What is a Content Strategy?

What is a content strategy? 

It’s a pretty big answer, as a content strategy can span many different channels, goals, and outcomes. In short, it’s a strategic approach to creating and managing online content for your brand.

If you’re researching this, chances are you’re focused on marketing your business and want to develop a content strategy that:

• Drives awareness for your business (aka sends you traffic)
• Helps you build trust and authority in a competitive space
• Generates more customers or closes more deals

These are generally the main goals of a content strategy, no matter what your business does. 

Although, there’s a lot more that goes into developing an effective content strategy, and there’s a lot more your content strategy can achieve. We’ll cover everything you need to know in the guide below. 

What is Content?

First of all, what the heck do we actually mean when we say content?

Basically, content refers to any information or material created to inform, educate, entertain, or engage an audience online. It can come in various forms such as articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, social media posts, and more.

If you absorb information online that gives you some kind of value, that’s content. As a business, you want to offer quality content to your audience. This attracts customers and helps you build authority.

Content marketing is a big topic, and content serves different purposes depending on its context. 

Here are the main elements of online content:

• Information: The core message or knowledge being shared. It can be factual, practical, entertaining, or a mix of these.
• Context: The reason behind the content and its target audience. Why is it being published and who is it for?
• Medium: The platform where the content is shared, such as a blog, social media, or email. The choice of medium affects how the message is received.
• Format: The form in which content is presented, like text, video, audio, or interactive media.

When creating content, it’s essential to consider all these elements to ensure the message is clear and effectively reaches your intended audience. Good content fits the medium and format while staying relevant to your audience’s needs and your goals. 

For example, a detailed guide is better suited for a blog post than a Twitter thread, while a quick tip might be perfect for social media. If people want hands-on practical advice they can follow, a video is probably a better fit.

Effective content also helps in the customer journey by educating and guiding potential customers. It builds trust, and ultimately drives conversions. This content should answer questions and solve problems for the audience, showcasing your expertise and understanding of the topic.

In today’s online environment, your business needs great content to thrive.

What is a Content Strategy?

A content strategy is a plan that guides how an organization creates, manages, and distributes content to achieve business goals. 

These strategies align specific content efforts with the overall objectives of the organization, ensuring that content serves a clear purpose and delivers value.

It’s only too easy to publish content that you think makes sense for your business, but in reality, it doesn’t actually help you achieve anything. With a well-planned content strategy in place, you can ensure your content makes an impact.

A content strategy is also essential for your website’s SEO success. You need to think long-term when developing an SEO plan, and having a clear direction for your content will help you develop a more structured site that performs better in search engines.

Why is a Content Strategy Important?

A content strategy is crucial because it ensures that the content you create aligns with and supports your business goals. Without a clear strategy, you’ll spend way too much time creating and publishing content that doesn’t help your brand.

Content strategies provide a clear understanding of what content you need to create and what its expected outcomes are. This focus helps keep everyone on the same page.

Having a well-defined content strategy is the only way to measure your content marketing ROI effectively. It keeps your content marketing efforts aligned with your business objectives, ensuring the content you create has a positive impact.

Content Strategy vs. Content Tactics

Many people confuse content strategy with content tactics. 

Content tactics include activities like copywriting, editing, making videos, designing infographics, and posting on social media. These are the actions you take to execute your content plan.

A content strategy, on the other hand, is the plan that comes before these actions. It defines the purpose of your content and how it connects to your business goals. A strategy clarifies why you are creating content and what you want to achieve with it.

Organizations often treat content as an afterthought rather than a valuable asset. They may focus more on user-interface design than on the information users need. 

Content professionals, especially those working alone, often face frustration due to a lack of understanding of content strategy in their organizations. They might be expected to create, edit, and market content without time to think about the bigger picture. This focus on tactics over strategy prevents a holistic approach to content.

To avoid this confusion, it’s essential to slow down and plan your content strategy first. Identify goals that serve both your business and your users. This alignment ensures that all content efforts are cohesive and purposeful. 

