Create a Powerful Content Media Strategy.

First of all, what is a content media strategy? What value does it bring to customers?

Planning, developing, and managing content whether audio or written is a content media strategy. The goal of a content media strategy is to deliver content to clearly defined audience to spur action. Individuals, small teams or content marketers work to actively to attract, engage, and retain customers. They do so by creating quality podcasts, articles, videos or other media.

For example, a content media strategy for salon might be blogs posts about hair and beauty tips. Or a salon might provide how-to guides or other content about the salon itself. Ultimately, bringing results such as more visitors, traffic, retaining customers, and selling more products end goals of content strategy.

Why is a content marketing strategy important?

It will hard to achieve the business goals if no plan is in place.

Here are other reasons to develop a strategy:

Your team will be less stressed
Enable a team to understand what is working and what is not
Spend more time promoting content
Improve brand awareness

A simple image showing how to develop a social media content strategy.

Steps to Develop a Content Media Strategy

Set your business goals
Define your target audience
Analyze Your Competitors
Define your platform and topic
Create a social media content calendar
Continually track and iterate results
Create the best content possible

The image features a simplistic, yet powerful scene of a man engaged in the thoughtful process of setting business goals.

1. Set Your Business Goals

A content media strategy can be effective at attracting new customers. However, measurable goals need to be established first. These will enable the content team to determine whether the energy, efforts, and strategy that have been implemented are working.

For example, a salon uploaded a video to Instagram highlighting new products available. There’s going to be an extra 10% off for first 30 people who call or email about products.

How would the salon establish a baseline to track the engagement, traffic, or sales if there are no goals. The answer is, they cannot. Take a look at some common goals that are typical for most businesses.

Improve customer engagement
Drive repeat business
Grow leads
Improve revenue
Increase organic traffic

So, we can use the above goals to track benchmarks that the business strives to reach. For example:

Improve customer engagement in the first quarter by 15%.
Grow leads by 50% in January.
Improve revenue by 13% during the first quarter
Increase organic traffic by 25% during the first quarter.

The above goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely(SMART). No matter the size of the business, it is best use set business goals and ensure they are SMART.

The image presents a visually appealing and straightforward design centered around the educational theme of "How to Define Your Target Audience." Set against a warm beige background that evokes a sense of calm and focus, the central focus is on bold, clear text that directly communicates the topic at hand.

2. Define Your Target Audience

Another fact which will determine whether the content strategy success is defining the target audience.

Now, this might be painstaking, tedious, or time-consuming but it is worth it.

First, take time understand the demographic of target audience. Review the education, age, income, location to build a buyer personas(a detail description of someone who represents the target audience).

The business could decide to partner with an agency or consulting team to obtain additional information.

However, that might not be necessary depending on the information gathered by the team.

Understanding which social media platform your audience is spending the most time on is critical.

This will dictate the creation of content strategy, which platform to focus on, and what resources to devote the platform specific strategy.

3. Analyze Your Competitors

Once you or your team gather information about the target audience, it is time to analyze the competition. Use social listening tools or competitor analysis tools to streamline the process. See what they are posting, how often, when, and last but not least how often they engage with followers.

Also, it is a good idea to note what competitors are not doing. This can give your org ideas for opportunities to surpass competitors or mistakes to avoid.

A title of section with a blue background, stating The Top 10 Social Media Sites & Platforms.

4. Define Your Platform and Topic.

While building a content media strategy, it is important to understand that social media platforms are not created equal. There are a lot of social media platforms and your org cannot share content to all of them at the same time. Based off the research done during analysis of target audience, you will already know which platforms to …target.

After choosing the top platforms to target, pick a topic(s) to write about. Promote the company’s products and services, aim to be informative and entertaining with written or digital content. To achieve the balance, you’ll need to understand what your audience wants.

The image features a visually calming and organized depiction of a blank calendar, strategically used to plan future content release dates. Each date designated for releasing new content is subtly marked with a small, green leaf symbol, serving as a natural and creative indicator of growth and renewal.

5.Create a Social Media Content Calendar

After choosing which platforms you’re going use, begin creating a content calendar. Decide which content you will post on any given day, week, and time to do so. Work done during the research phase will enable you or your team to launch content at the best time. As more content is added to the calendar, there will be gaps or areas where there are too many promotions.

Viewing the content calendar at a glance will help you determine whether the content is appealing and compelling enough.

Also, is the team promoting too much of the same content? Are there opportunities to reuse content that is captivating or generating a lot of buzz/ engagement.

Perhaps you might decide to remove articles, videos, podcasts that ineffective based off data. Lastly, a calendar will allow your org or team to establish a regular schedule of posts.

An image of an elephant and ant on a balance beam, along with reminders to track, measure, and iterate. Content strategy needs to be informed by analytics.

6. Continually Track and Iterate Results

Your team should be using benchmarks or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track performance. If certain content- for example- podcasts are yielding a lot of leads, continue to utilize them. Needless to say, it is critical to monitor your analytics because they will dictate if the content team needs to adjust the strategy.

Perhaps, posting more short videos on Instagram, or using TikTok because.

A napkin with several messages, such as great content, engaging, compelling, interesting, readable and many more. Essentially, great content needs to be shareable, memorable and many other things. — Crafting the Perfect Message: A Napkin’s Guide to Making Great Content, Memorable, and Irresistibly Shareable

7. Create the Best Content Possible

Without a doubt, creating fresh and dazzing content is one of the biggest challenges for any marketer. Not to mention there are several social media platforms and audiences to consider. That said, utilize all tools at your disposal, like the competitor analysis. It can give you ideas of what content to develop.

Use Google Analytic, in-house analytics, or trends can inspire colleauges to create new content. Need more ideas? Use an online idea generator or YouTube as other resources. Last but not least, utilize a social media calendar which is naturally built in promotion ideas.

Conclusion

In summary, a content media strategy will help any business deliver content clearly to a defined audience. Some reasons to develop strategy include decreasing stress to improving brand awareness. Follow the step-by-step plan to develop a content media strategy. Begin with setting your business goals then transition to defining the target audience and end with creating the best content possible. If done well, a content media strategy can catapult your business to unparraelled success.