Content Strategy Approach for Company's Blog
Spearheading content creation for a small media company
My Role
Writer
Process
Empathize User research
Competitive analysis
Tools
Google suite dropbox
Duration
3 months
Strategy
Brain storm phase
Brand voice development
Development
Persona building
Launch
Publishing content weekly
Verifying
Examining analylitics
The Challenge
Building a blog from scratch was the biggest challenge with this project. Overcoming that involved a lot of market research and developing an understanding of the audience's needs and goals.
The Goals
The primary goal of this challenge was to craft content that would educate, inform and, when possible, entertain. In order to do this well I needed do research to understand the blogging expectations and the audience.
The secondary goal was to improve the organic traffic for the site
The Outcomes
Two defined content categories that are tailored for the diverse audience needs.
The Audience
Every client that used BAMMFilm's services has a similar goal of turning an idea into some form of media. What made them different was their purpose with the media.
Fundraising
Needs: Media that tells a story about why they deserve financial support
Real Estate
Needs: Media that tells a story about the house and surrounding areas
Wedding
Needs: Media that tells the story of one of their most important life events and something to look back on
Commercial/Promo
Needs: Media that tells a story about a product that will improve the customer's life in a specific way
Competitive Analysis
My first step in understanding the scope of this endeavor was researching. I focused the majority of my investigation with bay area media companies to get an understanding of expectations that would be involved, for me as the content creator and for future readers
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Bayside Entertainment
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StudioB
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Corduroymedia
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Buzzmasters
Each company provided good insight into the scope and expectations before me. Buzzmasters was the one that stood out, with higher quality content that answered questions most in line with our customer base, both future and present.
After going through an initial brainstorming phase of "no bad ideas" that, not surprisingly, had a plethora of terrible ideas.
After weeding out the ideas that didn't meet the criteria of helping the user, I broke the content strategy into two categories.
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As mentioned before, content that was inspired by the common questions from clients. These pieces were called BammFilmSchool Example here.
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The intent behind the other type of content was for the long term SEO game plan and to have some good content for social media sharing, especially for Linkedin. These piece were labeled Industry Insights. Example Here.
Brand Voice Breakdown
Tone
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Disarming
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Supportive
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A little snarky
Character
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Friendly
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Lighthearted
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Authoritative
Language
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Honest
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Charming
Purpose
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Educational
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Informative
Conclusion
In addition to generating blog content, blurbs and data from these articles were reused in social media campaigns and the company newsletter.
The blog is ultimately a stop-gap for the business, the more effective organic marketing tool being a Vlog or at the very least short video content distributed on the appropriate platforms. A review of budgeting showed that that wasn't in the cards, so the blog will be test run of content to help determine what will be the best for video form content.
Also, at this time, the blog doesn't have any impact to measure since the SEO goals have a minimum timeline of 6 months.