By doing this, you create a clear roadmap that guides your tactics and leads to more effective content. 

If you’re going to outsource your content management, make sure you work with an agency that focuses on content strategy and not just content creation.

How to Create a Content Strategy

Now that you understand what a content strategy is, here’s a very brief overview of how to develop a strong content strategy, including the key areas a content strategy should focus on:

1. Define your business goals: First, identify what you want to achieve with your content. Goals might include things like increasing brand or product awareness, reducing customer churn, or speeding up the sales process.

2. Understand your audience: Know who your content is for. Different audiences will require different types of content.

3. Run a content audit: Review any existing content your brand has published to see what you have, what’s working, and where there are gaps.

4. Content planning: Decide what type of content you need (articles, videos, a podcast, etc) and how it will help meet your business goals.

5. Content creation: Produce content that aligns with your objectives and speaks to your audience’s needs. This is often the trickiest part, as your content needs to be of a high quality if it’s going to perform well.

6. Managing your content: Establish rules and processes to manage content creation and publication. This includes setting up an editorial calendar and defining roles and responsibilities around your content plan.

7. Measurement and analysis: Track the performance of your content. Determine how success will be measured, such as through engagement metrics, lead generation, or conversion rates.

8. Cross-department collaboration: Make sure you have buy-in from different departments and subject matter experts. Content strategy should be a company-wide effort, not just a marketing task.

9. Content distribution: Plan how to share your content across various channels, including social media, email, and your website.

10. Iterate and improve: Regularly review and update your strategy based on performance data and changing business needs.

This is just a quick summary of what steps are needed for developing a content strategy. You can follow our detailed guide to creating a content strategy step-by-step for more insights and actionable tips for laying out your content strategy.

By following these steps, you can develop a content strategy that supports your business goals, engages your audience, and provides measurable results. 

What Else Your Content Strategy Should Include

As we’ve established, a content strategy is a detailed plan that guides content creation and ensures it aligns with business goals while engaging your target audience. To get all of this right, a detailed content strategy should include quite a lot of different parts.

Beyond the steps outlined above, here are some extra elements that your content strategy should include.

Brand Voice

Define how your brand communicates. Make sure there is consistency in tone, language, and style across all content your business publishes.

Product Messaging

Clarify key messages about your products or services, highlighting their unique selling points and benefits. It’s important that all of your content frames your products in the same way.

Target Personas (Audience)

Describe your target audience in detail. 

This should include demographics, interests, needs, and pain points. You’ll also need to align your target audience’s online habits with the content mediums, or channels, that you choose.

Competitive Analysis

Analyze your competitors’ content strategies to identify what works for them and discover gaps you can fill.

Content Ideation Process

Establish a system for generating content ideas by involving brainstorming sessions, audience feedback, and trend analysis. This should be firmly rooted in SEO planning.

Creating a Content Calendar

Plan when and how often to publish content, using an editorial calendar to schedule and track your content. 

This is often planned out on a quarterly basis. The more long-term your editorial plan is, the more strategic you can be with your content.

Content Distribution (Promotion Plan)

Define how content will be shared across channels, including social media, email marketing, and partnerships. 

Benchmarks – Goals

Set clear, measurable goals for your content, such as engagement, leads, and conversions. Understand what metrics and processes you will use to measure the performance of these goals.

Styleguide

Provide guidelines for content creation, including rules for grammar, punctuation, formatting, and visuals. This is important for keeping your content creation process on-brand with every piece you publish.

Keyword Research

If your content is going to be SEO-friendly, then you’ll need to conduct research to find relevant keywords and use these keywords to optimize your content for search engines.

Including these elements in your content strategy ensures you create high-quality, effective content that supports your business goals and resonates with your audience. Keywords are necessary if you’re going to publish content that generates traffic.

Check out our complete guide on how to do keyword research to learn how you can do this.

