensure that your content is of the highest standard is to invest in a professional content production team to develop content for you on a regular basis. A content strategy has the potential to do great things for your traffic, it just has to be implemented properly.