Eight Questions to Ask to Define the Scope of Your Content Strategy [Infographics List]

The importance of defining a clear scope of your content creation strategy keeps growing and growing. This includes a wide range of media, such as videos, commercials, blogs, social media, and more. Some advisors do it well, but we’ve seen a lot of people jump into the deep end and end up paddling in circles. This is because they don’t have a plan.

In the absence of a sound strategic framework, even the most valuable, engaging content can fail to achieve its full potential. Despite this, it can be challenging to navigate a large number of different channels, formats, platforms, and audiences in an enterprise content strategy. We designed a list of eight questions to help you set a clear path for your firm’s content creation and marketing. This will help you get where you want to be in terms of content marketing strategy.

How to Define the Scope of Content Creation Strategy

Here are eight questions that you should answer to define and determine the scope and purpose of content creation. This will lead to and help you build a solid content creation strategy, focused on your market niche and potential leads, making the scope and strategy more effective.

1. What is the Purpose of the Digital Content Marketing Strategy You Use?

The purpose of content marketing can be to increase the visibility of your brand, generate more leads and sales, or improve the authority of the brand. By defining the purpose of the marketing strategy, you will be able to address the main pain points of the customers. You can provide educational contents to build authority and increase the online visibility of your brand.

2. Which Strategy Would be Most Effective in Achieving Your Goal?

There are many strategies but you should research to select one that is most effective in achieving your goals.

• You can start a blog along with your company’s website to build online visibility
• Create videos and describe solutions for customers using your products or services
• Create graphical infographics for people to share and link back to you
• Conduct market research and publish white papers

There are tens and hundreds of ideas, and each business has its requirements and budget. For example, writing and starting a blog requires less effort and budget than creating videos which require equipment and editing them.

3. Who is the Target Audience for Your Project?

It is best to distribute your audience in different segments:

• Customers who have previously bought from you, and you want to offer them additional or improved products or services.

• They downloaded PDF guides or materials that they are interested in learning about. You can provide them with more information about related products.

• Segment customers based on their geographical locations, seasons, holidays, etc. which will increase the likeliness to buy from you.

One of the best ways to approach targeting the audience is to check how you can fit your products or services into the current trends, seasons, festivals, etc. This way you can easily build a link between your product and the target audience’s situation to use your products.

4. Do I Need to Publish New Content Regularly?

The best answer to this question is to start a content calendar in your content creation strategy to stay consistent. You will find plenty of online calendar templates to help you define and stay on track with content strategy scope. You don’t need to publish content daily, but 1-2 blog posts per week are considered ideal and followed by many established blog owners and marketing agencies.

Businesses who publish blog content regularly are likely to receive 67% more leads than companies who dont.

Source: https://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-marketing-infographic

5. Should You Perform a Content Audit?

It involves auditing and analyzing the existing content, and updating them according to your company’s marketing strategy and current trends. It can benefit companies and businesses of all sizes.

Auditing and upgrading content has two major benefits. Improving SEO and keeping content fresh can contribute to audience engagement significantly, and increase conversion rate.

To reduce the auditing efforts, identify the pages that have a high potential of ranking in the search engine to target low-hanging fruits that can you give results quicker. You should also decide what content you are going to review, and schedule auditing different types of content such as articles, PDFs, videos, publications, landing pages, etc.

6. What Should I Write About?

There should be a clear message and a goal to achieve behind every piece of writing, such as building a relationship, telling about a new product, showing different uses and how it can address the customer’s pain point, etc.

It should address the pain points of the customers which will make it appealing. You can conduct surveys, and polls, interview the target audience to under the pain points, picture them in your products and describe how they solve the problem.

7. What is the Best Way to Publish and Manage My Content?

It varies with businesses as each has different preferences. You can publish your content on WordPress as blog posts on your business website. Medium is also a good platform to post and link back to your oebsite or landing pages, which will help in link building. You can also share on social media platforms, or engage influencers to discuss and review your products, and share with their audiences.

It depends on how much budget you have and the amount of the audience, as well as where you want your audience to land.

8. How Will I Measure My Success?

Content marketing strategy and scope can have different matrices to measure the KPI and performance. It can be:

Don’t measure the performances of the goals and metrics just to show the numbers to the management. It shows the outcome of the return on investment in terms of time, effort, and cost.

According to a Content Marketing Institute 2020 research report, 62% of the respondents use some form of metrics to measure content performance, which dropped to 32% when about having KPIs to measure content initiatives, which further dropped to 23% when asked about having measures to determine content marketing ROI

Source: Content Marketing Institute B2B 2020 research report

The measurement process can take time to track and analyze. You will realize the importance of defining content strategy and scope with KPI in the marketing success

We summarized the points of the article in the below infographics:

Conclusion

It is important to have a comprehensive content strategy that starts with a tailored plan, and the questions above are the basics that you should always ask yourself when putting together your strategy and defining the scope.

As you read through these questions, remember that this is not a one-time questions list, but one that should be asked continually throughout the entire lifecycle of a strategy.

There is never a time when you should not be asking yourself if your message is consistent, who your audience is, if your channels are appropriate, if you are finding a good balance between facts and emotions, and if your strategy is meeting your end goal.

Content marketing is a cohesive plan, always measured as a whole. As long as content strategy building and defining the scope is done correctly, it can be one of your most valuable marketing tools.