Content Strategy: What Is It & How to Develop One

You probably know by now that content is key to promoting your business and brand as well as building authority, trust, and credibility with prospective customers. In fact, 45% of marketing leaders said they intended to increase their investment in content marketing in 2024. 

The thing is, successful content creation doesn’t happen by chance. It requires a well-thought-out content strategy that aligns with your goals and engages your audience. 

A content strategy requires focusing on quality, audience engagement, and measuring your content’s impact for continuous improvement. 

Creating a strong content strategy will help ensure you make the most of the time and resources you devote to content creation and that you get a strong return on that investment.  

Key Takeaways

• Almost half of marketing decision-makers said they were raising content marketing budgets at the beginning of 2024, indicating a need for a solid content strategy. 

• Developing a comprehensive content strategy ensures marketing departments use resources efficiently and effectively to plan and optimize their efforts. 

• Defining the goals for a content strategy can indicate the types of content businesses should focus on. 

• It is critical to research audiences to understand the content topics and formats they are most likely to engage with. 

• In addition to creating content, marketers need to focus on how it will be distributed and how to measure its effectiveness, including the revenue it brings in. 

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Is Content Strategy?
• Step #1: Define Your Goals for Your Content Strategy
• Step #2: Research Your Audience for Your Content Strategy
• Step #3: Analyze Competitor Tactics
• Step #4: Audit Your Existing Content
• Step #5: Develop Your Content Creation Strategy
• Step #6: Amplify Your Content with Distribution
• Step #7: Measure Your Results for Your Content Strategy 
  • 1. Consumption Metrics
  • 2. Social Sharing Metrics
  • 4. Sales Metrics
• FAQs
• Conclusion

What Is Content Strategy?

In a nutshell, content strategy is a detailed plan for creating, distributing, and measuring the effect of marketing content designed to appeal to prospective customers across all stages of the marketing funnel. 

While the ultimate goal is to get more traffic and convert users, content strategy can be used to spread awareness of your products or services, cultivate trust, and build up your brand authority. 

Step #1: Define Your Goals for Your Content Strategy

Great content isn’t created just to get views and clicks: it’s created for a specific purpose. 

Some of those reasons could be to increase awareness of your brand, bring in new customers, attract past customers, or increase sales. You could be doing it for several of these reasons—or even all of them. 

Whatever your goals are, you need to make sure the content you create aligns with those goals. 

For instance, long-form, heavily researched content like case studies and white papers might be of little use in converting users at the top of the sales funnel. It could be invaluable for building authority and converting users who are closer to the bottom of the funnel, though.   

Source: WordStream 

On the other hand, short SEO-optimized blog posts could help boost brand awareness and organic lead generation. 

Different phases of the customer journey require different content topics and formats. You’ll need to figure out what types of content will attract users at each stage. In other words, you need to develop the right message at the right time for the right people.  

Figuring this out is the purpose of content strategy. 

Step #2: Research Your Audience for Your Content Strategy

Your content strategy will only be effective once you know who your target audience is. Researching how old they are, where they live, their interests, what kind of content they already engage with, and which social media platforms they are on are all important details you can use in your content planning. 

Understanding your audience and how they act will help you narrow down your content strategy, without feeling like you need to have eggs in hundreds of baskets. For example, case studies can illustrate the value of B2B software solutions for businesses.  

Knowing your audience’s age range can help you figure out which platforms to target. While younger people gravitate more toward TikTok and Instagram, older users are more likely to be on Facebook and LinkedIn. 

As a starting point, you can use Google Analytics to find information about your existing website visitors, such as age range, location, and gender. Social media channels like Facebook and Instagram can also provide insights into your followers’ demographics and interests.  

Industry and marketing reports are also valuable resources that can provide insights into audiences, their behaviors, and preferences when it comes to content. 

Step #3: Analyze Competitor Tactics

Researching competitor content can provide valuable insights to jump-start your content creation strategy. 

Identify four or five of your biggest competitors and analyze their content. Explore the topics they cover, what formats they use (such as blog posts, videos, or social media posts), and how often they publish content.  

Investigate which topics and formats get the most engagement in terms of comments and shares. Read user comments to understand their appeal. 

Don’t forget to consider things like voice and tone. Are competitors using humor to connect with users? Or perhaps they are taking a more serious and professional approach.  

Use tools like Ubersuggest to analyze their keyword and content strategies. You can use your findings to target the same or similar keywords and topics. You can also use it to research what content topics your competitors have written about and which are most popular to see where you can fill gaps or find complementary subjects.    

Step #4: Audit Your Existing Content

To make content planning and strategy as efficient as possible, it’s critical to know what content you already have published. That’s why you should always conduct a content audit as part of the process. 

A content audit can show where old content can be updated, refreshed, or repackaged. An old blog post might be updated with new statistics, or a webinar recording can be repackaged into a blog post.  

You should also delete any published content that is totally obsolete and cannot be repurposed or updated, as it may detract from your brand image. 

To conduct an audit, create a spreadsheet to inventory every piece of content by type. This can include web pages, blog posts, social media posts, emails and newsletters, and documents and media. Organize them by format. 

You can then create columns for the topic or theme, who the intended audience is, and what stage the content is for (i.e., awareness, decision-making, etc.). 

Analyze the performance to see which types of content did well. This can help guide your efforts moving forward. 

