Tips for an Effective Content Strategy (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this series we looked at how important content and consistency are in capturing your audience within your app. After you start getting great content in your app, there are some other important considerations to keep your audience engaged.

Here are a few:

4. Always Test

The hardest part about creating a content strategy that works for your community is the fact that there is no perfect model or template that works seamlessly across all organizations and audiences. Each church and ministry is unique in terms of what their needs are and what their community will respond favorably to. That's why it's important to track the responsiveness of your audience to your content. 

If one piece of content doesn't receive much engagement, maybe it's time to try something different! Testing different things in your app is the best way to determine what your community wants to see. If you've tried writing blog posts about a particular topic and don't see much traction, maybe it's time to write about something different, or try your hand at a video or a podcast.

It's also possible that you aren't posting your content at the right moment when your audience is most likely to see it. Testing the receptiveness of your content might look like posting at a certain day and time every week for a month and then switching it up if you don't get much feedback.

5. Always Refine

It's best to see your app as an ever-evolving project. Continually refining the visuals, content, and features offered is a good way to keep your community hooked. The more you create, test, and refine the content in your app, the better you will become at providing great resources for your community.

For more great tips about creating and maintaining a high quality app, check out our Church App Essentials series!

Let's chat about developing a content strategy for your organization's app! 

Tips for an Effective Content Strategy

Once you get your mobile app up and running, it might be tempting to move on to the next big initiative for your organization, but we'd say, "hold on a minute...what's your strategy for keeping your audience engaged in your app?" The app creation and promotion stage is largely completed, now it's time to develop your content strategy.

Engaging content is going to make up a large part of your strategy for maximum engagement with your audience, here are a few tips for getting started:

1. Know (or come to know) your Audience

You might think this one is a given, but have you really considered what your community's mobile habits are? What about identifying common pain points that you might be able to address with helpful content? 

Going through a few exercises can you help you both nail down your audience's mobile habits, and find out what kind of content would be most relevant to them. Using your existing tools, like website analytics can help you answer some of these questions. Also, once you start to see some initial engagement in your app, our new and improved analytics in the Subsplash Dashboard will give you great visibility into your community's behaviors in your app!

2. Be Consistent

It can take some time to ramp up interest and adoption for your app. If you want to see continued growth for downloads and impressions it's important to remain consistent with the content you share. One helpful way to keep track of this is in a content calendar. There's plenty of free templates out there to get you started. You might want to start small with one blog post per month, and then scale it to three or four over time. But consistency is key. Publishing something on the same day of the week gives your community something to count on and look forward to. 

Once you start to learn what kind of content resonates best with your audience, you can start creating and sharing helpful blog posts, podcast episodes, and other great resources, and use your app to put them at your community's fingertips. And don't forget to leverage push notifications to let your community know when something new is live in the app!

3. Choose Quality over Quantity

Sometimes consistency can come at the expense of quality, but your audience has so much content at their disposal, and limited time. To help your community gravitate towards your content, you have to earn their trust by providing high-quality resources and on-brand messaging every time.

We'd love to help you get your mobile strategy off the ground. Get in touch with us about creating an app for your organization! And stay tuned for part 2 of this series!