In short
Throughout our years of experience in content marketing, we’ve seen many brands struggling with the same 6 challenges: content consistency, brand awareness, audience focus, SEO, costs and competitiveness.
We’ve developed our content marketing strategy services to help brands overcome those challenges and achieve impressive results, like boosting on-page conversion for PropertyGuru by 16% while lowering their content refresh costs by 80%. Learn how our content strategy services can help you reach your content marketing goals.
Does your brand have a documented content marketing strategy in place? If so, congratulations! You’re in the happy minority: Research shows that only 40% of marketers have a formal content marketing strategy. If you’re like 33% of marketers, you ‘sort of’ have a strategy, but it’s not fully worked out. Or maybe you’re among the 27% of marketers who say they don’t have a content strategy at all.
There are lots of reasons why so many marketers struggle to create a solid content strategy. Often, it’s simply too much work to keep up with the never-ending list of other things you’ve got to do in a day. In many cases – especially among fast-growing brands – marketing teams simply lack the resources, experience or network to develop an effective strategy on their own.
These are just a few of the reasons why many of the world’s fastest-growing brands now rely on professional content strategy services from Contentoo. Below, we want to share with you the most common strategy-related challenges we help our clients overcome, and show how our approach to content strategy can also help you achieve more with your content.
What is content strategy?
When we talk about a content strategy, here’s what me mean:
A set of guiding principles that helps you plan, develop and manage your content—text, video, interactive or other—across all the channels you use to reach your audience.
A content strategy gives you a structured approach for creating, curating and distributing valuable, relevant and engaging content, so you can attract the right audience for your brand.
Its chief aim is to align your business goals with your audience’s needs. That way, you can be sure that your content reflects your brand’s identity and resonates with your potential and existing customers.
Building an effective content strategy is a complex task that involves:
- In-depth research capabilities: This means having access to the latest tools and resources to perform SEO and keyword research, make data-driven decisions and continually optimise your content.
- Market and branding expertise: It takes experience to identify your audiences’ preferences, needs and interests, to develop a distinctive tone of voice and style for your brand, to create buyer personas and to choose the best channels and formats to match your content marketing goals.
- Trend analysis: If you’re like most marketers, the main marketing trend you’re aware of is that 80% of marketing teams are overworked and understaffed. With that in mind, you probably don’t have time to keep up to date on constantly changing marketing trends. Professional content strategists on the other hand devote a large portion of their energy to spotting and getting ahead of the latest trends and techniques.
Why is a content strategy so important?
In our experience, a strong strategy is something that all successful content marketers have in common. Strategy-focused brands are better equipped to create compelling narratives and rich content experiences that inform, engage and inspire.
A strategy also provides guidance for how to respond to changing market conditions. It gives you a playbook for how to interpret your data and decide what to do next.
But creating a content strategy doesn’t happen overnight. And it takes specialised knowledge to get things off the ground, which is why we see such a strong need for the content strategy services we offer. Below, we look at 6 of the main reasons marketers come to us for support with their content strategy – and what we advise them to do.
6 reasons why marketers need content strategy services
Over the years, we’ve worked with hundreds of brands on improving their content strategy. One thing is clear: no two brands are ever alike. Each has a unique story and tone of voice, and each faces unique challenges. But many of those challenges fall into the 6 categories below. These are the 6 reasons we hear most often from brands who come to us for help with their content strategy.
1. Achieving consistency in your content
Do any of these challenges sound familiar to you?
- “Our content is a mix of old and new.”
- “There have been so many different people creating our content over the years and it’s not all in the same style.”
- “Our brand is maturing and our old content doesn’t represent who we are anymore.”
- “We’re not posting new content regularly enough to grow a steady audience.”
If so, then your brand is probably facing a consistency problem. It’s one of the top reasons why marketers turn to us for support. Here’s what we would do in that case:
- Define your tone of voice: We brainstorm with our clients to create written style guides, branding guidelines and tone-of-voice documents that ensure all your content is consistent and unmistakably written in your brand’s voice.
- Create a content calendar: We all know how long it takes to create new content, but new content is just one part of your content strategy. We work with our clients to develop realistic content pipelines and create a content calendar. This ensures you don’t overlook any important tasks (including content optimisation) and keeps your new content output flowing at a regular, frequent pace.
