Being a content strategist is one of the most rewarding jobs in the field of marketing and communications. Not only will you build loyalty with your target audience, but you will also be able to strengthen your brand awareness and grow your company every step of the way. Although this all sounds appealing, it’s important to understand that it comes with hard work, keeping up with results and adapting to changes. Check out my three tips on how you can survive being a successful content strategist for your brand!
Tip #1: Understand your brand needs, and your audience
Developing a successful plan includes understanding your business, your audience, and their needs. Both sides are important as it determines the success of the strategy that’s being executed to promote the product/service. For example, if we look at Spotify, their goals are typically to gain premium subscribers throughout the year and to also retain as much users as possible. One successful plan they executed is the creation of the Spotify Wrapped campaign. This data-driven social media campaign took existing data from their listeners and produced personalized playlists for them. This became a hit with their customers as they got a curated playlists of their liking which also prompted them to share their playlist across their social media. This plan attended to the customer’s needs as well because they all got a curated album with their favourite songs that is easily accessible. By executing this strategy, not only does Spotify retain their existing customer base and build loyalty with them, but each year they also manage to gain new customers who also want to be involved in the campaign.
Photo Credit: Digital Marketing Institute
Tip #2: Utilize your technical and psychological skills
As our guest speaker Ron Abraham said in his interview, in order to build a successful content strategy plan, you need to focus on your technical skills as well as your psychological skills. What this essentially means is that as a content strategist, you have to first have a data driven mind. You need to understand how data works, and how it applies to understanding the success of your product/service. This also means understanding the use of KPIs in your plan, learning more about your brand and how you can use your creativity to tap into all areas of your business to ensure the maximum amount of growth. This already sounds like a mouthful but it should not stop there. You also have to understand the psychology of business and the psychology of your customers. Constantly look out for their behaviours and their thought patterns when interacting with your brand. A great way to start is by analyzing their behaviour during the marketing journey. See how they interact with your product/service when in the discovery, consideration, conversion and retention stages. After you find key data points that give insight on their behaviours, try to market your brand in a way that convinces them that they need your product/service to improve their life or pain point.
Photo Credit: Influence & Co.
Tip #3: Platforms matter when you analyze your data
When looking at your data, understand that different platforms have different outcomes when measuring the success of your strategy. For example, as Ron mentioned, email is a great way to measure open rates data. Click through rates are also great indicators of the success of your strategy by analyzing the data from SMS, emails, and websites. Lastly, different social media platforms also have different functions and outcomes as well. It’s important to look at the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and see which one is better to utilize for the purpose of your strategy. By understanding this, you will notice better outcomes. Additionally, if you notice you are not seeing success, it can also be an indicator that you should try another platform in order to interact with your consumers in a better way.
Photo Credit: Unbox Social
Written by: Brintha Manoharan (1176883)
Date: October 2nd, 2023