Click here to read Content Strategy – Six Steps to Better Content: Introduction – Part 1
Understanding Content Strategy
To understand content strategy, you need to understand that creating good content is more than just putting words and pictures together. Good content involves:
- Understanding your target audience’s needs
- Defining your organizational ability to meet them
- Setting content goals to address those needs
- Conducting a content audit to determine what, if any, usable content already exists
- Assessing what shape that content’s in – does it need refreshing or serious overhauling?
- Determining what new content is required
- Determining who’s going to provide it and where and how it’s going to be used
To ascertain all the above, you need to go through the steps mentioned earlier. The result of this process will be an outline of actions needed to successfully produce the valuable content you need without head-scratching, finger-pointing, and frustrating delays.
6 Steps for Creating More Effective Content
While there is perhaps any number of ways to go about creating content, they all boil down to these six basic steps that, in a proactive organization, form a cycle of renewal:
We’ll now take a look at how each one of these steps, when completed as thoroughly and accurately as possible, will provide a solid, actionable content strategy grounded in reality while avoiding the pitfalls of assumption and wishful thinking. The first three steps guide the development of your strategy, the second three show you how to implement it.