A content strategy is a simple plan for achieving the goals and growth metrics your content program is responsible for. It sounds complicated, but after 20 years as a content strategist, I can assure you it’s quite simple.
Keep reading for my ultra-easy guide to creating a content strategy that drives real results without a million moving parts.
Why You Need a Content Strategy
As with any great marketing effort, you’ll get better results if you’ve got a plan. A well-crafted content strategy is that plan.
It aligns content creation and distribution efforts with business goals, target audience, and unique value proposition and helps you effectively engage, inform, and persuade your audience. Ultimately, it helps you drive more growth and success.
Here are a few benefits of a well-defined content strategy:
Consistency: A content strategy ensures consistent messaging, tone, and visual identity across all content, reinforcing brand recognition and trust.
Audience engagement: By understanding the target audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points, a content strategy helps you create more relevant, valuable content that resonates with them.
SEO benefits: A content strategy that incorporates keyword research and optimization techniques can improve search engine rankings, driving organic traffic to your website.
Lead generation and conversion: Strategically crafted content can guide the audience through the marketing funnel, nurturing leads and encouraging conversions.
Resource optimization: A content strategy helps allocate resources efficiently by prioritizing content creation efforts based on business objectives and audience needs.
Measurable results: By setting clear goals and KPIs, a content strategy allows brands to track and measure the performance of their content, facilitating data-driven decisions and improvements.
Competitive advantage: A well-executed content strategy can differentiate your brand by showcasing your unique expertise, values, and personality.
Long-term value: Evergreen content, which remains relevant and valuable over time, can continue to attract and engage audiences, providing lasting benefits to the brand.
That’s why you need to create a content plan. Now let’s look at how you can create a simple plan that can work for any business.
Creating a Content Strategy
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the channels and strategies that you might need in your content strategy. But I assure you, you don’t need a complicated strategy that requires a huge team of creators.
To start, you need to know the KPIs (key performance indicators) you’re responsible for.
These are your focus. Everything in the strategy should help you hit your target metrics, and there should be nothing in your plan that doesn’t support those metrics.
Once you know your KPIs, you need to identify key areas in the customer journey that will help you achieve your goals. I tend to break it into three stages: top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel.
In most cases, content will be needed to achieve your goals at each stage of the customer journey. To know what type of content you need, evaluate your ideal customer and their journey from first awareness to purchase.
Then ask a few question:
- How can I attract their attention?
- What do they need to see my brand/product as a viable solution to their problem?
- How can I differentiate my offer from every other options?
- What information do they need to know about my offer to say yes?
- What are the triggers that make them ready to buy?
- How can I make my message visible in those buying moments?
Jot down the answers to these question, along with any other pertinent information about your customer and their buying journey. Then decide on the key pieces of content you need to create at each stage of that journey.
Here’s a simple content planning template with a few suggestions for the types of content you might create. Fill in your ideas for your own product or brand, being as specific as possible.
Step 1: Content planning
Top of funnel (TOFU)
Goal – Build awareness and gain your target audience’s attention
Content – Onsite and offsite pieces that increase traffic and generate leads.
- Social media marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Events
- Presentations
- Guest speaking on podcasts
Middle of the funnel
Goal – Educate your audience and position your product as their best solution
Content – Anything that boosts engagement, trust, and a deeper relationship:
- Webinars
- Free trials
Bottom of the funnel
Goal – Convince prospects to purchase your product
Content – Anything that removes objections to the purchase:
- Strategy calls
- Sales enablement
- Case studies
- Demonstrations
- Targeted email campaigns
This gives you a high-level view of the content you need to create. Now, flesh out your plan for quality control and content distribution.
Step 2: Quality control
There are two elements to QA in content marketing. The first is obvious. Is your content the highest quality possible? The other is less obvious, and that’s content optimization.
Quality Assurance
Key to a strong strategy is your quality standards. Many brands have into the idea the more is better. But all things being equal, more deadlines will lower the quality of a content team’s output. And that can harm your results.
