What is content strategy
A content strategy takes your business goals, and then uses content as a primary means to achieve those goals.
For instance, your business goals might include increasing brand awareness (to ultimately drive more revenue) — to achieve this goal, you might implement a content strategy that focuses on SEO to increase website visibility on the SERPs and drive traffic to your products or services.
New business owners might assume a content strategy is a ‘nice-to-have’, but not entirely necessary early on. However, producing high-quality content to meet business needs can help companies build trust with new audiences and, ultimately, succeed over the long-haul.
While HubSpot may be known as a marketing automation tool to drive email marketing and lead capture, HubSpot can also help you develop and implement a content strategy simply and quickly. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the steps to use HubSpot to power your content marketing.
How to use HubSpot’s content strategy tools
HubSpot’s new tool helps you focus on a new marketing approach by providing suggestions for topics based on your current website content and domain. After all, no one wants to start from scratch at this point.
The tool helps you sort and organize ideas by grouping content into categories called topic clusters. These are made up of a core topic (or pillar page focus) and a number of related subtopics. HubSpot’s tool suggests core topics based on your existing website content to get you started. You can also choose to create your own core topic. This may be a way to test new core topics you’re looking to target.
1. Open the SEO Tool
If you haven’t explored this tool yet, it can be found under the main tab, Marketing and then go to Planning and Strategy, where you’ll see SEO.
2. Add a Core Topic
Whether you’ve already done research through a tool such as SEMRush or you’re exploring which topics might be the best to focus on, you can enter your core topic here. This topic should be a higher monthly search volume (typically a three digit or higher number) and be able to encompass several related terms. HubSpot will list a few recommended topics based on your business. As you can see, some may make more sense than others.
3. Add Subtopics
Once you’ve chosen a good core topic, you’ll select several subtopics that will be the keywords you focus on for blog posts. HubSpot will again provide suggestions, but use your best judgement based on your own research through a tool or using search engine results pages as a guide for good ideas.
4. Connect Existing Blog Posts
You may have existing blog posts that perfectly align with your chosen subtopics. Attach those blog posts to the appropriate subtopics. Using the subtopics that are left, create your blog posts over the next few weeks.
5. Create Your Pillar Page
Once you’ve developed or attached several blog posts to your cluster, you can write your pillar page. It’s recommended that your pillar page should have a minimum word count of 2,000 words.
As you put together your pillar, you essentially summarize the content in each of the blog posts you’ll connect to the pillar page. Make sure that each blog post is linked to within the content. Once you’ve perfected your content, set up your pillar page as a main page on your website – you’ll also want to create a PDF version so visitors can easily download.
