5 Tips for Developing your Content Strategy for 2022 and Beyond

Establishing and knowing how to create a content strategy is no longer an option for businesses to succeed in the cutthroat digital environment. With more than 80% of potential customers now using mobile phones to access information about products and services, marketers need to create a solid web content strategy to communicate with their audience and improve overall conversions.

While traditional strategies can still be effective, the changes brought by the pandemic are making it even more challenging for businesses to create a strategy that resonates with changing customer behaviors.

After all, marketers also have to consider emerging content strategy 2021 trends to ensure their strategies will result in better leads and less waste. This may include modifying their existing content marketing plan or perhaps adopting innovative content marketing tools to keep their content efforts going.

In this article, we’ll outline several tips for marketers to consider when developing a content strategy for 2021 and beyond.

1. Analyze and Evaluate Existing Strategy

More often than not, most businesses have a working content strategy that has delivered excellent results in the past only to flop during the pandemic. That said, you must analyze and evaluate your existing strategy to understand its strengths and weaknesses and determine opportunity gaps. Doing so allows you to identify whether the existing strategy can help achieve business outcomes and is extremely relevant to the changes experienced in your industry.

When performing a baseline audit of your existing strategy, you must integrate metrics such as brand awareness, messaging effectiveness, and media sentiment. You may also want to consider hiring someone with an excellent track record  to determine whether existing content is still effective. Either way, performing an analysis ensures that your strategy will align with the new pandemic reality.

2. Identify KPIs

Determining relevant and useful key performance indicators (KPIs) is critical in measuring the effectiveness and the return on investments of your content strategy framework.

While there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for KPIs, the ideal content metrics are those that can assess performance over time and throughout all levels of the conversion funnel. This includes measuring consumption metrics to identify who’s viewing your content, where they are getting your content, and how much time they are spending on it.

By assessing consumption metrics, you can generate insights that you can use to tailor content that is relatable to your target audience. It also helps you measure progress towards a specific goal within your marketing channels to increase accountability among your teams.

3. Establish a Multi-Channel Content Strategy

Multichannel content strategy is a marketing concept most leaders shy away from, and understandably so. With so many responsibilities that come in handling a small business, it is often easy to settle for social media channels as the primary distributor of your content. While this indeed makes up for a large part of your content strategy, there are also other channels such as online adverts, website, and email newsletters, wherein you can attract new customers.

Therefore, you must establish a multi-channel content strategy to maximize your efforts and put out your content into a much wider audience. It also increases the likelihood of a consumer receiving more frequency in interacting with your brand, which can lead to increased brand awareness and recognition. A rule of thumb when adopting a multi-channel content strategy is to ensure that each content is optimized for a specific channel to make it easier for audiences to connect with your brand.

4. Have a Content Calendar

Maintaining publishing consistency is a key component to a successful content strategy. Like every marketing strategy, it takes time to achieve results with website content strategy and you have to deliver superb content experiences consistently to grow. Using a content calendar, you can fill the gaps in your content strategy and plan out your posts for streamlined workflows.

This makes it easier to customize content and target them into a relevant audience to increase the likelihood of return visits and conversions. Through this process, you can establish strong customer relationships because your content will stay relevant and will always be of value to them. Moreover, a content calendar will also help you create seasonally-appropriate content to remain adaptable and create a strong community behind your services.

5. Use the Right Tools

Planning a content strategy will only take you so far. As a marketer, you need to have the right tools to execute this strategy and distribute content across multiple channels.  This way, you can ensure unified experiences throughout your content channels while maintaining brand consistency.

It is not uncommon for marketers to deliver similar content in identical formats to multiple channels due to time constraints and a truckload of other responsibilities. However, doing so can confuse your audience which could ultimately lead to them leaving in the middle of the customer journey and resulting in missed conversions. By using the right content marketing tools, you can edit your content to fit the right channel and ensure that your messages will stand out in a polluted digital environment.

Having defined roles and systems in your task flows is crucial. For instance, having a clear understanding on what is PMO helps your organization maintain standards for your project management, similar to your other departments whether it’s marketing, customer service, and more.

Achieving a Successful Content Strategy for Years to Come

The pandemic has turned the marketing world on its head, resulting in most content marketers to scramble and look for solutions to remain competitive in the new normal. One way for your content strategy to stay relevant in the future is to use powerful tools such as Inksprout to compose engaging and trustworthy social media content. With Inksprout, you can track trends in your niche and tailor your content to increase reach and grab your network’s attention. Inksprout offers a free forever plan but users can opt for its paid Pro and Premium packages for additional features.