Foundations for Growth: Creating a Content Strategy for a New Website

The best time to engage an expert in creating a content strategy is when your website is a glimmer in your eye. Here, you can create a roadmap for your website before you’ve even engaged a designer.
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That roadmap will help you determine:

• Who is coming to the site? This is, of course, your ideal customers, investors, and even prospective employees. You may also want to attract journalists and other industry thought leaders. If you do, you will have to create content to get them there.​
• ​What content do they need to see? There are two types of foundational content, and this is the first one. This is information about your products and services, information about your company and information about how to contact you.
• What content will attract them? This is the second type. No content strategy is complete without a plan for producing ongoing content to cast a wide net and bring users to your site.
• ​​Where should the journey end? This is the money shot. The answer to the question, “What do you want to happen on your website? What is the ideal outcome?” This could be:
  
  • To book a product demonstration
    
  • To make a purchase
    
  • To sign up for a class
    
  • To join a mailing list
    
  • To create login credentials.
    
• ​​What are your secondary goals? A first time user might not book a demo on day one, but they might download a white paper. That’s a step in the right direction. (And once they've done that, you've captured their email address. Score!)
  
• How do you plan to move traffic from one page to another? Once you know what pages will exist on your website, you can answer the all-important question: how will users move from one page to another? This isn’t just clicking around. You want to direct them from the entry page (say a blog post) to the money page. Along the way, they might want to learn more about you, or they might want to learn about your products and services. But they should never get lost between here and there.

Before we even get here, we need to understand a few more things about your users. This content is for them, after all, so we need to know where they’re coming from and what they’re looking for.

The Research that Goes Into a Content Strategy

The foundation to the foundation is a keen understanding of your industry. This doesn’t necessarily mean working with an industry expert (who could have their own blindspots and biases). But it does mean working with someone willing to put in the time to dive deeply into the industry to learn everything they need to know about your customers' needs and pain points. 

This means: 

• Reading industry blogs and other publications
• Listening to industry podcasts
• Learning industry jargon.*

*Admittedly, this is one area the expert has over the generalist.

Another quite banal but important component to the strategy is keyword research. This will help shape the meta titles of the core pages on your website, and provide grist for the mill when it comes to creating ongoing content.

Keyword research isn’t just about SEO, though it is a good foundational step toward SEO. Knowing how your ideal customers search is more about matching problems with solutions. 

Say I want to know how to create an image for my website and you have software that can help me do just that.

Thanks to keyword research, you now know what my problem is. Your Title Tag can address my problem head on.
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A good content strategist can help you:

• Perform this research
• ​​​Determine your website’s pages.

A content strategist and writer can help you:

• Perform this research
• Determine your website’s pages
• Write your content exactly as intended.

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The Next Steps: Creating an *Offsite* Content Strategy

An offsite content strategy is an excellent way to improve brand recognition and SEO, all while introducing your experts to would-be customers and the industry at large.

The type of content strategy described above is an excellent first step toward getting there. 
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Want a little help? Contact me and let’s get started.