Creating Content Strategies Like a Pro

Let’s get real, content strategy can be tough. “What is a content strategy?” may even be a question buzzing on your mind right now. In short, a content strategy is a sets of written or visual content your business publish to reach your current audience and attract new customers.

Here at The Sampson House, this is an area we are constantly working on perfecting and refining. We are always trying to grow both as a company and as content creators while remaining true to our brand. Strategizing our next move is a must.

Creating a content strategy is key for any business looking to strengthen their brand awareness. The content you put out for your audience should be thoroughly planned out because you want to be able to visually story tell your brand for your target audience.

Here’s a five-step guide to creating a content strategy that will help you become a pro at reaching and connecting with your audience, building an amazing brand and growing.

1) GET TO THE DRAWING BOARD

Creating a plan can be difficult without inspiration (cue an endless spiral of Pinterest scrolling). The best way to start creating a content strategy is to leave your requirements as open as possible. Yes, that sounds scary but trust us on this. Starting with just a general concept of what you’d like to see out of your company will keep you from limiting yourself to the same ideas. Seek new concepts from influencers or companies that you admire and take notes on how you can do something similar for your page.

Pro tip: Create a visual moodboard in Pinterest, sharing it with the whole team. Every one in your team can then add the images, ideas, theme, etc., they like.

2) JOT DOWN A PLAN

Once you have an idea of what you want to do, plan it out immediately. This should be both small and large scale visions and goals that you have for your page and business. Strategize themes, color palettes, timing, and products you would like to see for your next month’s worth of content.

Pro Tip: Our team uses Editorial Calendar to draft the content plan for our next months.

3) CREATE AWAY!

This is where the fun happens!!!.

Creating content is your opportunity to take your vision board and turn it into reality. Recently, our office had a day dedicated to a studio photoshoot in order to create content for the coming months. From flatlays to lifestyle shots, we focused on producing as much content that we could come up with. Props and all! It was a great day to get our creative juices flowing and look ahead to a refreshed TSH feed.

4) ROUTINELY CHECK UP WITH YOUR CONTENT

It’s always good to perform a monthly check on how your content is performing and whether it’s being received well from your audience. After all, you want to make sure your content drive great traffic and conversion.

For this, you’ll want to keep track of two essential pieces of information:

a) Trends. You will always want to keep up with what is trending because you don’t want to keep spewing out the same content when it’s out of style. One of your goals as a company should be to evolve and grow. Fluctuating your content with what is in style, whether it be color or design, can help you keep your audience on their toes and attract newcomers.

b) Analytics. We cannot stress this one enough. Analytics are the whole point of the game. If you don’t know how your audience is responding to your content, then you won’t know if the content you are creating is actually affecting your business positively. Here at TSH, we use Google Analytics and Google Search Consoles to do a monthly review of our audience (demographics, activity hours, interest, what they are searching for) and how our content is performing on search engine. Our whole process of analyzing and auditing content is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

5) KEEP THE BALL ROLLING

Think of content strategies as long-term commitments. You’ll have to think ahead when doing content strategies and commit to the cause. Once one month is planned out, then it’s on to the next. So start early and think on your feet; you got this!