Web Content Strategists: Does Your Business Need One?
Trying to figure out a way to boost your content marketing campaign? Web content strategists are excellent at understanding a company’s current content performance and how they can improve it. They fill a crucial role in a marketing team to improve their efforts and create more attractive content for a business’s target audience. In this article, we discuss:
- What Is a Web Content Strategist?
- What Does a Web Content Strategist Do?
- Web Content Strategist vs Content Strategist
- Web Content Strategist vs Content Manager
- How a Web Content Strategist Uses a Content Strategy
- Does Your Business Need a Web Content Strategist?
What Is a Web Content Strategist?
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A web content strategist creates the plan for a company’s content creation process. They do this by researching and assessing their target audience to find their most common pain points and challenges. From there, they develop a strategy to address or solve those pain points using content, like blogs, articles, and eBooks. As you can probably guess from the name, web content strategists focus most of their efforts on web-based content. That might include website copy and other content they publish on the company’s site.
What Does a Web Content Strategist Do?
A web content strategist focuses their efforts and skills on all the content a business publishes on its website. This content includes blogs, articles, and videos, as well as the website itself. When developing the plan for content creation, strategists also focus on search engine optimization (SEO) efforts to make sure the content rises to the top of the search engine results page. They also ensure that audiences can easily find what they’re looking for on the site by updating the web copy and creating an easy-to-follow design.
Why Are Web Content Strategists Important?
Having a dedicated web content strategist is important for a number of reasons, including:
- Setting and Tracking Goals: Web content strategists help to set goals for a content marketing team and track those goals using informative data and analytics. Without a content strategist, companies might not understand how their content or marketing efforts are helping their business.
- Understanding Target Audience: Understanding your target audience is crucial to converting your readers into paying customers. Web content strategists use their analytical and research skills to identify a business’s target audience and the best ways to attract them to the company’s website.
- Identifying Content Gaps: Content strategists work hard to find gaps in a business’s content marketing strategy so it can stay competitive in the industry. For example, competitors might not use blogging to target their audience, which could be a great untapped market for conversions.
- Saving Time and Money: Because content strategists understand exactly what your target audience wants to read, they won’t bother with unnecessary content creation. For instance, if you know your audience wants educational articles instead of videos, you don’t have to waste time or money on video development.
Web Content Strategist vs. Content Manager
Where a web content strategist focuses mainly on the big picture of a content marketing campaign, the content manager takes care of its day-to-day functions. In fact, a content manager generally works with the web content strategist to ensure their efforts align with the overall content strategy. Their duties also differ in a few other ways, including:
- Analytical vs. Organizational: Web content strategists use more analytical skills to understand how a content strategy performs and who it targets. Content managers use more organizational skills to create and implement a content plan that follows the strategist’s ideas and data.
- Brief Collaboration vs. Teamwork: Web content strategists perform most of their work by themselves, only collaborating with other departments and team members briefly. On the other hand, content managers oversee a team of content creators and work with these teams daily.
How a Web Content Strategist Creates a Content Strategy
Here are the ways web content strategists create and use a content strategy in their role:
Auditing
Web content strategists begin their workflow by auditing the website’s current content campaign. They take a look at what the company is already creating and what the results are from these efforts. It’s important for content strategists to look at this data so they can see what’s already working, what could be improved, and what gaps the company has in its present marketing strategy.
For example, a content strategist might discover that their company isn’t currently ranking for a specific keyword that target audiences are searching for. Using this information, the strategist could develop a better content plan to improve rankings for the keyword. But what if a company hasn’t done any content marketing before?
In this case, a web content strategist can take a look at competing content to see what’s attracting target audiences. In fact, a good strategist will take the time to research competitors whether their company is developing content or not. Competitors can help you understand what a similar audience wants to see on your site and define a content plan that meets these needs.
If you’re looking to get started on a content audit, CopyPress offers a free content marketing analysis tool you can use to compare your content with top competitors. See how your content ranks against the competition and what gaps you should be targeting in your content marketing strategy.
