A content strategy is a plan in which you use content (audio, visual, and/or written) to achieve your business goals. A successful content strategy will attract your target audience at every stage of the funnel and keep them engaged even after a purchase.
With 70% of marketers actively investing in content marketing, you must develop a good content strategy to compete in your industry.
While content marketing keeps growing in popularity, creating blogs and social media posts is not enough to impact the bottom line.
To succeed in content, you must build a comprehensive and holistic strategy. Ultimately, it will allow you to attract and engage a clearly defined audience and, in the end, generate profitable customer action.
By following the in-depth guide below, you will map out the primary steps needed to develop a robust content marketing strategy for your business
Have a look at what this guide entails
What Is a Content Marketing Strategy
A strategy is a plan for getting where you want to go. So, what specifically is a content marketing strategy? Let’s distinguish it from a few similar industry terms:
- Content marketing strategy: This high-level strategy deals with mapping out the implementation and distribution of your brand’s content marketing materials.
- Content plan: You will sometimes hear this referred to as a “content calendar.” A content plan helps you organize your material implementation in a neat and orderly fashion
Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Strategy
We found out that 40% of businesses don’t have a documented strategy yet. But why is it important to map out and document your content marketing strategy?
It helps you move from chaotically creating content to building an organized system with specific goals, success metrics, and processes for continuous improvement.
Out of the 1,500 marketers we surveyed for our State of Content Marketing report, 78% who felt their content marketing strategy was exceptionally effective in 2021 had documented their strategy.
While it’s true that a solid content strategy will improve marketing results for nearly every company and industry, many marketers don’t understand why.
The following four elements embody why a content strategy to produce QUALITY content is paramount in today’s marketing.
- Quality content attracts customers, engages them and builds trust.
- Quality content allows you to reach the customers you want without being blocked. Ad blocking software is used by 30% of Internet users, which loosely translated means that a quarter of paid advertising messages will never reach their audiences.
- Quality content helps consumers remember a brand (business or individual) and encourages them to engage more personally with the company or individual.
- Quality content increases search visibility and authority.
Questions you need to ask while building a content strategy.
Generally speaking, when a business initiates any marketing campaign, many questions need to be answered regarding the type of content you need to achieve your desired goals. The following are questions we answer with our clients here at Kruse Control:
- What do we bring to the table? (Why do people choose us over our competitor?)
- What benefits does our brand promise to deliver?
- Who are our target customers?
- What do we hear our customers saying? (What are their common questions, needs and concerns?)
- What’s the purpose of our content? (build authority, increase awareness, engage customers, get conversions, etc.)
- What content do we already have in place to educate, promote and build trust?
- What resources do we have right now to carry out our marketing?
- What do we need, if resources are lacking, in order to reach our goals?
- Who will create and maintain our content?
- What forms of content are we the most comfortable with?
- Where will our content reside (what platform will you build from)?
- How often should we publish?
- Where will we distribute our content?
The 5 Elements of a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy
An effective Content Marketing strategy should have these five core elements to be successful: audience personas, brand positioning, owned media value proposition, business case, and an action plan. Let’s see why these elements are essential and how you can start implementing each of them.
1. Audience Personas
You can’t really tell the story of your brand if you don’t know to who you are telling your story. That’s why your first step will be to identify the audience you are attempting to target with your content. There are multiple ways to do this:
- Survey your existing customers
- Research industry trends
- Know who you aren’t trying to target
- Keep close tabs on whom your competitors are targeting
Once you have your audience in mind, you can use our free Personas tool to put them into writing.
You’ll want to be able to clearly and succinctly communicate who your audience is to all stakeholders and anyone involved in brand messaging.
Start by exploring these persona examples for your inspiration.
2. Positioning Your Brand and Story
A clearly defined brand and product positioning will help you provide a consistent experience for your audience and build the right image through all your content marketing channels.
These questions will help you brainstorm your positioning in the market:
- Who are my existing and potential customers, and what are their goals?
- Who are my top competitors, and how do they market their brands?
- What is my brand’s unique value?
- What problems does my product help to solve?
- What makes it a better choice than my competitors?
Use this information to shape the main pillars of your brand story.
A brand story is a summary of your company’s history, mission, purpose, and values. It can help you choose the right direction in your content marketing strategy, identifying to right messages and topics to translate with your content.
Focus on the following elements:
- The hero of your story (your customer) and their goals and challenges
- Your brand’s personality
- The purpose of your brand and key brand values
- The way your product and your content can help reinforce all the above and empower your hero
Use this free brand storytelling template to complete this step and document your efforts. This step can be especially beneficial for small businesses and startups that can leverage their unique backgrounds and identities.
3. Content Marketing Mission Statement and Owned Media Value Proposition
To establish your brand as a credible content publisher, define your owned media value proposition. It’ll help you find a differentiation point in your content strategy and compete more effectively. To do so, answer the following questions:
- What unique value do you provide to your audience with your content?
- How do you stand out from other content creators?
- Why should readers choose to follow your content channels?
Another important item to include in your strategy is your content marketing mission statement. It should summarize why you are creating content and provide information on who can benefit from it.
Make sure your content marketing mission statement includes the following elements:
- The audience you are creating your content for
- Their goals and how your content will help achieve those
For example, ‘Our content is where digital marketing managers find multimedia information about SEO and content marketing so that they can help their companies grow via organic channels.’
4. Business Case and Content Marketing Goals
Providing value to your audience is an integral part of a successful content strategy. But in addition to attracting new readers and followers, content marketing should drive your business forward.
Identify business goals your company needs to achieve and figure out how content marketing will bring your company closer to those goals. How many resources do you need to invest in your content strategy and what results do you want to generate?
