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Content should never exist in isolation. It should serve a larger strategic purpose for your business, whether driving site traffic, generating leads or increasing brand awareness. Importantly, to ensure content always directly contributes and ties back to business objectives, content teams will need to collaborate with other business functions across the organization and set clear KPIs to measure the impact of each piece.

Understanding your target audience—their preferences and priorities, their challenges, essentially all the things that keep them up at night—is critical for creating content that will resonate with them and that will entice them to act. All too often, organizations skip this step, don’t conduct thorough enough research or don’t pull in all the right stakeholders from the company to create a holistic understanding of their buyers. This research is absolutely vital for content creators, though, helping them tailor various content types to meet the specific needs and interests of the target audience—and ultimately, helping to reach (or ideally exceed) the team’s set KPIs.

Your tangible, living content strategy document should be flexible and adaptable while also well-defined. It should account for the evolving needs of your target audience, industry trends and business goals, and it should serve as a road map for creating, distributing and measuring content that aligns with your overall marketing and business objectives. Include important elements, such as:

• Content types that are of interest to your target audience and that align with business goals. Think blog posts, infographics, videos, case studies, webinars, podcasts, social media and more. 
• Content channels that will reach your target audience. Think website, email campaigns, newsletters, events, advertising, social media and more. 
• Content topics that speak to the interests of your target audience. What are their pain points? Their interests? What industry trends are impacting them? Are there any gaps within your existing content that you can shed light on? These answers should become clearer during your upfront research. 

Content insights

How to create a successful content calendar: Best practices for content teams

By Anne Neubauer
May 02, 2023

Learn how to streamline your content creation process and keep your marketing and communications teams aligned and informed with these proven tips and strategies for content calendar success.

Ensure you’re leveraging the right tools and technologies to execute your content strategy. The legacy systems you might currently be using could be slowing you down, making your strategy next to impossible to execute effectively and efficiently. A modern content management solution (CMS) can help fix that. Today’s solutions offer content templates and workflow automation to streamline the end-to-end content process. They can support true personalization and provide targeting capabilities to ensure content is reaching its intended audiences with the right message. They can support distribution and multi-channel publishing as well as content governance and security. There are a lot of factors at play when it comes to content management—modern, flexible CMS solutions can help ensure everything stays on course.

Remember the KPIs you set at the beginning of this process? It’s critical to always be tracking those so that your team can pivot as needed if goals aren’t within reach. Whether measuring engagement, conversion, audience, SEO, or social media metrics, have an always-on measurement approach in place and leverage those insights to refine your strategy as needed.

Following these five steps and truly honing in on the basics that make content strategies successful will always be important, no matter how many industry changes and trends are on the horizon.

Connect with Brightspot for support with your content strategy

We know that content strategies are a big lift. That’s why Brightspot was designed to fit into your content strategy and publishing process, freeing content experts and creators to distribute content quickly to every channel without the need for IT.

Our platform streamlines the entire process by providing planning, collaboration, performance assessment, brand consistency and analytics features (to name a few) so that you can create content that resonates with your audience and more easily achieve your content marketing goals.

Interested in learning more about how Brightspot can help you create and execute a content strategy for your business? Let’s connect.

Request demo here