In today’s market, it’s more important than ever to understand how to create a content strategy that delivers tangible results. In an environment saturated with content, your strategy should be geared toward attracting the right audiences and engaging them to increase conversions.
Many organisations miss the mark, investing in content marketing without a defined content marketing strategy to guide their marketing efforts. For example, a recent study indicated that 63% of B2B companies haven’t yet created a documented content strategy. That means two-thirds of businesses are investing money without a solid roadmap.
A good content management strategy clarifies your goals, helps you to reach your target audience, and ensures a consistent brand identity. Ultimately, your strategy provides direction and purpose to your content creation, so your investment in content marketing provides a return.
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Table of Contents:
- Elements of a Solid Content Strategy
- Understanding Your Goals
- Defining Your Target Audience
- Carrying out a Content Audit
- Deciding on Your Content Types
- Building a Content Plan and Calendar
- Choosing Content Topics
- Choosing Where To Publish Your Content
- Promoting Your Content
- FAQs about how to create a content strategy
- What are the steps in creating a content strategy?
- Conclusion
Elements of a Solid Content Strategy
The first question is, how do you define a ‘content strategy’?
Kristina Halvorson, a leading figure in the world of content strategy, defines it as “the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content.” This definition originated way back in 2009 from the first edition of her book, Content Strategy for the Web.
While it’s a broad definition that includes every aspect of your content, from blog posts to social media content, it’s because a content strategy is a holistic approach.
But, it can feel overwhelming.
For the sake of clarity, we can simplify the process by looking at content strategy as the overarching framework for creating and distributing any form of content for marketing.
Understanding Your Goals
- To start creating a content strategy, ask yourself a few key questions:
- Why do you want to publish content at all?
- What do you want to achieve?
- What does successful content look like?
- Do you want to:
- build a community
- develop a marketing funnel
- raise brand awareness
- educate your audience, or
- promote a new product or service?
The answers to these questions will determine your content focus.
For example, let’s say your goal is to establish yourself as a thought leader in a specific industry you might choose to develop a content strategy centered on informative articles and white papers.
Or, let’s say you’re promoting a course. A good content strategy might be a mix of how-to videos, email marketing and blog posts showcasing the course content and the value it brings to your audience.
In every instance, your goal dictates the journey.
Defining Your Target Audience
Once you’ve clarified your goals, you’ll need to understand your audience. When planning a content strategy, be very clear about who you’re targeting, and understand their interests, needs, pain points and their decision making barriers.
Next, identify where they hang out online – for example, are they mainly on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter, or on online forums? Are they on Q&A websites like Quora, or niche communities like Reddit?
Once armed with this knowledge, you’re prepared for success.
Carrying out a Content Audit
Now it’s time to look in the mirror. Before creating a content strategy, it’s a good idea to analyse any existing content you already have.
Questions to ask are:
Do you already have a website with blogs and online resources or social media pages?
Have you been consistently creating and uploading videos?
Which of your content has resonated with your audience – and, more importantly, why?
Which content pieces failed to attract your audience and which failed to deliver the results you hoped for?
Look for recurring themes and spot opportunities for improvement. An honest appraisal helps you define and address weaknesses.
Fortunately, there are tools such as Feedly and BuzzSumo are great to help with this, or opt for sophisticated programs, such as HubSpot’s Website Grader.
Deciding on Your Content Types
Understanding how to create a content strategy goes beyond text and visuals. Knowing what good content looks like is the first step to ensuring your message cuts through.Use a range of different content formats and identify the right fit for your target audience and overall business goals.
For example, a young demographic with a shorter attention span might be more likely to engage with short TikTok videos and high-quality Instagram photos and stories.
That means opting for short video-based content and incorporating eye-catching images into each video and image you create.
