The Ultimate Guide To Building A Content Strategy In 2020

Do you know you should be creating content, but you’re not sure what to do?

Or, have you been generating content, but you’re not getting any traction?

We’re taking you behind the scenes here at Flight Media, and showing you exactly how we build a content strategy for our clients. 

There are a ton of reasons a business should create content. These can include developing authority in your industry, generating awareness, and creating collateral for your sales team to use. 

And perhaps one of the most important outcomes of creating a content strategy: improving the Google search rankings for your website.

So let’s dive into how we generate a content marketing strategy so you can duplicate the steps to create your own.

Content Strategy Basics

Before you start, you need to know as much about your audience as possible. 

We call this step the “Buyer Persona” phase, and we always, always start every project with it.

In order to create content, you need to know for whom you’re creating it. 

Some of the questions you need to ask your team (involve content people, marketers, salespeople, and design team members) include:

1. Who is your primary customer?
2. Do you have more than one customer?
3. What problems do they have?
4. How do you solve these problems?
5. What makes your approach or customer unique?
6. Where does your customer hang out? (This is where you’ll distribute your content.)

How To Create Your Content Strategy

Once we lay the foundation with a buyer persona for our client, we move onto the next stage: creating a strategy for content based on this information.

First, we run the numbers on your monthly traffic and domain authority.

Based on this data, the emphasis of your content will fall into one of three categories:

1. Authority
2. Keyword
3. Sales 

1. Authority Content

Most of our clients fall into the authority-building stage. This means we’ll focus on creating new blog content based on non-competitive keywords, which includes these types of blogs:

• Comparison blogs.
• Buyer question blogs.
• Introduction to an offer blog.
• Review blogs.
• KPI (or key performance indicator) blogs.
• Checklist, template or example blogs.
• Terminology blogs.
• List blogs.
• Case studies.
• Data-backed blogs.
• Long-form blogs.

Here’s an example of a comparison blog we wrote on our blog.

And a content KPI article:

These types of articles are specifically designed to get lots of traction and eyeballs on the content, and are directed at building authority, educating the audience and answering questions.

We also “update” blogs if the client has existing content. Often, this older content is missing key elements like a meta description or keyword, so we spend time ensuring that each post is optimized to SEO standards  – as well as adding content as necessary.

2. Keyword Content

Once a client has established authority and their domain authority and monthly traffic meets certain milestones, we move onto optimizing content, while continuing to create new articles. 

This approach includes:

• Identifying articles that are dropping in traffic and rewriting them.
• Combining blogs that are ranking for the same keyword.
• Writing new articles based on keyword phrase matches.
• Creating more long-form blog articles.
• Creating additional content based on the strategies in Authority Content.

We routinely update blogs based on a number of factors, including traffic, like this one:

And we are always producing more long-form blogs based on topic clusters and a pillar page approach, like this pillar page on marketing ROI:

3. Sales Content

This is the fun stage. 

Here, your company is getting outrageous traffic, you’ve created a ton of useful content, and your sales team loves you. :)

But that doesn’t mean you can rest on your content laurels. 

In this phase, we focus on these strategies:

• Identifying content that brings in the most leads and writing more blogs about them.
• Optimizing blog posts with CTAs to drive conversions.
• Creating more lead magnets or free offers that align with blog article topics.
• Expanding landing pages for free offers into stand-alone blog articles.
• Writing more pillar pages.

SEO Content Strategies

We use a tool called MOZ to monitor our clients’ progress and make adjustments to tactics like:

• Creating and ranking for featured snippets.
• Linking blogs to the client’s own blogs, as well as outside sources.
• Generating backlinks through guest articles.
• Fixing SEO errors as they arise, such as 404 errors, duplicate content, etc.

For example, one of our clients gained two domain authority points from diligently addressing SEO errors in their MOZ profile, and they also ranked for 5 featured snippets within a span of three months.

This screenshot shows the number of keywords the client has ranking on the top two pages of Google (a total of 17). In the past week, 13 of the keywords moved up in ranking, while only 4 moved down, and they are maintaining the 5 featured snippets.

Another client is performing just as well due to our MOZ strategies.

Their search visibility continues to rise; they rank on page 1 or 2 for 30+ terms, and they have earned 3 featured snippet spots.

Creating Your Own Content Strategy

You can follow this guide to create a strategy for your business’ content, or you can partner with Flight Media. 

We can set you up with a year’s worth of content to write on your own, based on your audience’s needs, or we can do it all for you. Just give us a call!