While the elements above are the key parts of a content strategy, it’s important to understand the different types of business outcome-focused content strategies that you can roll out. Let’s break these down in the following sections.

Developing a Content Strategy for SEO

Your content strategy can focus on achieving different things, but one of the main reasons to develop a content strategy is to boost SEO.

Developing a content strategy for SEO is crucial for increasing organic traffic and generating leads or awareness in your business. This strategy aims to create high-quality content that meets user search intent while addressing different stages of the buyer’s journey. 

Here are the main steps you’ll need to take for an effective SEO content strategy.

1. Understand SEO and How it Ties Into Your Content Strategy 

SEO and content strategy should work together. The goal is to create content that attracts and engages your target audience, helping to lower customer acquisition costs. 

Search engines prioritize content that is comprehensive, credible, and high-quality. Most importantly, this content should target a specific keyword, address search intent, and offer anyone searching this keyword clear value.

2. Focus on Content Clusters

Content clusters, or topic clusters, organize related content around a central topic. This method helps small websites compete with larger ones by creating authoritative content on specific topics. 

Here’s a very brief overview of how to build content clusters:

1. Identify core topics: Choose a central topic relevant to your audience and business goals. These are typically aligned with your products or services.

2. Create a pillar page: This is an authoritative page covering the core topic in detail. This is your main page on the topic.

3. Develop cluster pages: Write multiple pages that explore subtopics related to the core topic. These should link back to the pillar page and to each other.

Now, when search engines crawl your site, they can see you have these hubs of content dedicated to specific topics or themes. This shows search engines that you know a lot about this topic.

Check out our detailed guide to content clusters for more information on how to plan and create these.

3. Cover All Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

Ensure your content addresses different stages of the buyer’s journey. These are:

1. Awareness: Content that educates and informs. It targets users searching for answers or solutions to their problems.

2. Consideration: Content that helps users evaluate different options. It provides detailed information and comparisons.

3. Purchase: Content that guides users toward making a purchase decision. It includes product details, case studies, and testimonials.

Here’s an example of what a content strategy could look like for a business that offers a personal training certification.

Awareness content:

“How to Become a Certified Personal Trainer”

“How to Start a Personal Training Business – The Quick Guide”

Consideration content:

“How Much Do Personal Trainers Make?”

“Can You Do Personal Training Without Certification?”

Purchase content:

“Certified Personal Trainer – Self-Guided Study Program”

“Certified Personal Trainer – Fast Track Program”

Internal Linking Strategy

Use a detailed internal linking strategy to connect all of your related content. This helps users navigate through your site easily and signals to search engines that your content is comprehensive and authoritative. This ties back to your content clusters.

Basically, when search engines crawl your site, you’ll need to have the site properly linked together for them to understand your niche and where your authority comes from. 

Developing a Content Strategy for Customer Success

While most content strategies are focused on generating traffic and customer awareness, your content can also play a crucial role in helping your existing customers.

Developing a content strategy for customer success is essential for reducing customer churn, minimizing support calls, increasing satisfaction, and boosting retention. 

Here’s how to create customer-centric content to achieve these goals.

Focus on Post-Purchase Content

Post-purchase content helps customers use your product effectively, reducing their need to contact support. This content can significantly decrease inbound support requests and improve customer satisfaction.

Build a Robust Knowledge Base

Instead of just publishing chronological blog content, it’s a good idea to give your customers a dedicated knowledge base. This is a space where they can access all relevant information related to your products or services.

A comprehensive knowledge base allows customers to find answers independently. It should include things like:

• FAQs: Address common questions and issues.
• How-to guides: Step-by-step instructions for using your product.
• Troubleshooting tips: Solutions for common problems.
• Video tutorials: Visual guides for complex processes.

Creating a self-serve library of support content like this has some clear advantages:

• Reduces support tickets: Customers can solve many issues themselves.
• Frees up support staff: Your team can focus on more complex, high-value issues.
• Saves costs: Fewer support requests mean less need for additional support staff.
• Increases customer satisfaction: Customers appreciate quick and easy access to information.

