10 Steps to Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

What is a content strategy? Glad you asked.

Content marketing and content strategy are used interchangeably all the time – but they aren’t the same thing.

• Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing content in order to meet specific business purposes.
• Content strategy is the framework that you use to make sure that creation and distribution is going in the right direction. It helps you get a big picture view of your entire content marketing machine – as well as your other marketing assets – and make plans for the future.

Although developing a content strategy can be a time consuming process (and it should be because there are a lot of moving pieces involved), it’s worth it. To put it bluntly, your organization cannot afford to throw money at social media or content development without a strategy. Creation and effective execution of content marketing is simply far too costly if you’re shooting in the dark.

As you develop a content strategy – or work with a content strategist to help you create one – keep these three goals in mind:

• Your content strategy needs to outline your goals, and how you’ll meet them.
• Your content strategy needs to convince decision makers that taking a new approach will help meet specific KPIs.
• Your content strategy needs to define the essential content types for your organization, with best practices guidelines for each.

With those three goals in mind, here are 10 steps you can follow to develop and implement a content strategy that works. This is exactly what we do for clients who come to us for help developing a content strategy, and we’ve found it’s the most effective way to not only plan, but implement breakthrough content marketing.

1. Determine your business goals for content marketing.
   Content marketing offers multiple benefits for businesses of all types – but you need to narrow your focus to what you want to achieve short term and long term. Are you aiming to develop brand awareness? Do you want to use content to convert customers? Are you trying to upsell them? All of these are possible, but in order to get the best results from your content you want to keep your focus as narrow as possible. This helps not only in implementing your content strategy, but it allows you to prioritize the measurable objectives so you know which KPIs to pay attention to.
2. Define your target audience.
   Content is effective when it has an emotional resonance with your audience – but you can’t resonate if you don’t know who you’re talking to. You have to define your target audience, and develop profiles of key personas within that target audience. Dig into your customer data, talk to your sales team and evaluate customer service requests. Who is interacting with your company? Who is making decisions to buy your products? This is your target audience. You need to understand their pain points and the type of information they are searching for.
3. Understand where your target audience is spending their time gathering information.
   Resonating with your audience isn’t possible if your content is never found. After developing detailed target personas, determine where these personas are spending their time. Are they networking on LinkedIn? Reading email newsletters? Downloading white papers? By getting to know their content consumption habits, you can figure out where your brand needs to publishing and how.
4. Evaluate your top competitors and how they are using content.
   You aren’t publishing in a vacuum, and until you earn their trust your audience doesn’t have blinders on. They are engaging with your competitors online, some more effectively than others. At this point in the content strategy process, you should get to know your top three to five competitors very well. How often do they publish? What do they publish? Where are they publishing? You may be pleasantly surprised at their lack of content or spurred into action based on their volume.
5. Define your top content type.
   There are a dozen of ways to publish content – but don’t fall prey to the temptation to try everything at once. Focusing on one content type on one main platform and publishing consistently is more important than jumping in on the next big trend. It takes time to grow a loyal audience, and by consistently publishing on your blog (for example) or using LinkedIn effectively, your organization will be able to gather an audience. Based on your assumptions about the current landscape, you can select a platform that works for your brand and your audience as well. Your content strategy document should include a best practices guide to your main content type so creators stay on the same page, and your brand maintains consistency in voice and approach. This doesn’t mean that you can’t diversify in the future, but you have to focus on one content type and do it consistently in order to be effective.
6. Create a content mission statement.
   Under the giant umbrella of content, there are multiple channels and places to publish – and they’ve all got to have the same mission. By creating a mission statement as part of your content strategy, you can easily decide whether an idea, tool or technique works for your brand. You can also differentiate your company from competitors by covering important topics in new ways. Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute calls this the “content tilt” – your slightly different way of sharing your information so that your content becomes a story worth telling. Your mission statement is the formula for making that happen. Joe defines a content marketing mission statement as a sentence broken up into three parts: who you’re creating content for +what you will deliver + outcome that your audience will experience.For example, our content mission statement is: “We help brands  make sense of content marketing and social media so they can improve their bottom line “
7. Audit your existing content assets.
   I’m going to be honest – content audits can be very time consuming and overwhelming. But they are well worth it and should not be skipped under any circumstances. In fact, a content audit is a good regular practice to get into on a quarterly or semi-annually basis even after you’ve establish your initial content strategy. By evaluating what has already been published or created by your company, you can determine a few things:How well your content fits the needs of your target audience.
   • How your content compares to the competition.
   • Whether or not your content fits your mission statement and has enough “tilt” to be interesting.
   • How much can be repurposed and repackaged in different forms.
   • Which types of content appear to be working best for your organization right now?

   The audit will bring out your inner control freak – but you’ll be rewarded with valuable insights about how far you’ve come and where you should head next.

8. Create a keyword list based on your target audience personas, your brand objectives and your competitive landscape.
   We live in an age of social sharing and content resonance, but keywords are still important. Getting organic traffic for your content is doable when you select the right keywords. Evaluate your website and blog’s performance over the last two years and identify the top terms you need to include in any content refreshes or new content creation.
9. Determine a content frequency schedule.
   Remember that point about consistency? All of the ideas and repurposed content in the world won’t matter if you can’t get your team to publish on a regular basis. Whether it’s a white paper once a month or blog posts four times per week, understand you’re your content team can handle (or better yet – outsource content creation so you can stay on track). Frequency should be baked into your content plan so you can stay consistent and build that loyal audience.
10. Translate your strategy into an actionable plan.
    You’ve gathered the information you need, and now it’s time to put it to use. Establishing a strategy is a bit like starting a weight loss program – you can plan all you want, but until you get your butt to the gym or start packing a healthier lunch, you aren’t going to see results. Translating your strategy into an actionable plan that you and your team use on a regular basis can be as simple as creating an editorial calendar or a lot more in depth. What matters most is that you get your team to take action – or find a team that can take action with you. Your plan should schedule out the creation and publication of essential types of content, on channels that work for your target personas, and with the right tilt that sets you apart from competition and fits your mission statement. It sounds like a lot – but if you follow the nine steps above it’s simple.

Developing a content strategy is a foundational piece to your digital marketing success. Stop wasting time and assets on content that isn’t strategic.

Need help developing a content marketing strategy? That’s what we do best. Give us a holler if you want to talk about how we can help you get started.