How to Create a Content Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

The foundation of any good digital marketing plan today is a rock-solid content strategy. In this guide, we’ll break down how to create a content strategy in detail, to help you publish content that generates traffic and acquires customers.

Far too many businesses and marketers dive blindly into creating content without having a clear content strategy to start with. 

If you haven’t established a strategy first, you’ll be shooting in the dark and could waste far too much time creating content that doesn’t do anything for your business. 

You don’t want this. 

Instead, take the right steps to create a well-thought-out content strategy first, and you can publish content that helps you grow your business. 

Let’s get into exactly how you can do this. 

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy is the ongoing process of planning, creating, managing, and optimising content to achieve specific business goals and meet the needs of your audience. 

A content strategy involves setting clear objectives, defining target audiences, and establishing processes for maintaining content quality and consistency. A well-defined content strategy ensures that your content supports your marketing, customer engagement, and overall business objectives.

Basically, you need to have a clear content strategy in place before you start creating and publishing content. Otherwise, your content will have little to zero impact on actually growing your business.

Check out our detailed guide covering what is a content strategy for more details.

Elements of a Content Strategy Plan

When you create a content strategy, you need to ensure it includes all the right details. To help you get this right, here are the key elements you should include in your plan.

Goals and Objectives

First, define what you want to achieve with your content. 

Common goals include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and improving customer engagement. Your goals act as your guiding star, helping you decide which types of content to produce.

Audience Persona

Next, develop a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on research. 

Gather insights through surveys, interviews, and social media analysis to understand your audience’s demographics, interests, pain points, and content preferences. Use this information to tailor your content to meet your audience’s needs and interests.

The better you understand your target audience, the more effectively you’ll be able to engage with them through the right content channels and formats.

Content Audit and Analysis

Review your existing content to see what’s working and what’s not. 

Identify gaps and opportunities by analysing which topics and formats perform well and which do not. Use tools like Google Analytics to evaluate your content performance and identify patterns.

Content Types and Channels

Decide on the types of content you will create, such as blog posts, videos, or infographics. 

Choose the channels for distributing your content, like your website, social media, or email. Base these decisions on where your audience spends their time and their content preferences.

We’ll explore these content tactics in more detail later on.

Content Creation Process

Outline the steps for producing content, from idea generation to publication. 

Assign roles and responsibilities to team members or freelancers. Develop a content calendar to plan and schedule content in advance. Use collaboration tools to streamline the process and ensure team alignment.

Measurement and Analytics

An essential part of any content strategy is measuring the impact of your content.

Establish metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the success of your content. Set clear metrics for each goal, such as engagement rates for brand awareness or conversion rates for lead generation. 

Regularly monitor performance using analytics tools and adjust your strategy as needed. This ensures your content is always achieving something.

Content Governance

Finally, set standards and policies for content creation, publication, and maintenance to ensure your content is consistent and of a high quality. 

Develop content style guidelines, tone of voice guidelines, and quality criteria. Ensure all content creators stick to these guidelines to maintain a cohesive brand voice.

By including these elements in your content strategy plan, you can create, manage, and measure your content effectively, ensuring it aligns with your business goals and meets your audience’s needs. This is what a content strategy is all about.

How to Create a Content Strategy: Step-by-Step

We know what main elements a content strategy should cover, so now let’s get into the process of actually creating your strategy.

While your content strategy can cover many different channels and be focused on various objectives, the process of creating a content strategy is always the same. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you develop a content strategy that meets your business goals and resonates with your audience.

1. Define Your Goals

Start by clearly defining what you want to achieve with your content. 

Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, generate leads, improve customer engagement, or achieve another objective? These goals should align with your overall business objectives. 

High-level business goals, team notes, and independent research can provide a solid foundation for setting these goals. 

Once you have a comprehensive list of goals, prioritise them from most to least important. This prioritisation helps you focus on immediate needs and plan for long-term actions. 

Your goals aren’t just there to look pretty, you actually want to achieve them. So, to ensure your goals are clear and actionable, use the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). This framework helps transform broad goals into specific targets that can guide your strategy effectively.

2. Conduct Persona Research

The most important aspect of quality content marketing is creating content that adds value and resonates with your audience. Deeply understanding your target audience is crucial for getting this right.

Develop detailed buyer personas to represent your ideal customers. These personas should be based on thorough research, including surveys, interviews, and social media analysis. 

