Marketing is often one of those catch-all phrases people use that may combine many facets of a business to signify awareness and growth. Similarly, content is a broad term which may make it challenging to understand or create a content strategy.
Simply stated, content is the compilation and communication of information, across many forms. Anything your funeral home publishes may be considered content.
Content can take on many forms. This article is an example of long-form content. A quick summary of it would be considered short form. Beyond written content, other forms include video, image, infographic (a visual representation of data), polls, etc. The type of content is one consideration.
Content creation can be important for many reasons. It may help attract new families who are searching on the internet. It may lend credibility to your funeral home. Content may also help answer questions directly and reduce phone calls for administrative items and leave your team more time to spend with each family.
As a funeral home, thinking about the content you create may seem overwhelming. Having a strategy in place for what you publish, where you publish it, and when, will help you focus your attention on your goals. A content strategy does just that.
A content strategy is your plan to create and distribute content in a purposeful, goal-oriented way.
Please find 5 steps to defining a content strategy:
Step 1: Identify your goals
As a funeral home are you focused on being the funeral home known for a specific service type or do you want to grow your pre-need sales this year? The information you would provide may look different based on your primary objective.
Step 2: Define your target
What types of families do you currently appeal to or who is your desired family? Understanding who the primary audience is for the information you are creating helps maintain focus and strengthen relevancy.
Determining the primary types of people you currently best serve and those you would like to reach. Perhaps your funeral home is well-known for creating custom experiences
Step 3: Create themes
Develop subject areas to build or share content around based on your audiences’ areas of interest. Developing themes can be done qualitatively (what have you learned from your experiences, what have families told you), quantitatively (using free or paid tools in the market to help identify what is being searched for most often) or a combination of both.
Step 4: Establish distribution opportunities
Identify the mediums available to distribute content. Examples include email, social media, your website, in-person, events, on a podcast, etc. Your content strategy will take into account your goals, where your audience is most likely to engage with your content, and where you feel confident in the ability to successfully distribute content regularly.
Step 5: Create
Understanding themes and distribution opportunities, the final piece of your strategy is your content calendar. This brings everything together. What will be created specifically (what topic, what format), when it will be created, and where you will distribute. You may also want to consider noting who the creator will be (internal or external). Finally, what is the desired outcome of each piece of content and how will you measure success? For instance, if you are sending an email, perhaps open rate and click-through rate will be your KPI whereas on social media, you may choose reach and total engagement.
Defining a content strategy creates focus for your funeral home. This focus enables the regular creation and distribution of targeted, useful, purposeful, and outcome-oriented messaging dedicated to achieving your specific goals and driving growth. Curious to learn more about content strategies? Contact Sympathy Brands at info@SympathyBrands.com.