Why you need a Content Strategy

What I learnt from the Wrapped Agency workshop

Last Tuesday I took the one and half hour journey to York (thanks to the traffic on the M62) to attend the content strategy workshop held by Wrapped Agency. Although I already know a thing or two about content strategy as a whole from what I’ve taught myself and the work I did while on placement at The Health Informatics Service, I still thought the workshop would be useful as I’d gain an insight into how other people go about their content strategies. In this post, I’ve outlined what I learnt from the workshop, that I thought might also be helpful to you.

Wrapped Offices

The main focus of the workshop was the things that we should be including in our own content strategies. Below is what we discussed, as group, what should be included in a content strategy.

• Plan a timeline and frequency of content;
• Research keywords relating to your industry/area of expertises;
• Look into seasonal campaigns you could include in you marketing efforts;
• Research what your audience type is — this could be through creating personas;
• What stage in the user journey are you audience at;
• Work out the problem that your content is solving and the key messages your content is promoting;
• Choose the right platforms for you business — questions to ask yourself are: Are you audience on that platform? The life span of content is very short, can your content be either left or re-worked? Also Try to tailor your content for each platform;
• What are the objective or goal of that content;
• Think about what your measurements for success are.

Knowing we need measurements for success was one thing, but knowing what measurements of success are was a whole different topic. We discussed what we could measure and define as success, which were:

• Driving leads/increase in enquiries following the content;
• Number of downloads;
• Lead generation (eg. providing contact details);
• Newsletter subscriptions or event sign ups;
• Route into your website, and user journey on your site;
• Website visitors and time on site;
• Qualitative analysis — asking people and analysing what people are saying about your brand;
• Loyalty/repeat visitors.

During the workshop a great question was asked; can you flood social media channels? Emily from Wrapped (the host of the event) informed the group that from her own experience, people can find their timelines do get flooded with content from a particular accounts which can seem like span, and often they haven’t been afraid to voice that. Emily said that typically you should be posting on platforms once a day while platforms like Twitter can be more than once a day.

People’s attention span had dropped to 8 seconds in 2015, and it is now believed to be around only 3 seconds.

Throughout the workshop I picked up a few general tips that might help in building/planning your own content stragery.

• Share knowledge to build trust and reputation;
• Educate them through guides and tutorials;
• Your content needs to show your values and ethos due to environmental awareness;
• Usually a person will interact with a brand 12 times before becoming a lead — you need to think about how a person is going to interact with your brand 12 times;
• 78% of customers prefer to get to know a brand through articles rather than adverts (Source: LyfeMarketing);
• 61% of online customers made a purchase after reading positive reviews (Source: Content Marketing Institute);
• Good content is key to good SEO results;
• SEO is now a result of content/digital marketing/social media rather than a practice;
• Ask for reviews — reviews on Google help with SEO. People are more likely to review you/your business if they are asked;
• Share statistics from all aspects of your company/brand;
• Use Google Analytics to find where people are coming from and too — this data can be found under the Acquisition tab;
• Allow people to download items
• Under Info and Ads tab on any Facebook page you can see the adverts that they are currently active.

I hope you found this post useful, and thank you to Wrapped for organising and running this event. I look forward to attending another Technical Tuesday session in the future. If you have any of own tips for someone building a content strategy please share them in the comments below :)