Collect data on your audience’s demographics, interests, pain points, and content preferences to create accurate and detailed personas. Group your audience by common characteristics and look for patterns that can help you refine your personas. 

Regularly updating these personas ensures they remain relevant and reflective of your current and potential customers. Conducting annual market research can help you stay aligned with changes in your audience’s behaviour and preferences.

3. Run a Content Audit

A content audit helps you assess your existing content and identify areas for improvement. This is a necessary step when developing your content strategy.

Start by cataloguing your content, including page titles, formats, word counts, and summaries. Analyse the performance of each piece using tools like Google Analytics to identify which content resonates with your audience and which doesn’t. 

Look for patterns in successful content to inform your future creation efforts. Evaluate the quality and relevance of your content, ensuring it addresses your audience’s current needs and interests. 

Identify content gaps where your audience’s questions or needs aren’t being met and find opportunities to repurpose high-performing content into new formats, such as turning a popular blog post into a video or podcast. 

This strategy can help you maximise the value of your existing content across multiple channels. Reviewing your content creation workflow can also uncover inefficiencies and areas for improvement, helping you produce higher-quality content more efficiently.

4. Determine Content Types and Channels

Decide on the types of content you will create, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, or e-books. 

Choose the channels for distributing this content, like your website, social media platforms, email newsletters, or other relevant channels. Align these choices with your audience’s preferences and where they spend their time online. 

Assess your resources, including team size, skills, time, and budget, to determine the most feasible content types. 

For example, suppose your team is experienced in writing but new to video production. In that case, it may be practical to start with blog posts and gradually introduce video content as you build skills and resources. Consider starting with simpler formats and gradually expanding to more complex content as your team gains experience. 

Your audience’s needs and behaviours should guide these decisions to ensure your content reaches them effectively.

After all, high-quality content is everything, and you can only achieve this if you’re using your team’s strengths. The other option is to outsource your content creation efforts with a content writing service. This ensures you get the highest quality content without needing to put the burden on your team to create it.

5. Establish Content Pillars

Before getting into specific content ideas, you should establish the key pillars, or themes, that your content will focus on. These are the different core topics, or areas of expertise, that your content is going to cover. 

The best way to do this is to focus your content pillars on your products or services. You can also create content pillars based on any vertical audience segments that your business serves. 

For example, let’s say your business is a software platform that offers multiple solutions, or tools, in one. Each solution can be its own content pillar. Or, if your software solution serves various industries in different ways, each industry can also be a pillar. 

Once you’ve established what pillars of content you’re going to focus on, you can get more granular and establish what content ideas you’ll create within each pillar. 

A best practice here is to create a hero page under each pillar to serve as your main, most informative page. This can also be called the hub page. Then, create more specific content pieces underneath this page, called your spokes. Each “spoke” should link back to the “hub” – just like a bicycle wheel. This gives your site a great structure for SEO.

6. Brainstorm Content Ideas

By this point, you’ve gathered a lot of information to inform your content strategy. Now, you can use these insights to start plotting out what kind of content you’ll publish.

Use your content audit, persona research, and goals to generate content ideas under each content pillar. 

You can use various brainstorming techniques and tools, such as Feedly for tracking trending topics, BuzzSumo for discovering popular content, and CoSchedule Headline Analyzer for refining titles. Generative AI tools can also be useful for helping you come up with content ideas, but just be careful that these ideas might be quite generic.

These tools can help you generate a wide range of ideas that are relevant to your audience. 

During brainstorming sessions, encourage creativity and open thinking. Initially, aim for quantity over quality, generating as many ideas as possible. 

Once you have a broad list, refine and rank your ideas. Organize them around your goals, topics, or personas, and break them down into specific, actionable pieces. 

7. Conduct Keyword Research

Once you’ve come up with your main content ideas, you’ll need to make sure these ideas actually help you generate traffic and match what your target audience is searching for. This is where keyword research comes in.

Conduct keyword research to ensure your content ideas align with real online search data. This step helps you prioritize ideas that have the potential to drive traffic and engagement.

If you ignore this step, then your content will likely get lost in the mass of information that is the internet. You’ll need to have a clearly targeted keyword strategy to help you create content that gets discovered and sends people to your site.

There are various ways you can approach keyword research, but you will need to use SEO tools to do it. You’ll also need to understand the different keyword metrics (like search volume and difficulty) and understand how well your site can compete with these.

Follow our detailed guide on how to do keyword research for actionable advice on finding the best keywords to target.

