You might have just started in the content marketing game and might not have much idea about this world, or you might have been given a task to create a new content team. Hence you need to identify the common content themes that run across all the content marketing to enhance your marketing strategy and drive profits.
This post will cover the why, what, and how to choose your content themes and how to use the content themes, and then it will dig into how to brainstorm to come up with the best content strategy.
What are Content Themes?
In simple terms, content themes act as high-level buckets of topics that align with both your company’s goals and your audiences’ needs and guide your brainstorming and content planning efforts(Dorland,2019)1.
You must choose a limited section of themes while planning your content calendar. It will ensure that you are focusing on your brand and content strategy for your target audience. This will also prevent you from creating content on any random topic of your liking.
The following are some benefits of this approach :
Brand Authority: You will learn how to strengthen your brand and learn authority on your brand.
Better SEO: Limit the Content; it will help you in your SEO strategy. Search Engines will find it easy to categorize your websites.
Easy ideas for a topic: Ideas will more easily and naturally come to you if you limit your content themes because you will not be paralyzed too much by choice.
User-Friendly: It will help your users understand your website more if you choose your content theme between 4-6 lines
Hubspot calls these ‘topic clusters’ and explains how they can benefit SEO in this short video.
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Why Content Themes will work for You
Any blog or brand, or website will limit itself to specific content themes.
For example, here at DivvyHQ2, our main themes include( Dorland,2019):
Content strategy
Content marketing/software
Content/editorial calendars
Collaboration
Content planning
Content automation
Content analytics
All content will fit under one or two more of these categories. For example, this article would come under ‘content marketing’ or ‘content strategy.’
These definitions will help marketers and content creators develop better ideas for setting up their content themes and content strategy. It will also help the audience know what to expect when they will visit the website.
If you randomly publish content under random content themes, it will eventually cause marketing blunders for your audience. Thus, it would dilute the marketing messages, risk annoying and confusing our regular leaders, and damage the SEO strategy.
Understand the ideology that less is more. Focus on only one or two themes at a time and enhance and explain those themes adequately. If you apply a scattershot method, it will have no impact on your message.
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How to Choose Your Content Themes
You need to have a clear idea of your marketing message for your target audience before describing or choosing your content theme for your marketing strategy.
Your marketing message should focus on the inherent values of your organization and the challenges that your company faces, as well as the pain points of your target audience. It should focus on that cross-section where your company’s subject matter expertise meets your customers’ informational expectations.
If you have already decided on your marketing message, then you must also have decided on your exact brand message. Because if you have not done that, you need to go back and check your brand messaging strategy. Focus on coming up with various statements that your brand focuses on.
The content themes adopted by DivvyHQ3 align with our business goals and the needs of our customers:
Maintain alignment with your content marketing strategy
Organize and simplify your content planning and production processes
Track content performance
Create better content
Your themes may be guided by service areas for your business or the different markets you target. But they must relate to your underlying business goals and marketing messages(Dorland,2019).
Keep in mind that each theme you choose should have the long-term ability to make sure that you can produce content. If you pick up a theme that is too narrow, you will eventually run out of ideas. Thus it will be difficult for you to create content regularly.
Ask the question, ‘Can I come up with content regularly if I choose this content theme?
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How to structure your content marketing using content themes?
Your content theme can help you devise your content marketing strategy if you have decided on your content strategy. Hence, ensuring that you are covering all the key marketing messages.
Content themes are the foundation of your strategy, eventually, article titles and ideas for each piece of content.
Imagine that your content is the tree trunk and the marketing messages are the leaves. The themes represent the main branches, sub-topics sprout from the minor branches, and they grow leaves, which are your pieces of content.
Ask these four questions when you are researching the marketing funnel.
When you are doing keyword research, these questions will help you get a clear idea about your marketing plan and its effect on the marketing funnel.
1. Who are you trying to attract?
Is it someone who has just started their journey? Are they researching something? Do they already have something in their cart?
