Section 2. Planning and building your content strategy

Many small details go into crafting your content strategy approach, but it always starts with a clear objective. 

Duh! I want to get new clients.

You want to be more specific than that. Getting new clients is the ultimate goal, but remember part 1.2 The Buyer Journey, where I mention how you don’t just marry someone right after meeting them. The same goes here. 

Any content plan you create needs to meet concrete objectives. For example:

• Get more profile views, followers, or connections on a specific social network.
• Collect contact details to initiate sales conversations. 
• Create interest in a particular product or service.

If you read carefully, these objectives have a very strong connection to your marketing funnel. The first objective is to create awareness about your business, the second about generating interest and action, and the last about closing deals. 

Let’s connect these objectives with each stage of the funnel:

Therefore, you will require a distinct content strategy campaign for every funnel stage to support you in reaching the respective objectives.  

In this section, we’re going to focus on crafting the content strategy that will enable you to create that visibility and awareness to move potential clients towards closed deals. This part of the strategy will be crucial, especially when you’re getting started with content marketing. 

Now that you’re about to begin planning and building your strategy, it’s important to understand what your content is trying to convey. With everything you create and share, you want to ensure your potential clients recognize that:

• You have the knowledge and expertise in the subject matter
• You can help them with that knowledge and expertise
• And you have proven, past experiences that demonstrate the first two

And how do you do that? Let’s take a look.