Here’s an example of a knowledge base offered by Hubspot:

Create Targeted Content

Identify common issues and questions from your support teams and create content to address these. 

Regularly update and expand your content based on customer feedback and new product features.

Here are some useful types of post-purchase content that your business could publish:

• Onboarding guides: Help new customers get started.
• Advanced usage tips: For experienced users looking to get more out of your product.
• Best practices: Share tips and strategies for optimal use.
• Webinars and Q&A sessions: Offer live help and build a community.

Monitor and Measure Success

Track metrics like the number of support tickets, customer satisfaction scores, and retention rates to measure the effectiveness of your content strategy. Use this data to refine and improve your content over time.

Ensure your content stays relevant by reviewing and updating it regularly. Remove outdated information and add new content as your product evolves.

Developing a Content Strategy for Sales Enablement

A final type of outcome-driven content strategy is one focused on sales enablement.

Developing content for sales enablement is useful for helping your sales team educate prospects and close deals faster. 

Here’s how to create an effective sales enablement content strategy.

Understand Your Sales Team’s Needs

Start by identifying the common questions and objections your sales team hears from prospects. This helps you create targeted content that addresses these concerns directly.

Create Relevant Content

Develop content that explains how your product fits into the prospects’ existing processes and tools. For example, if prospects often ask how your product integrates with other tools, create specific guides and use cases.

Make the Content Shareable and Accessible

Ensure that your content is easily accessible and shareable. 

Salespeople should be able to quickly send relevant content to prospects. This content should also be easy for prospects to share with other decision-makers within their organization.

It’s a good idea to create a centralized repository where your sales team can easily find and access all sales enablement content. This could be an internal website, a shared drive, or a specialized sales enablement platform.

Types of Sales Enablement Content

Here are a few examples of sales enablement content types you can publish:

• Product guides: Detailed guides showing how your product integrates with other tools and processes.
• Case studies: Real-life examples of how your product has solved problems for other customers.
• FAQs: Address common questions and objections.
• Comparison sheets: Compare your product with competitors to highlight unique benefits.
• Video tutorials: Visual content to explain complex features and integrations.

Regular Updates

Keep your sales enablement content up to date. Regularly review and revise it to reflect new features, changes in competitor offerings, and evolving market conditions.

Maintain a feedback loop with your sales team. Regularly ask for their input on what content is working and what additional resources they need. This helps ensure your content remains relevant and effective.

A Content Strategy is an Ongoing Process

No matter what outcome your content strategy is focused on, you need to always remember this: a content strategy is not a one-time task; it’s an ongoing process. 

It’s essential that you always revisit your content strategy to see if it’s driving the results you’re trying to achieve. This will reveal room for improvement or new ideas that you can implement.

There are three key components of an ongoing content strategy. These are:

• People: Identify who is responsible for creating, reviewing, and maintaining content.
• Processes: Establish workflows for content creation, approval, and updates.
• Policies: Develop guidelines for content quality, tone, and consistency.

Regularly review and update your content to ensure it remains relevant and useful. When reviewing content, ask yourself:

• Does the content make sense?
• Is it interesting?

If the answer is no, then get to work improving it and filling in the gaps.

It’s also important to return to your original goals and see how your content is helping you achieve these goals. Monitor user feedback and analytics to identify areas for improvement.

Regularly review and update your content based on performance data and changing user needs. Always remember, content marketing is not a marathon, not a sprint.

How to Get Started With Your Content Strategy

Now that you know what a content strategy is, it’s time to develop one for your business. 

You’ve got two options here. Either, develop a content strategy yourself or get it done by experienced content strategists.

If you’re interested in the DIY route, we break down the process in detail in our step-by-step guide on how to create a content strategy.

Want a content strategy developed by the experts? No problem, our team can help you create and implement an impactful content strategy for your business. This saves you time and effort while ensuring your content delivers results. Get in touch to start your fully managed content plan.