Remember: Content quality is always more important than quantity. The quality of your organic content tells people what they can expect as customers, so it needs to meet the highest standards possible.
A good place to start is a content style guide that sets your brand’s preferences for grammar, punctuation, formatting, colors, fonts, and your branded terms. This can be a living document that keeps everyone on the same page.
Optimizing Your Content
All content needs to be optimized for three things: humans, search, and conversions.
The first, optimizing for your readers, ensures your target audience can consume and engage with your content. I used to focus primarily on readability. But today, I’m just as focused on accessibility. Your content needs to be accessible to everyone — including people with digital disabilities, such as difficulties seeing, hearing, or distinguishing colors.
Just as importantly, your content needs to be readable to search bots, so your content can rank on search engines. You don’t need to be a professional SEO to accomplish this. Focus your content on the topics your audience is searching for. Answer their search query fully. And be sure to include meta data for each page on your website. I use Yoast to do this.
Finally, optimize your content for conversions. A good practice is to link to a contact form or product page related to the content on the page. You may ask visitors to subscribe or download a resource. The specific call to action will depend on the purpose of the content piece and where it falls in the customer journey: top of funnel, middle of funnel, or bottom of funnel.
As part of your content strategy, create a workflow that ensures your content gets the QA it deserves. For example:
- First content review by department head
- Second content review by internal stakeholders
- Optimization for SEO
- Final review to verify the content is readable and accessible
Step 3: Content distribution
Creating content is just the beginning. You need to distribute it strategically so your target audience feels that everywhere they go, your name shows up.
Here’s why this matters.
Psychology tells us that the more familiar your audience becomes with your brand or product, the more they trust you. This phenomenon is called the mere-exposure effect.
The mere-exposure effect suggests that people tend to develop a preference or positive attitude towards things, ideas, or people that they are repeatedly exposed to, even in the absence of any conscious awareness or reinforcement. It has been observed in advertising, interpersonal relationships, decision-making, and more.
The key is to distribute your content in the channel where your target audience is most active. This may be one channel or several. And it may require organic or paid strategies. It might also include online and offline ideas.
Digital content includes a variety of channels and formats. It’s by far the best way to develop a strong presence in your niche. Of course, your most valuable real estate is your website. But you can also provide e-books, webinars, digital white papers, newsletters, videos, podcasts, and a business-related blog.
In-person content is an effective way to build brand awareness, thought leadership and sales support. It’s especially important when selling high-value or highly complicated products and services. Think in terms of bootcamps, conferences, trade shows, executive roundtables, and one-to-one conversations.
Print content is an easy way to stand out, simply because no one else is doing it. You’ll need to budget for printing and postage. Think in terms of corporate magazines, newsletters, white papers, fliers, and books.
Other offline content includes radio or television spots and billboards. These distribution channels can give you huge exposure, but they often require a large investment.
What are your best channels for distributing content? It depends on your audience and your bandwidth. Choose a distribution strategy that works for your team, and add it to your content strategy.
Tracking Success
You can’t know how well your strategy is working if you don’t measure results. I track metrics daily or weekly in most cases, so it’s easy to see where you need to adjust.
Look for the types of content that get results. Evaluate why it worked, and try to develop more content that can achieve similar results.
Now, add the KPIs you’re tracking and a tracking schedule to your content strategy — and you’re done.
Scaling Your Content Strategy
The 3-step strategy outlined above is perfect for busy marketers or small content team who need to work efficiently without compromising results. But it’s also scalable for a larger program with more resources. This is important as your team grows or you want to refine your strategy.
To scale your program, you might add:
- More types or formats of content
- Content that supports the product or sales team
- Below-the-funnel content that boosts onboarding and retention
- Branded publishing channels such as podcasts and YouTube channels
- Expanded social media exposure
As you scale, you may need to develop strategies for each of these additions. That would include your the type of content, topics, publishing frequency, and how you’ll track success.
