How to Build a Content Strategy That Converts

If you’re looking for a guide to “Craft Compelling Content that Converts”, this ain’t it. Putting together a content strategy that converts goes way beyond just stringing together some nice words. 

Instead, this guide will show you how to put together a real digital content strategy, without all the fluff, mess and marketing buzzwords. You’ll learn what a content strategy is, how to put one together, and the secrets we use to make sure our content delivers actual results. Not just likes, views and clicks.

But first…

The Golden Rule of content marketing: Create what people want. 

This might seem obvious. Why wouldn’t you write articles and make videos that people want to read and watch? 

But the number one mistake new content creators make, especially for businesses, is creating around what they want their customers to know, instead of what their customers want to know. 

Your customers don’t care about your high-quality materials and great customer service. Not yet, anyway. 

They want to know how your product or service improves their life. They want to learn your tips and tricks, industry secrets, and fun facts. 

And on social media, above all else, they want to be entertained.  

So, with that out of the way, let’s get started. 

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is simply a plan for how you’re going to ideate, create, distribute and profit from content creation. It’s an essential part of digital content strategy, and without one your content is never going to perform as well as it could. 

Back when content marketing first became a thing, a content strategy could be super simple. Just work out what your target market wants, write a blog post about the topic, and then get it out there on the internet. You could promote it with ads or on social media if you wanted more oomph, but often if the article was well written Google would pick it up and drive traffic to it organically. 

Now, things are a little more complicated. The above strategy still works, but what’s been done has been done before, and content creators have to get a little creative. 

Here’s how you can do it with your business:

Step 1: It All Starts with the Reader

Just like any other kind of marketing, you have to start with your audience. Who are they? What are they interested in? What content do they engage with already? What questions are they asking? Where are they consuming content? How much do they know about your business, product or service already?

A great content strategy will take all of these into consideration and plan accordingly. 

Let’s take a fitness coach, for example. Their customers probably already know what fitness coaching is. They might even know if they want it or not.

They’re interested in getting fit, but haven’t committed to coaching yet, or may be picky about choosing a new coach. 

Either way, that gives you a very solid base to start creating content from. Their next step is to work out what they want to read and when. 

Step 2: Set Some Goals

Take a few minutes to set some goals for your content strategy. What are you trying to achieve? This could be: 

• More followers
• Better engagement
• More clicks through to your website
• More signups for your email list
• Better conversions
• More sales
• Whatever else you want!

A goal will help shape the rest of your content strategy and give you direction when you’re optimising your strategy and the content you produce. 

Personally, I’d recommend a goal related to sales, as most social media metrics are for looks more than anything else, but this will always depend on the kind of business you’re running.

Step 3: Map Out the Customer Journey

The second step is to work how your customers get from zero to sale, and where your content fits into that. 

Like marketing using a traditional sales funnel structure, different types of content will be more effective at different stages of the customer journey. 

Create a chart of all the places your customers hang out, including social media, email, blogs, youtube, forums and more. Then make a list of all the steps they take from the moment they discover you through to purchase and beyond. 

With these in order, you can map out the customer journey from start to finish, and connect the locations and actions that help them get from end to end. 

A fitness coach’s customer journey might look something like this: 

1. Customer discovers the business on social media or Google. 
2. They like the idea of getting fit and continue to follow on social media. 
3. They see the offers and get curious about how it would look for them to have a fitness coach. 
4. They investigate pricing and packages, and buy fitness coaching services
5. The customer continues to stay subscribed and enjoys the products and services provided. 

It’s important to note that this isn’t a linear process. A customer that has already used fitness coaching services before might start at step 3 or 4, and be ready to buy a lot sooner. Or they could be the kind of person who gets really into an idea first and looks at all your packages and pricing, only to simply follow you on social media and not purchase until months down the track. 

Your content should be able to cater for these people too, but don’t make it your main priority. Create for your core, ideal customers, the ones who act like you expect them to, and the rest will fall into place.

Step 4: Choose the Right Content Types and Channels

Now that we’ve worked out the journey our customers take, we can map that against a typical sales funnel.

Top of Funnel

Here, the customer is aware of your brand and exploring what you’ve got to offer. You’ve got to grab their attention and run with it. 

For our fitness coach, that could look like Instagram and Tiktok posts going over effective exercises people can do at home, funny videos about relatable experiences at the gym, diet tricks, myth busting and more. A good mix of promotional, informational, and pure entertainment is good here. Anything that offers value for free. 

And yes, entertainment is valuable, especially when it comes to engagement!