“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”
Kevin Doory
Director of SEO at Auto Revo
Planning
Once a web content strategist has a better idea of a business’s current content strategy, they can start to develop a plan to improve it. When planning, they use data they discover in their auditing phase to identify the types of content to create, the topics to cover, the volume of content to produce, and the audience’s pain points content should solve. The first step in the planning phase is developing goals that the company can monitor.
For example, let’s say the company realizes it’s not generating much traffic. The strategist might create the goal of developing more organic traffic using its content creation. Now they have a great place to start in their strategy development. From there, they can look at targeting keywords with little competition to hopefully improve their search engine ranking, boost their traffic, and fulfill their goals.
Creating
Once the web content strategist has a solid plan or strategy in place, they need to enact it. That involves creating the content and ensuring each blog post, video, or eBook matches the brand’s tone and style. The best place to start is with a style guide. Style guides help all writers, editors, and quality assurance specialists who work on a content campaign to emulate the same style. That might include different words they should use or avoid, the formatting of the article, or the simple tone and voice of the text.
Once the style guide is complete, the strategist determines how much content the company needs to produce and who they need on their content team. If the company starts small, it can often get by with a small content team. That includes maybe one or two writers and an editor. But if the company is hoping to scale its production, it might need a larger team to help. That can be a costly and frustrating endeavor, especially if the company tries to hire freelancers.
Luckily, there are other options, like outsourcing your content creation to experts at CopyPress, where we have a team of creatives who know how to develop content for any industry and niche. We also help you develop a style guide to fit your brand’s voice and tone, so your content stays consistent for your target audience. Schedule a strategy call with us and learn how you can scale your content and support your marketing campaign.
Analyzing
Once the strategist starts publishing content for their campaign, it’s important for them to analyze its performance. Analyzing helps the strategist know if the content is successful and if they’re on the right track to achieve the campaign’s goals. However, one of the most important things to remember for a content campaign is that the results can take a little longer to show up than other forms of advertising and marketing. That’s especially true for search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.
That’s because search engines take time to scan new content and decide where to index it on their search results. Once they index it, it can take even longer to update its search ranking based on new visitors, backlinks, and more. So, it’s best for web content strategists to wait before analyzing the results of their work. It’s also best to check on a monthly or weekly basis versus a daily one. Traffic, clicks, and conversions can vary drastically from day to day. It’s more helpful to have an average or general understanding of how it changed over time.
Adjusting and Maintaining
Once the content strategist has a solid understanding of how their current campaign is performing, they’ll adjust and maintain it so it meets the company’s goals. For example, let’s say the strategist’s goal was to improve the average bounce rate by 10% over the next three months. That’s 3.33% per month. If the bounce rate only increased 2.5% in the first month, they need to adjust their efforts in order to reach their goal on time. That might include changing the format or topics of their content as well as the loading time of their webpage.
Once they make adjustments, they let the campaign proceed as normal, and then analyze and adjust again if necessary. If the campaign is currently on course to meet its goals, the web content strategist just needs to maintain their efforts. During this time, it’s also helpful for the strategist to look at other potential gaps in their content strategy and see what goals they can create for their next campaign. For example, they might be on course to improving their bounce rate, but their conversion rate is still very low. The next campaign can then focus on the conversion rate.
Does Your Business Need a Web Content Strategist?
The short answer is, yes. If your business is currently conducting any type of content marketing online, you need a web content strategist to make it as effective as possible. Content strategists help you better understand your current content strategies and how they’re helping your target audience. But it’s not always easy to find a content strategist, especially if you’re looking for a freelancer. It’s important that your content strategist understands the capability of your team and your in-house content production.
That’s why it’s always better to use a full-time web content strategist who can get to know your team and its content production capabilities. Don’t have a content production team? CopyPress can help you with it all.
Not only do we have a team of vetted writers, editors, and quality assurance specialists, but we work with you and your team to develop a winning content strategy that helps you fulfill all your content marketing goals. Get in touch with us and find out how we can help your business create a content marketing strategy that boosts rankings, increases traffic, and achieves your goals.
CopyPress writer
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