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Content strategy

The right content can forge lasting connections with your audience. We thoroughly analyze your business goals and audience preferences to strategize and align content creation—from blog posts to videos—with your brand objectives. Through our strategic approach, we enhance your brand visibility and drive growth by engaging your audience effectively.

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What is content marketing?

Content is everywhere. Content marketing is interwoven into your entire digital ecosystem. You need content for your product pages, social channels, blogs, FAQs, newsletters… you name it.

The core of content marketing is to answer the questions, needs, frustrations, and pain points customers face and eventually form a positive relationship with them through your channels.

Illustration of gated content, laptop with padlock on the screen

Why content marketing?

Great content captures your audience’s attention and generates traffic, views, and eventually leads. The best way to achieve this is through a combination of free and gated content.

Free content results in views and traffic, while gated content, or in other words “putting your content behind a gate”, brings in the leads. Because the gate can only be opened in exchange for data, which can later be used to start the sales conversation.

On top of that, it is safe to say that online content marketing not only benefits marketing, but also sales & customer service by providing a self-service mechanism for common queries, speeding up sales and reducing workload. Win-win, right?

Advertising is asking someone on a date. Your content is the reason they say yes

Dries De Kimpe, Content Strategist

How we define a content plan

Getting ourselves in customer's minds

When we define a digital content strategy, we always start by putting ourselves in the customer's mind and try to identify as many problems, struggles, questions, … as possible. Of course, there are different ways to get this information.

One way to do this is through workshops where we use the know-how from your team to get acquainted with your clients. This input combined with data-driven insights like keyword research or an analysis of the existing content gives us a pretty good image of the people on the other side of the screen. The information we gather here can result in buyer personas, user journeys, content backlogs, etc. From there on we craft a roadmap for the next months to decide which content needs to be created or updated.

Mapping out the technical content track

In the case of a brand-new website, we also take the technical content track into account, meaning that we map out the content model, the taxonomy, the information architecture, etc. This is to ensure the content is structured the right way for both front- and back end. Since the requirements are different for each company, we do not pin ourselves to one particular CMS. You can check out all the CMSs we work with on our partner page.

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What we expect from you

It is important to note here that content marketing is a long-term strategy that requires the full commitment of your organization, unlike quick-result methods like advertising and campaigning. That is also why content has to be a co-creation process where we combine your business expertise with our content expertise. 

Furthermore, setting the right expectations across your organization is crucial. Like consistently working out at the gym, content marketing success comes from regular efforts in creating valuable content and sticking to the plan, rather than expecting immediate results from sporadic big pieces. It is not about the big content pieces, it is about the consistency of creating valuable content and sticking to the plan until you get into shape.

Take a look at a few of our best content cases

Port of Antwerp

Port of Antwerp-Bruges underscores merger with a new website

With The Reference, Port of Antwerp-Bruges has built a composable website where everybody can find the information they are looking for quickly and accurately.

Vandersanden building facade

Vandersanden

Vandersanden is a Belgian producer of bricks, facing bricks and clickers, both for private homes and the streetscape. They wanted to reposition themselves as a partner in building solutions by focusing more on their services rather than their products.

Mennens employees together with the team from The Reference on the balcony at the Ghent office

Mennens

Mennens, a company that specializes in steel wire rope, lifting and hoisting equipment, and fall protection, partnered with us to further develop their brand and online presence. 

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