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How to Find the Best Content Strategist for Your Business in Portland, OR
When it comes to organizing content across the various platforms where you maintain a business presence, you need a content strategy plan. Content strategists in Portland help you maintain a consistent brand image in everything from email newsletter copy to social media posts and make sure your content is optimized and distributed where potential customers can find it. Whether you're running a restaurant in the West End or creating a website to sell locally made hand-crafted products online, a content strategist can ensure your attention-getting content reaches the right audience.
What Is a Content Strategist?
A content strategist builds your brand presence, creates a cohesive content strategy, and manages all of your content across the different platforms you use. Content strategy typically involves a more organic approach than traditional marketing. Instead of creating ads that target customers watching TV or reading a magazine, content strategists create a comprehensive body of content that potential clients seek out themselves for entertainment or information purposes. Essentially, content strategy is about the big picture, not just the individual posts you write.
Major Aspects of Content Strategy
Content strategists handle multiple aspects of your marketing plan. A big part of the job is making sure that everything you produce remains true to your brand. Some content strategists handle all or part of the actual content creation, while others delegate writing or graphics creation to specialists and focus on the overall strategy and editorial duties.
Web Content Strategists
Web content strategists focus on your entire online presence. This includes your company website, social media feeds, opt-in newsletter, and online directory pages. A content strategist also tracks the results of your web-based marketing efforts, including engagement and conversion rates of your pages and posts.
Business Website Content Strategy
When it comes to building and maintaining a website, throwing up a few blog posts isn't enough to draw attention from busy web searchers. A content strategist helps you decide what to include on your website and how to arrange your web content so site visitors want to bookmark your page and visit again.
Website content strategy also involves positioning your web pages in search engines. Before anyone can read your content, they need to find it on the web. A professional web content strategist understands how search engine optimization (SEO) works and can maximize the visibility of your pages so they show up high in search engine rankings. The job also involves handling any pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which promotes your site on other websites so people with an interest in your product or service can find you.
Social Media Content Strategy
Social media is a major part of a content strategy marketing plan. With so many platforms out there, it can be hard to determine which ones you should use. A content strategist can develop a social media marketing plan that works for your business. Your social media content strategy might include:
- Creating business pages for various social media sites
- Scheduling posts for the optimal day and time on each site
- Coordinating social media posts and blog content to ensure complementary content between platforms
- Adjusting content to maximize its impact on each social media platform
- Working with local influencers to boost your online presence
Newsletter Content Strategy
Email newsletters let you keep in contact with existing customers, or potential clients who have a strong interest in your product or service. Running an email newsletter involves developing a system for customers or web visitors to opt in to your newsletter, creating the content of each newsletter, crafting subject lines that encourage recipients to open the email, and scheduling email distribution.
Infographic & Video Strategy
Visual content has become increasingly important for optimizing visibility on the web. Some social media sites, such as Pinterest and Instagram, deal primarily with visual images instead of written content. A professional content strategist understands how to integrate visual content with written posts so everything remains cohesive. Some visual strategies your content marketing specialist might use include:
- Creating video content, such as how-to videos, behind-the-scenes clips, and entertaining promotional videos
- Making infographics that complement articles and blog posts on your site
- Developing photo layouts to include on posts
Community Engagement Strategies
Some content strategists go beyond the digital realm to create community engagement. This might include creating press releases for print newspapers, commissioning articles for print magazines, and hiring ghostwriters to develop books or booklets about your industry that can be attributed to you or your company.
Community engagement efforts by content strategists also include developing speeches for you to use when participating in local events and seeking out partnerships with other local businesses.
Skills Used in Content Strategy Marketing
When you're hiring a content strategy consultant, you want to make sure they have the right skills. Some of the specific skills you should look for in a content strategist include:
Flexibility
Managing content involves a lot of moving parts, and current standards can change rapidly when search engines or web platforms make changes to their algorithms. A good content strategist keeps tabs on changing standards to ensure your content is always up to date.
Data Analysis
Content strategists need to be able to quickly assess whether a strategy is working, so they should be familiar with tools such as Google Analytics and social media engagement data. Effective data analysis lets your content strategist know where to focus marketing efforts and provides ways to test different content types to figure out which ones work best.
Research
The ability to research keywords, industry trends, competitor behavior, and the changing needs of your target audience can help a content strategist plan short- and long-term web strategies.