You should also establish a business case for your strategy. To do that, you need to include:
Business objectives: Aligning content creation and distribution with the organization’s goals and values.
Target audience: Identifying and understanding the needs, preferences, and behaviors of the intended audience.
Content audit: Assessing existing content to identify gaps, strengths, and opportunities for improvement.
Content themes and topics: Determining the main themes and topics that the content will cover, based on business objectives and audience needs.
Content formats: Deciding on the types of content to be created, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, case studies, or whitepapers.
Distribution channels: Selecting the appropriate platforms and channels for content distribution, such as the company website, social media, email newsletters, or paid advertising.
Content calendar: Planning the creation, publication, and promotion of content over a specific timeframe.
Tone, voice, and style: Establishing guidelines for the brand’s tone, voice, and writing style to ensure consistency across all content.
Metrics and KPIs: Defining the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to measure the success of the content strategy and individual pieces of content.
Governance and workflow: Establishing processes, roles, and responsibilities for content creation, review, approval, and maintenance.
This gives you a well-defined content strategy that provides a roadmap for growth. And that allows you to be creative while ensuring your content serves both your organization and your target audience.
The Key to Content Success
Content is your primary vehicle for getting your value proposition, message, and product in front of your target audience.
Without a strategy to create and distribute content efficiently and effectively, your business will suffer. It’s that important.
But it doesn’t have to be difficult. You can create a simple 3-step content strategy or develop a complex strategy with multiple formats and channels. Just keep in mind, no matter how simple or complex your strategy, the cardinal rule of marketing still holds: Know your prospect.
When developing your editorial plan, make sure you think in terms of what your prospect wants and needs. What are their hot buttons? What kind of information would make their lives easier? Where do they go for information?
Bottom-line, you need to provide information that positions you as the first-choice provider when they’re ready to buy. And you need to provide enough exposure that you build trust and remain top of mind.
Need help developing a content strategy that’s right for your business? Book a free consultation with me.
FAQ
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the strategic distribution of content that attracts your ideal prospects, demonstrates the value of choosing you over any other alternative, and persuades them to take whatever action is required to purchase your product.
Content marketing is generally viewed as a “pull” strategy. It fills your pipeline by inviting interaction rather than demanding immediate response. It blends customer service with editorial, marketing, social media, and even public relations.
The content you create can take many forms:
- Text articles
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Live presentations
- Events
- Social media posts
- Books or ebooks
- Guides
- Reports
- Surveys
- Case studies
- And more
And you can employ both organic and paid strategies. You can publish content organically on social media and then pay to boost exposure. You can also publish content on your website and run ads to drive traffic to it.
In many cases, this is the strategy behind funnels. For example, you might produce an industry guide and build a funnel around it.
- A landing page offering your guide (email required)
- A sales page promoting a low-cost or entry-level offer
- A sales page promoting a high-dollar offer
Content marketing is often viewed as blogging or social media. These days, it’s often tacked onto the front end of the sales pipeline, with marketing acting as sales development representatives. But that’s not the best use of content.
From my experience, content should be part of a broader growth strategy that supports product, customer success, and sales.
A Simple Formula for Successful Content Marketing
Content needs to provide value for both your audience and your brand. Here’s a simple way to think about that, as defined by Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett in Get Content Get Customers.
They call it the B.E.S.T. formula:
Behavioral. Everything you communicate must have a purpose. What action do you want your readers to take?
Essential. Write from inside your prospect’s mind. What information do they need to succeed in work or life?
Strategic. Content marketing isn’t a stand-alone project. Does it integrate well with your other marketing efforts? Have you made it a part of your overall business strategy?
Targeted. Your content must be targeted to your ideal prospect so it’s truly relevant to them. Otherwise, it won’t attract the right people. Who are your readers, and what do they want to know?
Want to learn more about creating a strong content strategy for your brand? Content me today.
