How to create a content strategy for your business and why it’s more important than ever in the digital era

The right content strategy agency plan will drive consistently high levels of enquiries, strong leads, and additional revenue to your company over the long term.

They do this through the creation, publication, and distribution of engaging, persuasive, plain English sales and marketing materials online.

With more revenue being generated via web-based sales and enquiries than ever before, content marketing delivers a bigger share of the growing online marketplace to the companies investing in it.

And the longer a company delays the decision to invest in content marketing, the harder it will be to catch up with your competitors whose content marketing campaigns are already underway.

Our content strategy agency services

With our content strategy agency services, we have six aims:

1. every time a prospective client sees your content, the content they see really sells the products and services you offer well and it highlights the extra value that your products and services add to your clients’ businesses or lives,
2. the content we create builds your company’s credibility and authority in the minds of prospective customers,
3. every piece of online content we post on 3rd party websites should, where possible, link back to your website for greater search engine optimisation,
4. the volume and quality of the content we create results in a very high search engine ranking for your website and every page on it,
5. social media is an opportunity to build a significant number of interested followers and we should create and post quality content every day so that it appears in as many followers’ newsfeeds as possible, and
6. we should encourage the readers of your content to contact you directly at every opportunity however they found your content.

Prior to implementing your content strategy, we throughly research:

• your company, its ethos, and its history
• the features and benefits of your products and services,
• what makes prospective clients likely to buy from your company,
• what prevents prospective clients buying from your company,
• your main competitors’ content strategies, and
• the marketplace you operate in.

After our research, we’ll then set out our proposed content strategy approach for your company.

There’ll likely be three elements to your content strategy – web-based, promotional, and direct.

1. Web-based contact:

• The building of a library of high quality articles and blogs for your website answering the questions clients are most likely to ask about your products and services
• Re-writing of your current web pages and product/service description pages for SEO purposes
• Adding three calls to action to each page on your website – one to encourage immediate contact or a sale, one to encourage sign-up to your email newsletter service, and one to encourage visitors to follow you on social media
• If your online presence is very old, we may recommend investing in a brand new website design
• Identification of 3rd party websites of interest to your target markets and negotiating placement of your content on these websites

2. Promotional contact:

• Paid-for social media campaigns encouraging prospective clients to follow you
• The creation of downloadable and shareable content for use on paid-for social media campaigns and Google Ads campaigns in exchange for prospective customers’ contact details
• Press releases to be distributed to relevant journalists and publications with the goal of placing your content on high authority websites

3. Direct contact:

• Establishment or continuation of a newsletter to be sent regularly to your customers, prospects, and those who leave their details with you on your website
• Purchase of bought-in B2B email database containing companies and decision makers likely to need your products and services the most so that we can send them a promotional message once a month
• Organic (non paid for) social media management including the creation and scheduling of interesting, relevant, and actionable information to followers with a need for what your company sells

When we present you with our suggested content strategy approach, we strongly encourage feedback and input from you on each element so that we can agree on a plan you’re happy to proceed with.

Content strategy agency service prices

The plan we create for your company is bespoke.

For the parts of the plan you decide to go ahead with, we’ll quote you for each of these services.

Please bear in mind that we offer discounts to clients for larger volumes of work.

Find out more

To speak with one of our account managers about our content strategy agency services, please call us on 0330 010 3495 or click here to email us.

What is content marketing strategy?

To be the most successful, the content marketing materials you create for your company should:

• be easy to find on your website and on other websites and platforms your potential clients are likely to use and trust,
• vividly describe the benefits of the products and services you offer making them relevant to potential clients’ lives or the businesses they work for or run, and
• capture and share your company vision with interested consumers and business decision-makers.

If your targets like reading blogs and articles to find out more about the types of products and services you sell, you’ll need to write the most engaging, compelling, and informative blogs and articles in plain English.

If you know your target customer rarely uses Twitter when they’re on their buying journey, you need to find out which social media platforms they use and make sure you create regular content for those platforms.

Types of content strategy

It’s our job to create a content strategy bespoke to your company, its products and services, its clients, and to beat your competitors.

Creating and uploading customer-focused content for your website and the social media platforms you appear on is sure to increase interaction and this means that more people will see your content.

More people seeing your content means a greater number of enquiries and sales and, importantly, more forward-sharing of that content with friends, family, and work colleagues.

Where to start with content strategy for your company

Your main aim for your company’s content strategy should be to:

• make it as easy as possible for your target clients to find your website or your social media feeds and
• post premium content to your website and social media feeds which persuades your target clients to make a purchase or leave their details for sales team follow-up straight away.

Your secondary aim should be to encourage sign-ups to your email newsletter service or to your social media accounts if a decision to purchase is pending but not imminent.

Content marketing drives immediate sales and it builds sales funnels.

What is a sales funnel?

A sales funnel guides your prospective clients from their initial awareness of a potential need for your product or service right through to the point of purchase.