There are differences between the person who might start their journey and who already is on a journey. These are two different people with different needs. They are fundamentally at different marketing funnel stages and need very different content to be attracted to your site.
2. What do they need?
Are they looking for information? Do they need help making a decision? Are they looking for ideas?
3. How will your content solve their problem?
Experiences such as clicking on a link, searching two or three search results, and eventually finding that none of those links is helpful to lead to bad search engine experiences. Everyone has faced such a situation.
Tie your content intimately with your search keyword. How is that keyword going to relate to the content that you’re going to produce? Start with a keyword and try to develop your content around it. This will be a more beneficial strategy than writing your content first and then developing your keyword around it. Most misalignments are caused here.
4. What is your audience going to do next?
Maybe after reading your content about types of smoothies, your consumer might want to shop for smoothies or blenders that make smoothies. This is usually called a top-down business approach, where your audience’s needs are aligned with your company’s business goals. This is called the counter keyword search result strategy that may have gotten you good results in the past. That old way is certainly not recommended now.
So what are the appropriate ways to choose the right keywords? What are the things you should keep in mind while choosing keywords for content? Below are some of the strategies that might help you in your keyword-focused content strategy.
Seven tips for Helping You Choose the right keywords
1. THINK LIKE A CUSTOMER
While creating the initial list of content-focused keywords, keep in mind your content’s target audience and put yourself in the shoes of your consumer base. It is important to ask yourself the question of ‘What would I search on the search engine if I were a consumer looking for this particular product?’ Try consulting your peers, such as friends, family members, or even current customers, and get their experiences as to what they search for when typing on the search engines while looking for a product.
2. UNDERSTAND YOUR COMPETITION
Please make a list of your main competitors and go to their websites to see what keywords they are targeting. Understand their content and follow the meta tags that they are using for optimizing their content. When you look at your competitor’s keywords, you focus on what you are missing in your content and what you can increase.
3. IMPORTANCE OF LONG-TAIL KEYWORD
Long-tail keywords are a combination of three or more words or phrases. While long-tail keywords tend to boast lower search volumes, they generally attract more relevant traffic, are typically less competitive, and are easier to rank well on. Choose long-tail keywords that help to specify your product or service(Common Places Interactive,2019)4.
4. IMPORTANCE OF KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOL
While using GoogleAds, it is equally important to focus on Keyword research tools. This tool, along with SEMRUSH and raven tools, will help you gather data on keyword volume and trends, keyword competition, similar keywords, and more.
5. FOCUSING ON ANALYZING SEARCH RESULTS
When you have chosen your keywords, do not forget to analyze them and test them. Often there are trending keywords or new keywords that your competitor might be using that you are unaware of, so go look for those.
Utilize the keywords wherever possible. Insert your keywords into blog posts, social media posts, metatags, and your website’s content. The more you use keywords within your content, the easier it will be for your target audience to find you.
6. Get Your suggestions from the source
Google has the most data search on any activity. Google search field uses auto guesses to search for whatever data you are looking for. The system algorithmically analyses your needs and searches based on the experience of past hunts with similar keywords. This is accurately called Google Guess.
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7. Use Google AdWords Keyword Planner
The Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool was created to serve the needs of companies using their popular pay-per-click ad program. However, you can create an account whether or not you plan to pay for search ads.
The data offered via the tool is vast. Most importantly, it will serve your blog planning needs by delivering (1) approximations of the search volume for the keywords you enter and (2) related keywords. Enter an idea or several, and the tool will return up to 800 suggestions pulled from Google’s massive database(Alexa,2019)5.
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1
https://divvyhq.com/content-marketing/using-content-themes-to-structure-your-content-marketing/
2
https://divvyhq.com/content-marketing/using-content-themes-to-structure-your-content-marketing/
3
https://divvyhq.com/content-marketing/using-content-themes-to-structure-your-content-marketing/
4
https://www.commonplaces.com/blog/5-tips-on-choosing-the-right-keywords/
5
https://blog.alexa.com/choosing-keywords-for-your-content-marketing-funnel/