- Audit your content library: We identify content that’s working and flag everything that needs updating and optimising. Throw away weak old content and start all over? Never! Give it a new life with a content refresh. We’ve even got AI tools that make this extremely fast, like the time we bulk-refreshed 100,000 property listings for PropertyGuru, raising their Google SERP rankings by 14% and lowering content production costs by 80%.
2. Boosting brand awareness
How about these challenges?
- “Nobody is searching for our brand or product name on Google.”
- “We don’t have a backlink strategy in place.”
- “We’re relying on paid search ads for almost all our visibility.”
Sounds like your brand isn’t raising the awareness it deserves. Here’s what we recommend:
- Develop a strong SEO strategy: SEO should be incorporated into every stage of your content creation process. We’ll talk more about this below.
- Balance conversion with brand awareness: We all want to drive conversion with our content, but is conversion-focused content really what our audiences are searching for? Probably not. Balance your content activities between conversion and brand awareness. It’s a long-term investment that will pay off.
- Create brand ambassadors: Explore your options for deploying user-generated content, influencer content and employee-ambassador content.
- Focus on storytelling: Work with professional content creators who know how to tell a good story. This is the best way to bring your brand to life and make your message memorable.
3. Understanding your target audience
Here are some more challenges we often encounter:
- “We don’t know which topics are most important to our audience.”
- “We don’t have the time, expertise or tools to conduct market research.”
- “We’re entering a new market but don’t know what our new audience expects.”
Are you experiencing any of those challenges? To get to know your audience better, here’s what we advise:
- Conduct a professional market analysis: Target market analysis is an important yet time-consuming task. You don’t want to get it wrong, but you may not have the time to do it properly. We connect our clients with experienced consultants who support them throughout the process, whether you want to outsource some or all of your market research.
- Create buyer personas: Develop detailed buyer personas that are based on market research, data analysis and first-party data, including account information, surveys and customer feedback.
- Collect and analyse data the right way: We can help you create engaging, user-friendly options for your customers and leads to provide their data. And we have the know-how to help you analyse and get the most out of your market analysis.
- Include localisation in your strategy: Trying to expand into a new language or regional market? Our network talent includes native content localisation specialists working in over 50 languages. We also offer a mix of AI-powered, human-controlled localisation to make the process fast and effective.
4. Mastering search engine optimisation (SEO)
When it comes to SEO, we hear lots of questions like these:
- “Some of our content does well, but we’re not sure why other pieces fall flat.”
- “We lack the time, tools and expertise to conduct effective keyword research.”
- “We’re not sure if our SEO tactics are really effective.”
If you’re not satisfied with your SEO performance, the good news is, there’s literally always something you can do to improve it. Here are some good places to start:
- Outsource your SEO research: SEO deserves a lot of attention and it’s one of the best investments you can make in improving your content marketing performance. So, it’s a good idea to have an experienced, professional SEO specialist on your side. But hiring a full-time SEO expert is usually too expensive, and many brands don’t need full-time SEO support. The best option is to outsource your SEO research to a proven SEO specialist like the ones in our network.
- Prioritise content quality: Keywords are crucial, but the real deciding factor for who ranks first on Google is content quality. We connect our clients with best-in-class content creators who not only apply SEO best practices, but also create content that is helpful, reliable and user-focused – exactly what Google says it’s looking for.
- Use the latest SEO tools: In addition to their expertise, our SEO specialists have access to the latest research tools. They know which metrics to follow to deliver the insights you need, based on your SEO goals.
5. Lowering content marketing costs
With marketing budgets around the world continuing to sink, marketers are keen to lower their costs wherever possible. Maybe you can relate to some of these concerns:
- “Paid search gets us results, but it’s too expensive.”
- “Creating new content is slow, time-consuming and costly.”
- “We need a trackable ROI for our content marketing activities.”
We understand the importance of keeping your content marketing activities under control. Our content strategists recommend cost-saving measures like these:
- Automate time-consuming tasks: We provide a full range of AI-powered content creation tools that speed up repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
- Repurpose and refresh existing content: Extend the lifespan of your content and increase your ROI by reusing, repurposing and refreshing existing content instead of starting over each time. Our specialists can help you put the right content refresh strategy in place.
- Avoid costly mistakes: Ensure you’re getting the best results possible on the very first try. That’s why we fully pre-screen and onboard all of our content creators before connecting them with our clients. By working only with approved talent, we can guarantee they deliver the right quality without wasting your time on excessive back and forth.