The three stages in a sales funnel are:

• early-stage (when your client realises that there is a problem or that they are missing out on an opportunity and they are investigating how others overcome these issues)
• middle-stage (when your client realises that your product or service is likely to help them with their issue and they are investigating both you, your competitors, and the range of suitable products and services available to them)
• near-point-of-purchase (this is content designed specifically to give your product or service an advantage as the decision to choose a supplier is imminent)

At each stage of the funnel, you answer a question, you solve a problem, and you describe the benefits of using your product or service.

To do this, the content in your sales funnel must be easy to find, interesting, relevant, and meaningful.

You need to create an in-depth and substantial bank of content to upload to your website and for wider distribution answering the questions your potential clients ask at all stages of their buying journey.

57% of marketers regard content strategy and creation as being of significant importance in gaining customer leads.

Our five-step approach to creating a successful content strategy for your business

More Than Words’ digital agency team develops content marketing strategies for clients who want to increase:

• traffic to their website,
• the number of decision makers following them on social media,
• the number of subscribers to their current or proposed email newsletter service, and
• their overall volume of sales and enquiries.

To achieve this, we take a five-step process when planning and executing your content strategy.

Understanding what you want for your company

First, our content creation agency team discusses with you what your commercial goals are from your content marketing campaign.

This is so that we can understand exactly what it is you want to achieve and so that we can measure our performance against the goals you set for us.

Initially, we also research in depth:

• the product and services you offer to gain a deep understanding of the value proposition you offer to clients and
• the marketplace you operate in with reference to your competitors.

Understanding who you’re selling to

Second, we build a library of bespoke content strategy resources for your campaign.

The team working on your campaign consult these resources at every stage of creating and distributing your conent.

The most important of these resources available to our team are buyer persona documents.

Buyer personas help our content creators understand in detail;

• the specific types of person or business decision-maker who would buy your products or services,
• the particular benefits they would enjoy as a result of purchasing from your products or services, and
• what would stop them from purchasing from you so we can address and overcome that in the content.

Buyer personas are a way of trying to understand your target audiences on a personal level.

A thorough knowledge of the audiences you’re targeting helps us to create premium content which fits in with their life and which addresses their experiences, hopes, and fears – the more personal, the better.

The more complex or high-ticket your product or service, the greater the level of knowledge we need to successfully communicate with your potential customers.

B2B buyer personas tend to be more in-depth than B2C buyer personas because, in addition to describing the person, they also describe the hierarchy around them and their place within that hierarchy.

From our findings, you may decide that you only want your content strategy to focus on reaching and converting select groups of customers.

Choosing to prioritise the creation of content for more lucrative clients is a key part of any company’s overall branding strategy.

Understanding what value is to your target markets

Third, when your potential customers find your content, we need to keep their attention and to capture their imagination.

We create content which interests and engages with your prospective clients by demonstrating the value in your products and service to them as consumers or to the businesses they work for or own.

If you don’t make a connection with a potential client on an article they’ve found on your website for example, there’s no reason for them not to click back onto the Google results page and find a more relevant business to investigate.

When we have demonstrated value to readers through the content we create for you, we ask them to:

• make a purchase from you,
• leave their contact details for sales team follow-up,
• subscribe to your email newsletter, or
• follow you on social media.

Knowing where and how your target market look for information

Fourth, we map out a clear schedule for distribution to make sure that your content is easy to find.

We heavily optimise all blog and article content so that Google ranks your website and every page on it as high on search results pages as possible.

If we find your customers appreciate regular email newsletters, we will recommend that this forms a major part of your content strategy.

Content posted on social media must be easy for potential customers to find for on the platforms they actually use.

If your clients regularly read a respected 3rd party industry website, we’ll contact that website with a view to creating guest posts to appear specifically on that site.

Constantly refining strategy to reflect a dynamic competitive environment

From then on, we track the quality and quantity of prospective clients’ engagement with the content we have created for you.

For example, we’ll use specialist software platforms to see how many people clicked through from your email newsletters and who they are.

We’ll let you know which areas of your website and which pages in particular are gaining the most traffic.

We’ll monitor engagement with your content on social media platforms.

This information helps us to continually improve your strategy and, of course, we’ll keep you informed on any enhancements to your campaign that we make.

We also take advantage of SEO trends which change quickly on your behalf as well as refining our approach to suit ever-changing customer buying habits.

Please get in touch with our content strategy agency team for more information.

Contact our content strategy agency team

Companies with an active content marketing strategy enjoy over 6x as many conversions than those which don’t.

Talk to us about creating a content distribution strategy for your company which increases:

• organic traffic to your website,
• the number of decision makers following you on social media platforms
• the number of future clients joining your email newsletter service, and
• the quality and quantity of leads for your sales team to work with.

We create targeted, research-driven, SEO-based content strategies for clients which deliver consistent, trackable results.

We’re open during office hours between Monday and Friday.

Please call us, email us, or fill out the contact form and one of our content strategy agency team will get back to you.

We’re available on 0330 010 3495 or you can email our content marketing agency team by clicking here.

We’re based in North Shields town centre if you would rather meet us face to face. There is plenty of free parking outside and we’re only three minutes’ walk from North Shields Metro station.