Middle of Funnel

The customers here are engaged and considering what you’ve got to offer. They’re also comparing you to your competition, which makes this stage super important. 

Content that answers frequently asked questions or shows how your service is better than your competition is usually the most effective here. Case studies, quizzes that help customers make decisions about your products and services, blog posts that educate further, and testimonials are all good examples of middle of funnel content. 

In the fitness niche, that’s before and after videos of clients, blog posts with information about why a fitness coach is better than a dietician or a personal trainer, lead magnets with exercise plans, or even questions about workouts and fitness posed to your engaged audience.

Bottom of Funnel

Content here is for the customers that are ready to buy, and the ones who have bought. You want to keep content engaging and informative, bringing your current audience further into your business world. 

I’d even argue that content here is the most important, as it’s what’s going to build your brand the most in the long run and deliver both long-term value for your customers and your profit margins. 

Here’s where you can introduce the information you want your customers to know, now that they’re ready for it! Long form ebooks and guides are great for this stage, along with more detailed information about your products and services.

In the fitness niche, this could be a foot in the door product like a $10, 50 page eBook about foods that help you put on muscle, updates about your services and business to your email list (and just email marketing in general), webpages about your services and more.

Step 5: Create Value-Driven, Conversion-Focused Content

It’s time to start creating! If you’re struggling for ideas on what to make, take a look at what your competition is doing and the kind of content trending in your niche. AI can also help you come up with ideas quickly, but don’t get sucked into using it to create the content itself! 

If you’ve done the hard work to understand your audience, you’ll know what they want much better than AI. 

Then, and this is probably the most important part: 

Just. Start. Creating!

Consistency is 100 times more effective than perfection, especially when you’re starting out. As you create, you’ll learn what people like, and if you’re striving for better then you’ll start to see better results too. 

Step 6: Measure Performance and Optimise

Test, test, test! Switch up your ideas, formats, publishing times and anything else to get an idea of what works best. 

This is why just getting out there and giving it a go is so important, because without the data you’re just firing blindly. 

You can track everything with a simple spreadsheet, however there are some tools that make it easier, automating data collection and telling you what could be improved. 

When optimising, always refer back to the data and your goals. If a piece of content performed really well, but hasn’t led to any sales, it might need a bit of tweaking to get things back on track.

Bonus Tools to Help You Build and Track Your Strategy

Here are some tools to help you on your journey:

For Planning and Running Your Strategy

Content Calendar

A content calendar can help you prepare content in advance and stay organised and on-track with publishing. Hubspot offers a simple but effective content calendar for free.

Notion

Notion is a task management and note taking system by design, but it’s fantastic for project management too. Pick one of hundreds of templates and start planning your content strategy in a few clicks. 

Google Analytics

Once everything is up and running, Google Analytics will tell you where your traffic is coming from, what people are clicking, how long people stay around to read and much more. Just make sure to have it set up on your website before you start posting!

Much more

Check out our article about Social Media Tools for Business for a mountain of great tools you can use to run your content strategy.

 For Coming Up with Content Ideas

AnswerThePublic

Punch in your topic and AnswerThePublic will give you a whole heap of search terms and questions real people are asking. All of which make fantastic topics for blog posts, social media posts and more.

Google Trends

See trending topics globally or in your industry, based on what real people are searching for in Google. Fantastic if you’re trying to capitalise on current trends.

For Creating the Content

ChatGPT

This one’s obvious, but it’s worth mentioning. ChatGPT is great for coming up with ideas, but also putting together quick first drafts for content. All you have to do is give it a bit of personality and boom! You’ve got content tailored to your audience and ready to share.

Hemingway Editor

The only thing worse than bad content is unreadable content. Hemingway fixes this, giving suggestions for making your content easy to read. And the easier something is to read, the more likely that people will read all the way through. Works great for video scripts too!

Canva

Classic, but still fantastic. Canva will let you edit thumbnails for your videos, create graphics for blog posts, put together images for Instagram and more, all for free. And it’s super easy to use.

 Don’t Just Create — Convert!

Remember, unless you get your money from promoting ads, you can’t sell a view or a like! Keep your content focused on your audience and goals, and continue posting consistently, and you’ll have a successful content strategy in no time.

Are you looking for someone to partner with your business and create content for you? Get in touch with the experts at racket today! We provide content strategy for small business, large businesses and everything in between. We’ll answer all your questions and help you work out whether content marketing is right for you. Roll on over to our contact page to get in touch and learn more.