A documented business case will help you better understand the benefits, costs, and risks of implementing a content marketing strategy in your company and convince the decision-makers of its value for the company.
5. Action Plan
Finally, you will list out your main content marketing campaigns and projects on deck for the year and add them to your content plan. Think about how they will achieve the content marketing goals you’ve previously set for your business.
Doing this will allow you to think through each content strategy step. Make sure to include the following information:
- Content formats you want to focus on
- High-level content topics and campaigns
- Channels for content distribution and promotion
To decide on your optimal content formats and channels, you’ll need to look at your historical content performance and further analyze your audience, which we’ll discuss later.
We have listed the main elements to include in your content strategy. Now, let’s see how you can build it and develop effective content step by step.
7 Steps to Creating a Complete Content Strategy
Long-term planning allows you to anticipate challenges and allocate resources effectively. Laying out these seven steps will help you develop and implement a content strategy aligned with your marketing and business goals.
As mentioned earlier, you must document your plan. This could be a slide deck, a Google document, a spreadsheet, or another format that works well for your business model and can be easily shared with all essential stakeholders
Define your goal.
What’s your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan?
Know your goals before you begin planning, and you’ll have an easier time determining what’s best for your strategy. Each piece of content that you produce should, in some way, contribute towards a goal or objective.
Your goals should be S.M.A.R.T.: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic/Relevant, and Time-bound. When you know what you want to achieve and what you’re working towards, the steps that you take to get there become far more streamlined.
If your primary goal is to increase your MQLs, then you should escalate the rate at which you publish gated content. Similarly, suppose you wish to improve your SERP ranking. In that case, you need to analyse your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts and research how to optimise your current content – think keywords, meta description, H-tags, backlinks, etc. Likely, your goals will often relate to your customers or prospects, so be sure to understand your leads’ lifecycle stage so that you can offer them the right content.
Defining what it is that you want your content marketing strategy to achieve, or your overall business goals and objectives, ensures that you stay on the right track when creating your content.
Establish your target audience (Buyer Persona)
Marketers today create content for multiple audience segments. According to Hubspot, three audience segments is the most common number. You don’t produce content just to throw it out into the ether; you create content for a specific purpose and specific people. So understanding who your target audience is and what content they require is fundamental.
A great way to visualise your target audience is by conducting market research and creating buyer personas. Buyer personas are essentially a fictional representation of your company’s ideal customer — they act as a blueprint for who you want to reach and why. When marketers create personas, they include key characteristics such as demographic information (age, job title, gender, income), potential pain points and touchpoints, challenges, behavioural motivations, etc. Then, they consider how the business can align with this ideal customer and provide solutions.
Once you know your target audience you will find it easier to develop content that yields better results, simply because it’s more relevant and valuable. Take a look at your website and social media analytics – are there any trends? How do people behave on your site or profile? It’s important to regularly conduct persona research; experienced marketers will tell you that your target audience can change, or you can decide that you want to target new groups or expand into different markets. Similarly, people themselves can change due to market shifts or societal trends – external aspects that are out of your control.
Determine which type of content you want to create.
There are a variety of options out there for content you can create, from written content like ebooks and blog posts to audio content like podcasts.
In the next section, we’ll discuss some of the most popular content formats marketers are creating, including some tools and templates to get you started.
Identify keywords by establishing the problem your business solves
There’s no use in creating high-level content that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re selling or the values of your business. You can develop the most innovative, insightful, educational, or entertaining content on the market, but if the audience that this content draws to your website doesn’t have any interest in your product or service, then all of your hard work will have been for nothing.
So, begin by defining your business via the product or service that you sell. This will be the basis for the primary keyword(s) and phrases that you want to target and the main theme of your content. Including the right keywords and phrases in your content will help you rank highly in SERPs, ensuring that you’re found by the right people. You need to let your target audience know how they can benefit from your business, what value you can offer them, and why they should choose you over your competitors.
Aligning your content with the problems your business solves will give you a greater perspective of how customers see your brand and will ensure that the content you create is relevant, valuable, and easily found by those seeking solutions.
Run a content audit.
Early on, most brands start with blog posts. If you want to venture out into different formats, you can run a content audit to assess your top-performing and lowest-performing content. Then, use that information to inform which direction you take next.
If you’ve been in business for a while, you should review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year.
Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals. Now is a great time to align your team’s goals with the rest of your organization’s goals.
Determine which content types you will use
Once you’ve defined your goals, established your target audience, identified your keywords, and completed an audit, it’s time to determine the types of content that you will create. Content has the power to make or break your brand positioning. That’s why it’s so important for you to plan, create, and execute your content marketing strategy as meticulously as possible.
Some pieces of content act as a staple for businesses – blogs, for example, are created and published by brands both big and small. But there are so many different avenues available, and each serves its own purpose.
Here are a few of the most common and most effective forms of content marketing: Blogs, Guides, Videos, Infographics, Podcasts, Case studies, Pillar pages and more.
Measure results
Analysing your content performance is the best way to understand what type of content is connecting with your audience, which will inform your subsequent and future pieces.
By utilising tools such as Google Analytics, your social media analytics, and the analytics offered by your marketing platform or CRM software (if you use these), you can gain deep insights into the actions, motivations, pain points, and touchpoints of your audience.
This data will offer you clear signals about what attracts your audience’s interest the most, making it easier for you to come up with new and intriguing content.
Conclusion
The benefits of utilising content in your marketing strategy range from drawing new prospects and retaining current customers, to converting leads, improving SEO, and amplifying the credibility of your brand — these are just a few of the many reasons why content marketing is such an essential tool for many businesses globally.
Whilst user preferences can fluctuate rapidly, the core principles remain the same – if you create content that’s interesting, valuable, educational, entertaining, trustworthy, and correctly targeted, you will achieve your content marketing goals.