8. Publish and Manage Your Content

You’ve got all the information in place, so now it’s time to create your content and get it out into the world.

Develop a content calendar to plan and schedule your content. An editorial calendar helps you maintain a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website, ensuring consistent publication. It also helps you keep track of content updates and how you can structure your site’s content.

A social media content calendar is also important for promoting and managing your content across different platforms. 

Balance evergreen content with timely topics to maintain relevance and generate traffic spikes. For example, content about industry trends or seasonal events can attract attention at specific times, while evergreen content provides ongoing value and a steady stream of traffic. 

When creating your content, the biggest focus needs to be on quality and value. This involves deeply understanding search intent (what your audience wants to find out), and offering them the best possible content to match this intent. Using a reputable content management service makes this process easy.

Optimize your content for SEO to increase visibility, and use cross-channel promotion to reach a wider audience. 

Make sure you tailor your content strategy for each channel, considering the unique characteristics and audience behaviours of each platform. 

9. Revise and Improve Your Strategy

A successful content strategy requires ongoing evaluation and adjustment. You never just set a content strategy once and forget it. 

Regularly track and analyze your content’s performance using KPIs such as traffic, engagement, lead generation, and conversion rates. These metrics help you measure success and identify areas for improvement. 

Make sure you revisit your original content goals to see how your content’s performance is tracking in line with these goals.

Conduct marketing experiments to test new ideas and approaches, and use the results to adjust your strategy. 

For example, if a particular type of content or topic performs well, consider creating more of that content or exploring related topics. 

Engage stakeholders with data to secure support and resources for your content initiatives. Presenting clear, evidence-based insights can help justify investments in new content formats, tools, or team members. 

Regularly update your goals, personas, and content audit to reflect changes in your audience, industry, or business objectives. This proactive approach ensures your content strategy remains aligned with your business goals and continues to deliver value to your audience.

Align Your Content Strategy WIth the Buyers Journey

To create a successful content strategy, it’s crucial to align your content with the buyer’s journey. 

The buyer’s journey consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. Each stage represents a different phase in the customer’s path to purchase, and your content should address the needs and concerns of the buyer at each stage.

Aligning your content strategy with the buyer’s journey ensures you provide the right information at the right time. By tailoring your content to each stage of this journey, your content will be more effective at attracting prospects and turning them into paying customers.

Here’s a breakdown of how your content strategy can align with the buyer’s journey.

Awareness Stage

Objective: Educate and Inform

In the awareness stage, potential customers realize they have a problem or need. They are seeking information to understand their situation better.

Content Goals:

• Identify pain points: Understand the problems your audience is facing.
• Provide educational content: Create content that educates and informs without pushing for a sale. Your goal is to build trust and establish your brand as a helpful resource.

Consideration Stage

Objective: Compare and Evaluate

In the consideration stage, potential customers have clearly defined their problem and are looking for solutions. They are evaluating different options and considering which approach might work best for them.

Content Goals:

• Highlight solutions: Provide detailed information about how your products or services can solve their problems.
• Offer comparative content: Help your audience compare different solutions and understand the benefits of each.

Decision Stage

Objective: Convince and Convert

In the decision stage, potential customers are ready to make a purchase decision. They need reassurance that they are making the right choice by selecting your product or service.

Content Goals:

• Build confidence: Provide content that reassures potential customers of the quality and reliability of your product.
• Facilitate decision-making: Offer content that makes the purchasing process easier and highlights the unique benefits of your product.

Questions to Ask When Developing a Content Strategy

As we’ve covered, developing a content strategy requires careful planning and consideration. Here are a few key questions you need to answer to create an effective content strategy.

Who Will Be Reading Your Content?

Identify your target audience. Determine who you are creating content for and understand that your business might have multiple types of customers. Your content strategy should cater to each of these personas. 

Using a variety of content types and channels will help you reach and engage each segment of your audience effectively.

What Problem Will You Be Solving for Your Audience?

Understand the problems your audience faces that your product or service can solve. Your content should educate and guide your audience as they recognize and address these challenges. 

A good content strategy supports both potential customers who are identifying their problems and those who are already using your product to solve them. This approach builds credibility and reinforces the solutions you offer.

What Makes You Unique?

Identify what sets you apart from your competitors. Whether it’s your company’s longevity, a unique brand voice, or a particular feature of your product, make sure your audience knows why your offering is different or better. 

