7 Questions to Ask Yourself When Evaluating Your Content Strategy

With the rising competition between brands in the digital world, marketers are putting an emphasis on content marketing as a method of promoting their company and enticing people to visit their site. However, not all marketers are seeing the results they desire from their content marketing efforts.

There are various reasons why your content might not be yielding the required results, and one of these is a poor strategy. In some cases, there may be many people involved in the content creation and strategy execution process. However, that does not mean that your efforts will be fruitful. 

Some things should be taken into consideration: What is your strategy? Who is your audience? What do they want, and how do you get that message across? 

All of these questions matter a great deal when dealing with content marketing. However, if you’re not seeing positive results from your efforts, these questions can help you start to uncover where you’re falling short.

1. What is Your Overall Marketing Strategy?

If you conduct a survey amongst successful companies who dabble in marketing content, you will find that their edge is a good marketing strategy. 

In order to create a strategy that’ll guide you toward success, you need to define your goals.

Start by defining key performance indicators (KPIs). These are the metrics that you want to influence as a result of your marketing efforts. They help your business understand what to prioritize and what to improve. Next, identify what tactics will have a positive and long-lasting impact on your KPIs and work on implementing those tactics. 

Just having a strategy won’t be enough to successfully drive traffic through your content. You must also create content with that marketing strategy in mind and ensure you’re targeting the right audience. Employing a strategy to attract an audience that does not fit your niche or fails to understand consumer needs can land you in a pickle. Assess your audience and reorganize your content marketing approach to speak to them.

2. Who is Your Target Audience?

If your intended audience cannot relate to your content or if your content doesn't answer the questions your audience may have, then it won’t contribute to your bottom line.

People always want access to accurate information that's easy to digest. As we take a turn to the digital age, long texts are gradually losing engagement and going into extinction as videos, animations and infographics become more prevalent. 

Use the formats your audience prefers to engage with and ensure your content is interesting to your audience and provides value. In turn, this will keep them glued to your page and coming back for more!

3. Does Your Content Align With Your Product or Services?

If the content you create doesn’t eventually lead back to how your company can help prospects, readers won’t take any next steps once arriving on your website.

Many companies are so concerned with creating quality content that they have forgotten to align it to their target goal — creating customers. As important as awareness is, not targeting the right content topics can lead to the dilution of your brand and audience confusion. 

Target your audience’s pain points with the content you produce, and you will find that your conversions increase. Not only will your audience be interested in your content but also in your brand and the services you provide.

4. Who is Creating Your Content?

If you’re not a writer, you don’t have to create your content by yourself. Having experienced team members in communication fields or at least with a creative mind and understanding of the targeted audience will help you create quality content. 

You might be good at what you do, but that does not mean that you have the capability to clearly and effectively communicate what your brand can do. Find people who are specialized in content creation to take care of such things so that you can focus on your strengths. 

All team members can play a role in topic creation and coming up with content ideas, but a writer is necessary to turn those ideas into blogs, e-books or infographics for your audience to enjoy. 

5. Is Your Content Optimized?

Specifically, is it optimized for search? SEO has a lot to do with how well your content ranks on search engine platforms — which can be a major source of traffic.

Meta titles, meta descriptions and relevant top searched keywords are a means of making your content SEO-friendly. 

But, don’t stuff so many keywords into your content that it has a detrimental impact on the quality. That’ll hurt your content marketing efforts in the long-term. Instead, write for both people and search engines by using current facts and figures, making your post interesting, explicit and unique and only creating content relevant to your business.

6. Does It Include a Call-to-Action?

By generating content for your audience, you attract them to your site or platform. However, if they just read what you wrote and leave never to be seen again, your traffic won’t turn into paying customers — they need to take action while you have their attention. Coax your audience into participating more, for longer: call them to action!

A lot of successful businesses make use of calls-to-action (CTAs), and you probably have come across them online. A CTA directs your audience toward the next step you want them to take. 

When planning and creating content, you should have this action in mind. Do you want your audience to visit your social media page? Do you want them to take a survey or sign up for a newsletter? Tell the audience exactly what to do with the help of a CTA. 

Telling your readers to do something increases the chances of them actually doing it. 

Examples of CTA text include:

• Download the guide now
• Subscribe to our podcast
• Register by [date]
• Book a Meeting
• Request an Assessment/Demo

7. Are You Promoting the Content You Create?

Promotion is another way to amplify the reach of your content. The worst thing to do to your content is not to promote it after it has been published. 

Many businesses have a misconception that content marketing is all about content creation, organic traffic and nothing else. Well, that’s wrong — it is far more than that. Creation needs to be accompanied by content promotion.

Emails are an effective way of promoting your content. The use of email newsletters is both economical and efficient. There were approximately 290 billion emails sent in 2019 and that number is only expected to grow. Email reaches 85% of the people you send it to, it's up to you to make it captivating enough for the recipient to take the desired action.

Additionally, making use of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram can also be effective to promote content. With all the data social media offers, it makes targeted ad placement and content creation that much easier. 

Social media influencers can also elevate your reach and amplify digital marketing efforts. Influencers already have a large audience base with whom they've built trust, using them to promote your content will also be a nice strategy.

Conclusion

The reach of your business is amplified through effective content marketing. Taking into account your overall marketing strategy, your target audience, your content’s alignment with your product or service, your content creation process, your SEO efforts, your CTAs and your promotional strategy will help you ensure your content reaches the right audience and achieves the best results possible.