Conversely, if you’re reaching out to academics and researchers, more complex articles, online reports, infographics, webinars, podcasts or case studies are often preferred.
| Goal | Target Audience | Recommended Content Formats |
| Brand Awareness | Gen Z and millennials |
|
| Customer Education | Professionals in their late twenties and up |
|
| Thought Leadership | Business decision-makers, scholars and industry experts |
|
Building a Content Plan and Calendar
There are lots of exciting possibilities for creative professionals when choosing how to create a content strategy, but without proper organisation, your ideas and inspiration could be easily lost.
One way to address this is to develop a content calendar mapping out upcoming content you want to produce. If you’re not sure where to start, this guide to creating a content plan can help you break it down step-by-step.
With a comprehensive content calendar, your creativity can be captured and organised to fit around important dates or events, allowing you to respond to changing circumstances.
You can also make good use of visual cues to highlight significant deadlines and organise your plan visually.
Using color-coded labels will help signal priorities. This visual format will also help you and your marketing team keep up with publication deadlines, monitor progress, and track completion levels, so you can make changes as needed.
Before writing your plan, consider topical trends – such as the approach of Valentines Day, Christmas or New Year – so you can tailor your content around key occasions that resonate with a wide audience.
Choosing Content Topics
In order to gain an advantage in the content arena, it’s important to stay organised, and one of the easiest ways to achieve this is to define content pillars.
These pillars act as broad categories organising the topics you’ll address. Each category can have related sub-topics and all the posts you create will then slot easily into their rightful category.
With your pillars defined, you can use brainstorming to flesh out topics that could work. And to capture organic traffic, use keywords strategically when deciding on content topics.
Find out what users are actually searching for with Google Trends. It’s also a good idea to use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs and Answer the Public to get a detailed analysis of high-value keywords within your niche, track trends, and generate fresh content ideas.
Choosing Where To Publish Your Content
Of course, it’s possible to post all your content on your own blog or website. If that’s your chosen route, consider whether you will also set up your blog on Medium where you have access to a larger pool of readers.
You may even decide to focus on building a community via social media sites, rather than maintaining a company website. Just remember your online presence will be more fragile, as you’re operating on a platform owned by a third-party and at the whim of changes to their regulations, restrictions and pricing, it would make more sense to be present on several social media platforms.
We had a client in the beauty sector who had used Instagram for well over 5 years as her sole marketing platform with over 5000K followers. She posted multiple times throughout the day with general beauty tips, examples of her work and used the platform to promote events. She didn’t have a website or any other social platforms.
One day, her account was shut down without notice. Why? According to their statement, her site ‘suddenly’ ‘breached their operating rules’. Despite her multiple requests for review, she was unable to ‘speak’ to anyone, nor was she successful in getting her account reinstated.
This is just one direct example of how fragile relying on third-party platforms can be, so proceed with caution if you intend to put all your eggs in one basket.
Promoting Your Content
It takes hard work and a substantial amount of research to understand how to create a content strategy, and all that effort could go to waste without appropriate promotion.
Of course, your starting point will depend on the choices you’ve already made about content type, content purpose, and preferred platforms.
You may decide to prioritise sharing new blogs across your social media channels and rely on organic growth. Or, it may be better to promote each new post with paid ads using keywords targeting users in your demographic.
There’s a multitude of approaches so research your options, analyse current trends, and find out how others in your sector are attracting attention to new content releases.
Conclusion
Understanding how to create a content strategy can initially seem challenging. But the time you take planning out the key elements provides clarity and focus. That way you can identify opportunities and anticipate pitfalls.
By following the steps I’ve outlined, you will start your content journey well-equipped to attract and engage with the right audience and turn leads into sales.
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FAQs about how to create a content strategy
What are the steps in creating a content strategy?
- Identify your content goals.
- Decide on the kind of target audience you will reach with the content, considering things like demographics, their income and employment status, lifestyle choices, and so on.
- Do a content audit and assess content that has already been created by you or your competitors to see what is working well.
- Decide which content types and select the kind of content format that resonates with your target audience.
- Create a detailed content calendar covering the various topics you want to explore
- Identify keywords relevant to each of these topics.
- Work out the most suitable approach to content promotion, which may mean combining targeted online advertising campaigns with sharing posts across social media.