Highlighting your unique value in your content will help prove why your business is worth paying attention to and ultimately worth buying from.

What Content Formats Will You Focus On?

Determine the best content formats to engage your audience. Meet them where they are rather than jumping on the latest trends. 

For example, launching a podcast or a YouTube channel might be appealing, but only if these formats align with where your audience consumes content. Choose formats that are most effective for your audience and create a budget to allocate resources accordingly.

What Channels Will You Publish On?

Select the right channels to distribute your content. These channels could range from your website to various social media platforms. Identify where your audience spends their time. 

For example, if your audience prefers long-form videos, YouTube might be the best platform. For a younger audience that prefers short, quick content, TikTok or Instagram could be more effective. Publish your content on the channels that will maximize reach and engagement.

How Will You Manage Content Creation and Publication?

Establish a clear process for creating and publishing content. Determine who is responsible for creating each piece of content, where it will be published, and when it will go live. 

This process might be straightforward for a small team, but as your company grows, coordination among multiple teams might be necessary. 

Managing content from a topic standpoint can help prevent clutter and maintain a coherent message. Plan an editorial calendar around key topics to assert your authority in the market over time and ensure a consistent and strategic approach to content creation.

Content Strategy Tactics

Content strategy is about defining your goals and overall approach. Content tactics are the specific actions you take to achieve those goals.

To help you roll out and support your content strategy more effectively, here are the key types of content you can create.

Blog Posts

Blog posts are essential for attracting new visitors to your website. They should provide valuable information that encourages readers to share them on social media. They should also have a strong SEO focus to help you drive traffic to your website.

Posts should typically be between 1,000 and 2,000 words, but experiment to find what works best for your audience. Regularly updated blogs can drive significant ROI and are the foundation of any effective content marketing strategy.

Ebooks

Ebooks are longer, in-depth content pieces used for lead generation. They are effective at different stages of the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness stage: Introductory information to educate prospects about a problem.
• Consideration stage: Detailed solutions and tools for prospects evaluating their needs.
• Decision stage: Personalized content like comparison guides or case studies to help prospects make a final decision.

Ebooks can convert blog readers into leads by offering more detailed information in exchange for contact details.

While traditional eBooks are still valuable, many businesses are shifting towards gated content on landing pages as opposed to downloadable PDF eBooks. This is something worth considering if you’re going to use eBooks as a lead magnet.

Case Studies

Case studies showcase how your product or service has successfully helped real clients. They build credibility and can take various forms, including blog posts, ebooks, podcasts, and infographics. Select customers who exemplify the value you provide in specific business areas.

Templates

Templates are highly valuable content pieces that save your audience time and help them succeed. They are excellent for generating leads as users are more likely to provide their contact information in exchange for helpful resources.

Infographics

Infographics present data in a visually appealing and easy-to-understand format. They are ideal for sharing complex information clearly and concisely. 

Infographics are highly shareable on social media, helping to increase your reach.

Videos

Videos are engaging and shareable across multiple platforms. This is the most engaging form of online content right now.

They require more investment but offer high ROI. And, when properly created, videos can also play a valuable role in your SEO strategy.

Use videos to explain complex topics, showcase products, or share customer testimonials. They can be distributed on your website, YouTube, and social media.

Podcasts

Podcasts are great for reaching audiences who prefer audio content. They allow for in-depth discussions and interviews. 

Podcasts can attract new audiences and strengthen relationships with existing ones. A top tip here is to run webinars and repurpose these into podcast content. It’s a relatively easy process and can offer a lot of value over the long run.

Social Media

Social media is crucial for distributing your content and engaging with your audience. Share your blog posts, videos, and other content on platforms where your audience spends time. Each platform has unique features and user preferences:

• Facebook: Wide reach and versatile content formats.
• Instagram: Visually appealing images and videos.
• TikTok: Short, trendy, and creative videos.
• X: Short, timely updates and engagement.
• LinkedIn: Professional content and networking.
• Pinterest: Visual content and infographics.
• YouTube: Long-form and short-form videos.

Tailor your content to fit the platform’s style and audience expectations.

Implement Your Content Strategy

A great content strategy takes time, effort, and organisation. It’s never a once-off job, but rather an ongoing process of planning and maintenance to help your business grow. 

If you’ve never developed a content strategy before, you’ll probably need to adjust it quite a few times before you actually start seeing results. That’s why we offer content strategy and monthly content management services, to help make it as easy as possible for businesses to produce great content that gets results.