CONTENT STRATEGY: FLUENT CITY
A little background here...
Fluent City is a modern-day culture school that teaches 10 languages, culture, and more across 4 cities. I've been on the team for 10 months now, working as Content & Community Lead. One of my core responsibilities is creating a digital content strategy and calendar that serves our company needs, includes relevant and high-value content for our audience, and pushes our brand forward.
This calendar is also based off of the fact that I am a one-person content team—so I do the majority of writing, photography, and design direction that is needed. Let's get into it how it was created.
1/ A 30,000ft View
To begin, I thought about the big picture. A successful content calendar accomplishes the following:
- Brand Building: Conveys who we are as a brand through thoughtful pieces of content
- Increase SEO: Drives our SEO (search engine optimization) strategy forward and takes into account the need to always increase organic website traffic
- Social Integration: Includes easily shareable content
- Thoughtful Storytelling: Paints the larger story of who we are as a company
2/ Four Personas
Who were our customers and what kind of content would resonate with them? I had to think about who our audience was and how we would connect with them via engaging, relevant content. For this, I learned from several research studies, surveys, and Salesforce data we had compiled.
From there, I extracted our four main personas:
- The Traveler: Learns to travel or move abroad
- The Working Professional: Learns for their job or to increase career opportunities
- The Lover: Learns to better connect with their partner or wants to communicate with family across generations
- The Explorer: Learns for self-growth and for the sake of gaining knowledge
image via @itsnicethat on Instagram
3/ Research
The Digital Side
As a content creator, my brain is always on the hunt for new content. I typically reference design sites like ItsNiceThat & Design Milk, large publications like Refinery29 & FastCompany, and startups like Airbnb & Everlane—to keep up with what the big names are doing—as these are major publications that people who fit into our personas would read.
The Real World
Our team at Fluent City is a great, multilingual resource. I have begun weekly brainstorms with different members of the team to include their perspectives.
INCORPORATING MAJOR EVENTS
This is important for timely, relevant content. To compile a global list of holidays, I typically use a combination of various Google searches from different countries' geolocations and an app called TheSkimm Ahead.
4/ Understanding the Landscape
When building content strategy, it's important to consider what content exists out there already.
Buzzsumo Research
I use a tool called Buzzsumo, in which I search various topics and trends to see who else has written about those topics and trends. It also tracks virality, or how many times other articles have been shared. When looking through these articles, I ask myself, what else already exists and how can we create content that would be even more valuable to our customers, that would help them with their language learning?
Keyword Planner
For SEO, I create keyword lists based off of terms that our users would be interested in and search for—like "Spanish classes nyc" or "how to learn Italian fast." From there, I research national search volume and find related keywords.
5/ Et Voilà, The Content Calendar
Finally, these gathered insights are then compiled and organized into a massive spreadsheet, which is also tied in with our social media and email marketing strategies. This is an ongoing process that happens biweekly, or as larger marketing campaigns are created.
You can check out a portion of the final content calendar by clicking here.