Content Marketing

How To Develop a Web Content Strategy

CopyPress

October 25, 2022 (Updated: March 8, 2023)

If you’re planning a content marketing campaign for your brand or business, it’s important to start with a web content strategy. Web content strategies help you plan and launch a more effective campaign to target the right online audience and generate leads for your business. Without planning a structure for the type of content you create and the approaches to promote it, your marketing campaign could be ineffective. To help you avoid creating and casting your content into the digital void, this guide breaks down how to develop a web content strategy and why you need one:

• Why You Need a Web Content Strategy
• How To Develop a Web Content Strategy

Why You Need a Web Content Strategy

Image via Unsplash by @jeshoots

Web content strategies are crucial to the success of your content marketing campaign because they help you build a relationship with your target audience. Building a relationship with your target audience is important because it allows you to create quality leads. And attracting quality leads is more likely to result in conversions because these audiences know your brand, its expertise, and what you have to offer them. A content strategy can help you build these relationships by understanding what your target wants to read and what they’re hoping to find when visiting your brand’s online platforms.

But content marketing needs to offer value. So instead of creating and filling everything with ads, let audiences get to know your brand and its expertise through well-written content. This way, you’re solving customers’ pain points and presenting your company as the solution to their challenges. Your web content strategy can be the key to showcasing your business as an expert and authority in its niche, further boosting brand awareness and overall image.

Read more: Everything You Need to Know About Content Strategy

How To Develop a Web Content Strategy

A web content strategy can cover different types, platforms, and promotional efforts. As you get started, take a look at the steps below. Then sign up for the CopyPress newsletter for more approaches to planning and developing effective web content strategies:

1. Create Goals

The first step is creating achievable, relevant strategy goals for your campaign. Take a look at what you’re hoping to achieve and how long it might take to get there. For example, increasing your overall traffic by 100% in a month isn’t a reasonable expectation. But increasing it by 30% over three months might be more possible.

Understanding what your main goal is important, whether its lowering your bounce rate, improving traffic, or increasing conversions. That’s because it helps you understand how your content creation plays a role into achieving your goals and what you need to create or syndicate in order to succeed. For example, let’s say you’re hoping to increase your organic search traffic. That means it’s important for you to create content that’s optimized for search engines to try to rank well on the search engine results page (SERP).

2. Find Your Target Audience

Once you understand your goals, it’s time to start searching for your target audience. This helps you uncover exactly the type of content your audience wants to read and where they want to read it. For instance, a lot of your audience might prefer finding their content on social media versus search engines. That means you need to focus more on social media marketing and developing content for that type of platform.

To find your audience, start by creating a fictional representation of them using three different sections.

• What They Look Like: This includes demographic and age, as well as occupation and location.
• What They Like To Do: Think about their hobbies, interests, and other things they like to do outside of work.
• Why They’re Here: Understand why they might buy from your company. Are they looking to solve a specific challenge? How will your products or services help them?

Now, take a few points from each section and create a fictional customer persona. If you have enough details, create multiple personas. Give each one a name and a picture to help you visualize each audience member. Once you’ve created them, think about how each consumer might approach your business. What journey will they take to finally purchase your product or service? Will they Google different problems or questions? Will they stumble upon an ad? Think about the steps they might take to understand how to target them effectively with content marketing.

Read more: Create an Audience Profile in 7 Steps

3. Plan for Different Content Types

There are a few things you can do to help you determine what type of content to create. First, look at your newly created customer personas. What might your audience like to see? Do they use social media regularly? Do they prefer to get their information from blogs?

The point is, uncovering where and how your audience spends time online can give you insights into the types of content that’ll attract them to your brand. The other tactic you can use is a website audit to dig into your most and least successful strategies. You can also look at competitor websites to understand what those brands are doing to rank in search and attract audiences. That means analyzing the content you currently create and seeing how it’s performing. As you do this, review certain types of content to see which topics are performing better than others.

See what insights you can gather about your content creation based on what you already have. Then, take a look at the competitors. What content types do they produce the most? What topics does their content cover? How does their audience engage with it? Take note of the differences between competitor content and your brand’s current content. This can help you find potential gaps in your strategy that you can target and improve.

At CopyPress we have a content marketing analysis tool that compares your website with your top three competitors. Using the analysis, you’ll uncover the low-hanging fruit opportunities to understand how your brand’s content is performing. Plus, you’ll discover potential syndication partners that you can use for additional promotional and link-building opportunities.

“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

4. Develop a Content Creation Process

It’s one thing to strategize what content you need and where to place it, it’s another to actually create it. If you don’t have a team of dedicated writers, editors, and quality assurance specialists, you’ll find it hard to scale your content production when you need to.

Essentially, that means if you discover that your content is performing well, so you want to make more, it’s going to take you extra time to find the resources and hire the staff to make that happen. In that time, you could potentially lose the moment your content is currently creating. Developing a content creation process that’s scalable in the long run can help solve this issue.

5. Promote or Syndicate the Content

Creating content is just the first part of a web content strategy. The next part is actually getting the content seen by an audience. To do that, you need to find the best places to promote or syndicate your content. Promoting your content on social media or search engines can help you generate an audience. This doesn’t necessarily help you generate quality leads, but it can at least improves traffic and search engine ranking. This includes paid ads and influencers or agencies to share and promote your content.

It’s also beneficial to syndicate your content. Content syndication is the act of partnering with another business or platform and posting a copy of your content on their website or blog. This allows you to improve your brand awareness by displaying your content to someone else’s audience. It also helps you generate more backlinks for your content, which can definitely boost your search engine rankings.

Contact businesses who share a target audience, but might not be the main competitor. Offer your own website and blog as a platform to share other brands’ content. Once you’ve established a relationship with these businesses, they’ll be more inclined to offer you a similar service and promote your content on their sites and platforms. And with a handful of syndication and promotional partners all publishing your brand’s content, more audiences will see and engage with it.

Read more: Syndicating Content: Building a Better Content Strategy

6. Analyze and Refine the Process

Once people start to engage with your content, analyze the effectiveness. This can help you determine what’s working and if your content strategy is actually supporting your goals. For example, let’s say you notice that your content is improving your bounce rate, but not really affecting your conversion rate. If your goal was to reduce your bounce rate, you’re doing really well. But if it was to get more conversions through specific calls to action, you might need to make some adjustments in order to achieve the objective.

A great way to examine your content’s effectiveness is through Google Analytics, which also happens to be free. This tool tracks your website’s data, information on individual web pages and pieces of content, as well as your target audience. Create an account today and start tracking your website’s and content’s performance. Then, use that data to create a better and more effective web content strategy.

Take the Next Step in Planning Your Web Content Strategy

Are you thinking about using a web content strategy as part of your overall marketing plan? At CopyPress, we have the tools you need to identify the best content opportunities to improve visibility, boost rankings, and attract your ideal customers. Get the conversation started with our strategy team and create a content marketing plan that gets results.

Christy Walters

CopyPress writer

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