6. Getting ahead of your competitors
Lastly, we hear lots of concerns about how to create more competitive content. New brands are continually entering your market. It takes a non-stop effort to maintain and grow your market share. Some of the most common concerns we hear include:
- “Our competitors consistently outrank us on important keywords.”
- “We’re struggling to gain brand recognition in a crowded, competitive market.”
Here’s what we recommend:
- Analyse your competition: Knowledge is power. The more you know about your competitors and their strategies, the better prepared you are to outdo them. Our content strategists help you conduct detailed competitor analysis and identify the keywords, topics and channels that offer the most potential.
- Use content mapping: Use content mapping to ensure your content is nurturing leads at every stage of the buyer journey. We can help you map out your current content, identify gaps and create a plan to optimise.
- Offer a unique content experience: Personalise your content with the automation tools to create a tailored experience that your audiences will love.
Successful content strategies in real life
To show you the benefits that the right content marketing strategy can offer, we want to share a few real-life success stories:
PropertyGuru
PropertyGuru is Asia’s market leader in online real estate, operating a portfolio of property marketplaces, Fintech solutions and data & software (SaaS) solutions.
Because their marketplaces list descriptions for millions of properties, refreshing their content to make even minor adjustments is an extremely time-consuming task. They approached Contentoo for a strategic partnership on how to handle this crucial task as efficiently as possible.
Contentoo developed a plan to audit PropertyGuru’s content, identify which pages needed to be refreshed, apply our AI technology to refresh the content in bulk and then thoroughly review the updated content to ensure quality. The plan was a major success, resulting in 16% increase in on-page conversion, 14% more traffic for the updated pages and 80% cost savings compared to manual updating.
PropertyGuru CMO Bjorn Sprengers said: “Contentoo delivered spectacular Marketing ROI improvements with its use of augmented AI. It has given us a sustainable edge over the competition.”
Bloomreach
Bloomreach offers a powerful marketing personalisation solution for e-commerce retailers across Europe, Asia and North America. Because of their vast international audience, they needed a fast, scalable strategy for content localisation.
Here’s what Bloomreach’s Head of Regional Marketing EMEA, Allan Ménard, said about using strategic content localisation services from Contentoo:
“Contentoo helps us localise our content at a pace that we would not have been able to achieve on our own. Within just 1 year, they’ve helped us localise our English-language website into German and French. They’ve also helped us localise around 20 white papers and launch new blogs for those languages. Thanks to Contentoo, we can localise content within 1 week or less.”
As a result, Bloomreach now raises 3 times more leads in the EMEA region and says they’ve experienced a significant increase in brand awareness thanks to their new localised approach.
Studytube
Studytube is an all-in-one digital platform for learning and development. When they expanded into the DACH region recently, they needed market insights and a new content strategy for reaching customers there. Hakar Sidik, Head of Global Demand Generation at Studytube said:
“Contentoo connected us with an experienced marketing strategist on their platform. We worked with them to develop a content plan for the next 3 to 6 months and decide which kinds of content to create. Once we had that plan in place, Contentoo provided the freelance writers we needed to create the content. Contentoo is more than just a supplier to us. They are a partner who really help us overcome challenges and improve our content strategy.”
Thanks to their strategic partnership with Contentoo, Studytube is now able to publish at least 5 new content projects each month. Hakar said that thanks to Contentoo’s support, his team’s ads and eBooks in the DACH region immediately saw an 80% increase in conversion, which continues to grow.
What to look for in a content strategy service provider
Based on our successful collaborations with fast-growing companies like PropertyGuru, Bloomreach, Studytube and others, we know which strategic services offer the most value to brands like these.
If you’re looking for a content strategy agency, content strategy consulting or a content strategy service provider, here are some of the services we think are most important to check for:
- Extensive experience and a track record of satisfied customers in your industry.
- A vast talent network of freelance content creation specialists, including content creators, editors, localisation specialists, content strategists, SEO strategists and graphic designers.
- An online platform that streamlines your content creation workflow and allows you to interactively collaborate directly with your content creators.
- Access to the latest marketing tech, including generative AI tools, SEO and web analytics tools and market research tools.
- Dedicated customer success managers who serve as your single point of contact and coordinate all your content activities.
- Transparent pricing based on pre-agreed rates.
Looking for the right content marketing partner?
Are you interested in learning more about how our unique approach to content marketing strategy can help your brand achieve its goals – consistently, quickly and on-budget?
Click here to learn why we’re the preferred choice for quality, customer service and expertise in content marketing.
