Content that Clicks: The Power of Category-specific Strategies

Imagine going to your weekly food shop, only to find your Sainsbury’s is *uncategorised*. Clothes next to the eggs, meat by the cereal…how long would it take for you to abandon the trolley?

That right there, is the most blatant reason why you need to categorise your content. But, it’s not quite as simple as chucking a filter on your blog page. It goes all the way back to your initial marketing strategy. By prioritising categories from the outset, you’re optimising your approach for:

1. Targeted audience reach

By drilling down into the categories of content each demographic would value, you can set clear boundaries and targets for topics. Streamlining your approach to SEO, and ensuring your content aligns with interests and needs, to foster deeper engagement.

2. Enhanced user experience

Bringing it back to Sainsbury’s, we all value easy navigation and content discovery. By categorising your content, you can understand when your audience may be looking for particular information. This information will transform your sitemaps and website copy structure.

3. Improved SEO and search visibility

From a technical perspective, content that's well-categorised and tailored to a niche typically performs better in search rankings. This higher visibility helps to drive more organic traffic to your site.

4. Better conversion rates

When points 1-3 all join together, they make something beautiful - conversion rates. The bottom line that’s driving our strategies in the first place, is much easier to deliver when everything is working towards to same purpose.

So, this is why we bang on about category-specificity in our strategies. But how does it look in practice?

So, this is why we bang on about category-specificity in our strategies. But how does it look in practice? We’ve spent over a decade building our approach. Here’s what we found works…

The audit

We find the best place to start, is by looking at what’s happened so far. It’s all about who you want to reach, and how well you’ve been reaching them - I like to think of it as the ideal, versus the actual.

The ideal - Who do you want to reach? How do you want to be perceived? What do you want to achieve?

The actual - Who are you reaching? How are you being perceived? What are you achieving?

By applying these questions to each channel, you give yourself a clear foundation to start building your plan on. 

The research

Now you understand where you want to be vs. where you actually are, it’s time to dig in with some research. You need to understand, for each channel:

The behaviours of buyer personas

You need to understand what actually matters to them. How you approach this will depend on your resources, current performance and network. But here’s what’s worked for us:

Questionnaires/Surveys

If your audience is made of the right people, just not enough of them, this is a great way to get inside their heads. Offer an incentive attached to a questionnaire/survey you can gather information about their preferences and demonstrate you care about their opinions.

Answer the Public

If you don’t really know where to start, tools like Answer the Public are a brilliant way to put yourself in the audiences’ shoes. Simply pop in a term that you think your audience might care about and it’ll churn out a load of questions that are being asked about it.

Once you’ve got this information, you can form an understanding of what exactly they want from your resource page. Whether that’s:

• Education

• Inspiration

• Affirmation

• Or other!

The SEO hotspots

You need to understand where your best opportunities to be seen and connect with your audience are. This is where SEO research comes in. A topic that deserves it’s own blog in itself…(and it has one, right here!)

The strategy

Now you have all that juicy detail, you can build a strategy that makes sense. You need to map out the content that matters to your audience with the best SEO opportunities. This is where your categories will emerge - but it’s also where brains start to smoke…

Because it’s not just about your resource page, it’s about your socials, your email, your PR…your WHOLE digital presence. But the good news is, the right categories mean all your marketing efforts will be geared towards you and your audience, mapped out in a way that’s actually achievable in the space you’re operating in.

Builder.ai needed to improve website rankings and traffic after a website re-development. Their solutions were expanding at lightning speed, and they were rapidly readying themselves to make waves in new markets. But their ambitious growth needed to be fueled by targeted traffic and conversions. That’s where we came in.

We pinpointed Builder.ai’s best digital opportunities for the markets they were expanding into, and provided a clear breakdown of all the steps needed to maximise their potential for performance.

But we didn’t stop there…

Their categorised content plan offered social media ideas and writing support, plus a bespoke tracking system that monitored their ranking and traffic changes in real time. And good thing it did, because here’s what happened…

2,500%

increase in annual traffic

1,155%

increase in value of annual traffic

Read our case study in full here.

I hope you found this dive into the world of category-specific strategy helpful. Are you ready to raise the bar for your business? Curious about how we at Re-Imagine can help? Let’s chat!