Strategic Content Planning: Your Roadmap to Relevance
Our Content strategy services align all of the content we create with your business goals
What Makes a Great Content Strategy?
Your content strategy needs to be based on what your business wants to achieve. Otherwise, it’s easy to get distracted by strong opinions or vanity metrics.
Say your brand wants to be seen as the final word on peanut butter. Before you weigh in on whether crunchy or smooth peanut butter is better — and clearly, it’s smooth — hit pause. More important than where you fall on that question is where it fits in your content strategy.
Without a strategy behind it, even the most insightful content won’t fill or accelerate your funnel. It may not even reach its intended audience.
What you need is a plan: How will your broadside against crunchy nut butters streamline your buyer’s journey? Will it capture leads by linking to a landing page on the best bread and jelly pairings? Will it point readers directly to your silky smooth products?
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having fun in your content. But more important than making your leads laugh is helping them take that next step. Only a content strategy can do that.
Top of the funnel
Top-of-the-funnel content is all about education. How can someone choose a solution, much less yours, if they don’t even understand their problem?
Today’s consumers begin their buyer’s journey in search. They Google their problem and click on a top result — probably an authoritative article in a digital publication. They might also learn about their problem in an infographic, a blog post, a video, or a podcast.
Off-site articles are Relevance’s bread and butter. In most cases, the editors and contributors we work with look to our clients as sources. They may ask us to share a quantitative insight, like a statistic, or a qualitative one, such as a quote.
What happens next? Readers who understand their problem start looking for potential solutions. And while they also do that in Google, where they end up tends to be a whitepaper or other long-form content.
Middle of the funnel
Content that reaches readers at the middle of their buyer’s journey explains how people with their problem often solve it. It’s an often-neglected area of the content funnel but, to us, a critical one.
E-books, guides, case studies, whitepapers, and webinars belong in the middle of the inbound funnel. Each nurtures the reader closer to that holy grail that is their purchase decision.
Mid-funnel content doesn’t push the sale, though. It gives the reader the nitty-gritty details they need to make an informed decision.
What takes them the rest of the way? You guessed it: Bottom-of-the-funnel content.
Bottom of the funnel
Congratulations: Your reader is almost ready to make a purchase. But before they do, they want to be sure they’re spending their money wisely.
Content at the bottom of the funnel looks a little different than the above two types. Competitive comparisons, demos, consultations, testimonials, and free trials get a buyer to actually pull the trigger.
Although Relevance doesn’t specialize in some of those spaces, its content strategies produce something no sale gets closed without: authority. If your buyer doesn’t believe that you’re the leader in the space, why would he or she choose you?
Brands that own their industry can guide someone smoothly from start to signature. That’s the power of a strong content strategy: Visibility put you on the reader’s radar. Credibility gets them to listen to your advice. And authority ensures they see you not as a solution, but as the solution to their problem.