Step #5: Develop Your Content Creation Strategy

Based on what you’ve learned from completing the above steps, you should have enough information to develop a well-crafted content strategy that aligns with your business goals and resonates with your audience.  

Start by defining your goals. Perhaps you want to grow brand awareness, generate leads, or both. Pinning these down will help you figure out the kind of content you want to create. 

Decide on the topics you want to cover in your content. Those could be industry trends, new research or statistics, or how-to articles. Figure out which format is most appropriate based on the topic as well as the audience. Some information might be more engaging in an Instagram post than on your blog. 

Next, map out content planning for the next three or six months. You should create a calendar to organize schedules and deadlines. You can also tie content topics into holidays, anniversaries, seasons, and other events. 

For example the post below is designed to tie into the business’s anniversary. Below that, you can see a calendar template to lay out how you might want to plan these seasonal posts. 

Calendars can help you map out timelines. A case study will take longer to create than a blog post, so you might plan to publish shorter content more frequently and larger projects once a month or once a quarter, depending on your resources. 

Step #6: Amplify Your Content with Distribution

A sound content strategy and targeted content creation make up only the first part of the equation. The final part is amplification of the content. 

There are a number of ways you can distribute your content so that it’s seen and shared by as many people as possible. As a general rule, you should determine the places your target audiences are frequenting online, and then publish on those channels to reach them.  

Some actions to take could include: 

• Posting visuals or links to content on social media channels 

• Collaborating with influencers who can share your content to their audiences 

• Sharing content to relevant communities, such as groups on Facebook or LinkedIn (but avoid being pushy and salesy) 

• Encouraging employees to share content on their social media pages 

Ultimately, you’ll need to think strategically in order to identify all the resources available to you and truly harness the power of employees, customers, and influencers that can help you amplify your content. 

Step #7: Measure Your Results for Your Content Strategy

Measuring the results of your content marketing efforts is one of the most important aspects of developing an effective content strategy. Churning out content without analyzing your user feedback is akin to having a phone conversation on mute. You need to know what your audience liked as well as what they didn’t like, and why. 

Here are some of the most important metrics to understand. 

1. Consumption Metrics

Consumption metrics can show how audiences are interacting with your content, shedding light on strengths and weaknesses in your content strategy. 

 Some of the major metrics to pay attention include: 

• Page views, which show whether users find these page helpful. 

• Time spent on page, which shows that users are reading through the entirety of the content. 

• Bounce rate, which shows whether or not your piece aligns with the search intent of users.  

• Downloads and shares, which determines whether people want to retain the content for future use or find it valuable to share with others. 

With this data, you can find answers to questions like these:  

Did you craft a blog post that brought on a huge spike in traffic? Did your users spend more time on a particular piece or genre of content? Did a piece of content garner a large number of comments or shares on social media? 

2. Social Sharing Metrics

Sharing on platforms like social media can be a great metric for judging how engaged your audience is. Ask yourself what types of content are being shared, who is sharing, which platforms are being used, and, most important, what content is converting.  

There are a number of ways to measure how much your content is being shared on social media. 

Many social media platforms have built-in analytics that can show you how many times a post has been shared. 

You can also add UTM parameters to content links, which will tell you which platform users are coming from. 

Another option is to use social media management tools like Hootsuite or SproutSocial. These gather and analyze data from all of your social media accounts, all in one place. 

These metrics can be incredibly helpful for your content planning. You can adjust your content topics and formats as well as which platforms you post it on to increase social sharing and engagement. 

4. Sales Metrics

For most businesses, content generation ultimately should boost revenue. Therefore, if your content strategy is revenue-based, you will need to find ways to measure the amount of revenue your content marketing has generated. 

In Google Analytics, you can set up event tracking for actions you want users to take on your content that typically leads to sales, such as downloading a white paper, filling out a form, or other calls to action. Mark those events as “conversions.” 

When posting and sharing content, be sure to add UTM parameters to the URLs so you can tell which of your content pieces are converting. 

Then you can access the “Conversions” report in Google Analytics to see which pieces of content are driving the most conversions. 

Compare those conversions with sales to get an accurate picture of the revenue your content is generating. 

FAQs

How do I create a content marketing strategy?

Creating a content strategy requires considering your goals, researching your audience, analyzing your competitors’ content, and auditing your existing content. It also involves deciding how you will distribute, promote, and measure the effectiveness of your content. 

What is a content strategy framework?

A content strategy framework is an outline of how you plan to create content. A framework might include your audience, keywords you will target, how often and when you will publish content, and who will create the content. 

Why is content strategy important?

If you want to rank high in search results, you need quality content. You also need good content so when people visit your website, they want to convert. Content that doesn’t reflect your audience’s needs or interests won’t be effective. 

What is the first step of creating a content strategy?

The first step to creating a content strategy should be to define your goals. This will help guide who your target audience is, what kind of content you want to create, and where you will distribute it.  

Conclusion

Starting your content strategy on the wrong foot or having no content strategy is guaranteed to be a waste of time.  

Creating a great content strategy isn’t rocket science, but it can be quite challenging to implement.  

Following the steps outlined here will help you create an effective content strategy and identify  key metrics to help you monitor the performance of your content. 

Still, expect to go through some trial and error when you start. Once you have a recipe for success, though, all you’ll have to do is rinse and repeat to see the kind of audience growth you’ve always dreamed of!