Creating content that drives revenue involves more than just a quick blog entry with a few selected keywords. It involves connecting with your target audience on a much deeper level. Some brands are doing this quite well while others are struggling to evolve to this ever-changing media landscape.
Here’s the good news. It’s not too late to get the ball rolling in your favor to increase your brand’s presence.
6 Steps to Create an Effective Content Strategy
Across the board, the outdoor industry is experiencing unparalleled growth. With increased competition, outdoor brands are seeking to connect with their customers on a deeper level and in many ways, they’re looking to create brand loyalty. One way to do this is to provide relevant content that continues to keep them engaged with the brand across a multitude of mediums.
A number of brands do this extremely well.
- Know Your Audience
- Look At Your Competitors
- Define Your Goals
- Create An Editorial Calendar
- Be Consistent
- Ask Your Customers
So, what is content strategy?
Content strategy is a defined plan to achieve your business and marketing goals through content. Content can take the form of blogs, interviews, videos, graphics, how-to tutorials, etc … Your goal is to engage with your target audience with the goal of having them purchase your product(s).
This involves a targeted approach versus just randomly posting content. Building a successful plan can involve a significant amount of time to create, implement, manage and evolve as needed. Posting randomly and then going radio silent until another post appears is not an effective strategy.
1. Know Your Audience
Your content should provide a solution.
For example:
If your brand designs and creates tents, your customers are going to have questions about how your product will perform for their specific needs. Are they car campers, backpackers or festival attendees?
Providing relevant content that provides answers to yet-unasked questions can create a fostering environment.
2. Look At Your Competitors
Taking an in-depth look at your direct competitors can help you identify gaps that they are potentially missing from the market. This is often called a gap analysis. This will allow you as a business to determine what areas are being covered and which are being overlooked or underserved. Do a Google search and determine what content is actively populating the results and which seem to be missing or have outdated information.
It’s also a great idea to look at your own website to monitor the performance of the pages that currently exist. This can be a first step in helping to identify areas that might need to be enhanced.
When looking at your direct competitors, look at what content they are creating. How often are they publishing? Are they engaging with their customers? What avenues are they publishing said content? What’s missing?
3. Define Your Goals
The endgame for this entire plan is to attract potential customers to your site, build a relationship with them and hopefully sell them a product or service.
What are your objectives?
- Increase social engagement
- Build brand awareness
- Expand your email subscriber database
- Increase website traffic
To achieve these smaller goals, it’s important to consistently revisit your strategy and plan to evolve. Follow the analytics and make changes as necessary.
4. Create An Editorial Calendar
This step is integral to staying on track and focused as the content increases. In the beginning, it might be your team’s goal to post weekly. However, you don’t want your content to be one-sided.
You don’t want all of your content centered around one item.
For example: Let’s say your brand makes an array of outdoor gear — backpacks, sleeping bags and tents. You don’t want all of your content to be about tents.
Building an editorial calendar will allow your content creators to stay focused on the objectives while providing informative and engaging content that speaks to your entire product range.
5. Be Consistent
Regardless of whether you post once a week or multiple times daily, it’s important to be consistent. This can be crucial as customers will visit your site regularly, if they see that valuable content is being dropped on a regular basis.
6. Ask Your Customers
This can be as simple as asking regular customers what information they would be interested in seeing on your different outlets. Are they more interested in blog posts, videos or podcasts?
Other ways to elicit responses include:
- Utilize your email database to conduct a customer survey.
- Monitor social media comments.
Are you looking to improve the ROI on your brand’s marketing campaigns and enhance your content strategy? As a fully integrated marketing firm, TBA Outdoors can cover these bases — and lots more — for your brand. Reach out to our team of marketing professionals today to see how we can help your outdoor brand with its marketing campaigns and more.
