What Is Content Strategy?

Sure, you’ve heard of content marketing. You understand the benefits of sharing your industry knowledge to elevate your brand awareness and reputation with your audience. You may have even seen some improvement in your audience engagement metrics. But do your content marketing efforts have a strong foundation? Is there a theme that ties your blog to your whitepapers to your social posts? Or is more of a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” kind of process right now? 

Enter content strategy, stage left.

According to Hubspot, “A content strategy is the planning, creation, publication, management, and governance of content…” If you’re using the spaghetti method of content production, you’re missing out on the benefits of the planning, management, and governance steps, while settling for simple creation and publication. Let’s take a quick look at the why, the what, and the how of setting yourself and your content marketing up for success.

Why Use a Content Strategy?

As with any business strategy, a solid foundation is the best starting point if you want to reap all of the potential benefits of content marketing. Building your program on the solid foundation of a robust content strategy will allow you to:

Align your content with your business goals.

Having a strategy to create content around ensures that your efforts stay aligned with other business goals, keeping all your stakeholders happy.

Increase engagement with your audience.

Building all of your content around one consolidated strategy helps ensure that content will resonate with your audience, which in turn fosters a deeper connection between them and your brand.

Streamline the content creation process.

Think of your content strategy as a roadmap. By sticking to it, all of your content will be on target and your creators will know where they’re going ahead of time, making the trip that much more efficient.

Improve visibility with enhanced SEO.

Maintaining consistency across content will improve your SEO pull, which will help your site rise in the rankings and be seen by more potential customers.

Measure success, accurately.

Clear metrics and KPIs are part of a well-rounded content strategy, ensuring that each piece of content produced is working toward the same goals and will be easy to measure and track with data-driven insights.

What Are the Key Components of a Content Strategy?

The specifics of a solid strategy will vary from company to company or even campaign to campaign. That said, for a content strategy to be complete, five pieces need to be present.

Audience Research.

Understanding your target audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors goes a long way toward helping you understand how to reach them with your content.

Goals and Objectives.

Are you looking to drive conversions? Increase brand awareness? Spark conversations with prospects? Without a grasp on the reason for a piece of content’s existing, it’s difficult to make sure it hits the right notes.

Content Audit.

This list of your existing content assets will enable you to identify gaps and give you a strong base of evergreen copy you can reuse for new content.

Content Calendar.

Maintaining a regular posting cadence across distribution channels is key to building brand authority, both with Google and your audience.

Performance Metrics.

Establishing metrics and KPIs from the start will help keep your content organized and on point, as well as tell you which data to prioritize.

How To Develop a Content Strategy?

Great, now you know why you need a content strategy and what to include in it. So how to go about building one of your very own? Here are the five steps that I’ve found form the basis of any good content strategy development plan.

Set clear objectives.

Before writing one word of your strategy documentation, set your goals and objectives for not just this plan, but for your content overall. By laying out what you hope to achieve, you can better keep all future strategy work in line.

Conduct your research.

This encompasses both audience research and your content audit. Both will yield meaningful data on who you’re trying to reach and what you already have to work with to aid those efforts.

Develop themes and topics, and get them on a calendar.

I put these together because organizing when you’re going to talk about what gives you a broader sense of the overall direction your content program should take.

Create and distribute your content.

Now you get to stretch those creative muscles and have fun writing your articles, scripting your videos, and sharing your knowledge with your audience.

Measure and analyze performance.

Then tweak your strategy accordingly. Keeping regular tabs on the metrics and KPIs you laid out early on is the best way to know what changes need to be made in your content strategy.