Leadership and Coordination
Content strategy goes far beyond just content creation, and a professional content strategist needs the coordination skills to manage multiple team members handling writing, graphic design, video creation, web design, and newsletter layout.
Creativity
You don't want your content to look just like everyone else's posts. A creative content strategist can come up with unique ways to differentiate your business from competitors.
Storytelling
A brilliant content strategist weaves a story about your business, using empathy and a rich understanding of human nature to make people want to read everything your business produces.
Working with Content Strategists
Content strategy is a long-term project, so most business owners work closely with their strategists to ensure their brand voice remains consistent over time.
Setting the Initial Parameters
Before your freelance content strategist can get started, you need to define exactly what you want out of your content. You'll probably have one or more meetings with your content strategist before the actual work starts, so the two of you can discuss your brand vision and what you expect from your content.
Doing a Content Audit
If you already have a website, email newsletter list, or social media presence, your content strategist will want to conduct a content audit on everything that's there. The first part of a content audit is an assessment of your content inventory. The second part is to determine whether anything you already have can be repurposed or used as-is.
Your content strategist may recommend a complete overhaul or you may be able to build upon existing content. If you have specific content you want to keep, your content strategist may be able to work around it or expand upon it. Specific things a content strategist looks at during a content audit include:
- Whether the content is on-brand for your business
- Whether the content meets best-practice standards for your industry
- Whether the content contributes to your strategic goals and business objectives
- Whether the content is too similar to a competitor's content
- What content gaps are present and what kinds of content your site needs to fill any gaps
In addition to the initial content audit, your content strategist may recommend periodic audits to make certain everything remains fresh and up to date.
Managing your Content Strategy Project
Managing content is a big part of a content strategist's job. This involves both creation and maintenance of your content, along with choosing the platforms where your content resides.
Some steps in content strategy management include:
- Interviewing stakeholders. Stakeholders include everyone with a relevant interest in your project, such as managers, employees, board members, and other professionals, such as web developers doing the back-end programming for your site.
- Developing target personas. Knowing who you're targeting with your content helps simplify the creation of engaging posts, videos, and graphics. A target persona is an idealized version of your typical customer demographic, such as "moms between age 25 and 45," or "retired people with vacation homes in my area." Your content strategist can create these personas based on collected customer data and competitor research.
- Defining the customer's journey. If your goal is to sell more products or get more people to sign up for your services, you need a road map of how existing customers get to that point. Your content strategist can help you define the different stages of a typical customer's journey, from their first encounter with your business to the final sale. Understanding this journey helps your content specialist design specific pieces of content that guide the buyer through the sales funnel smoothly and organically.
- Crafting a distinct brand identity. Differentiating yourself from competitors is essential if you want to stand out and build customer loyalty. Your content strategist helps you develop the tone and voice of your brand, so local consumers can identify your business instantly whenever they encounter your content.
- Creating a core content strategy. Your business needs a distinct content strategy with well-defined objectives, guidelines for adhering to the brand voice, and a specific schedule for content creation. This overarching strategy guides all content creation, from long informative articles to short one-liner Tweets. Content strategists often develop style guidelines to ensure writers and graphic designers remain consistently on-brand.
- Setting benchmarks. Content creation only works if it's actually meeting your goals, whether you're trying to increase sales at your Multnomah Village boutique shop or build an email list of prospective clients for your downtown Portland walking tours. Your content strategist sets benchmarks and monitors whether posted content is contributing to your company's overall goals.
- Streamlining the content process. A professional content strategist creates an editorial schedule for content and lines up everything necessary to meet those deadlines. This might include things beyond just content creation, such as scheduling in time to have text approved by your legal team or having revised logos sent over from your corporate headquarters.
- Managing content distribution and visibility. This part of content strategy involves figuring out the best service for email newsletter distribution, automating social posts, and performing content updates to tweak existing articles when search engines change their ranking algorithms. It might also involve developing the metadata for posts so they're properly indexed and included in dynamic searches. Coordinating with back-end developers. Your content strategist works closely with your website developer to ensure posted content is accessible on various types of devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, and desktop computers. Working with a programmer, your content strategist might also try to find easier ways to create modular content that can be mixed and matched on different platforms. As an example, your content strategist may ask your web developer to create a widget that automatically posts a snippet from the latest blog entry on the website's front page or create content blocks and graphics that followers can download to promote you on their own social media feeds.