Your CEO keeps saying your content yields no results, and already, she is tired of spending money on ads, with no tangible ROI to show. This keeps you awake at night, trying to figure out what is wrong. Look here, what you need is a content strategy!

Ever seen someone throwing darts, without hitting the board even once? Well, that is what you do when you create content for your brand, without having a strategy in place. You keep missing the board! The board here is your content marketing goals. 

A content strategy is not a nice-to-have part of your content marketing plan. It is the core! And it provides a solid foundation, which determines if your content marketing efforts would succeed or not.

Below is an excerpt from a LinkedIn post by Victor Eduoh on things to do, to get results from content marketing

So, in this article, we discuss what a content strategy is, the qualities of a good content strategy, the importance of a content strategy, and a step-by-step process to help you create a stellar content strategy, with tools and templates to use. Let’s get to it!

What is a Content Strategy?

A content strategy is a plan that maps out how you would achieve your business goals using content. Just like a map helps you navigate the way to a place, a content strategy helps you navigate the way to achieving your content marketing and ultimately business goals. 

A content strategy showcases the planning, creating, publishing, and promoting of content to reach your target audience.

Now, there are certain qualities that a good content strategy must possess, if it would be effective and achieve the goals it is to achieve. They include:

• It must align with the overall business goals.
• It must be flexible, to accommodate trends and changes (This happened to many brands in 2020, during the pandemic).
• It must be comprehensive, catering to every channel of communication and content type that your audience loves.
• It must be based on data and research. Not on vibes, emotions, or what your boss’ wife thinks works. 

Why is Content Strategy Important?

According to Content Marketing Institute, 60% of the best B2B marketers have a content strategy. This goes to show how important it is to the success of your business. 

We explore some other reasons below: 

1. Content Creation Becomes Easy

One reason you should prioritize creating a content strategy is that it makes content creation easy and more organized. Your work becomes easy when you have a mapped-out plan for the content to create and how to do it.

2. Helps to Create Audience-centric Content 

Another reason you should create a content strategy is that it helps you create audience-centric content. When crafting your content strategy, audience research is an integral part of the process. Thus, a content strategy helps you create content that your audience would love and find useful, ultimately leading to conversions. You can also read this post on How to Conduct B2B Keyword Research for SEO, which will further help in your audience research.

3. Aids Consistent Content Creation

Another important reason for creating a content strategy is to enable you consistently create content for your brand. If you want loyal customers, then you need to build trust with them. And being consistent with everything you do, including the content you create, is key to building that trust. 

Thus, you need a content strategy that will guide your content creation efforts. And this would help you be consistent in creating content, without stalling or frantically thinking about what to do, every time you need to create content. And trust me, as a business or any startup, you need content creation.

4. Helps you find New Content Opportunities

Content opportunities abound. And having a content strategy would help you tap into these opportunities with ease. 

With a documented content strategy, you clearly know the content that would help you achieve your business goals and that your audience would also find helpful. Thus, when you see similar content ideas, which are not already included in your strategy, you can easily identify and use them. And this makes your content idea bank more solid and rich!

5. Ensures the Success of your Content Marketing Efforts

This should be a no-brainer. However, it is included for emphasis. 

Just like the foundation that determines how strong your house would be, your content strategy is the foundation that determines if your content marketing efforts would succeed or not. 

10 Steps to Creating a Stellar Content Strategy for your Business

Now, we would examine a step-by-step process to create a content strategy for your business. And for each step, a tool/template(s) is included to help you get started immediately. Let’s go.

1. Define who you are and set your Content Goals

A clear understanding of who you are, what you are offering, who you are offering your products/services to, etc. is key to creating an effective content strategy. 

See what Chima Mmeje, a B2B SaaS writer said about this, in a podcast episode on the Opportunity Podcast, on the topic: how to create a content strategy that will help you rank on page 1, “The first problem that new brands face is defining who they are. However, when they know who they are, their audience, and the one word they want people to think of when they think of their brand, then they can create the right content from there.”

This simply means that defining who you are would set you in the right direction when creating your content strategy and ultimately your content.

Now, after defining who you are, the next thing is to define the business goals you aim to achieve with content. This could be to increase brand awareness, drive organic traffic, attract new leads, convert leads to customers, retain old customers, increase email and product signup, increase sales, etc. These goals should also be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. 

For example, if you are a new business, you can’t set a goal to have 100,000 page views in the first month of investing in content. That would be unrealistic and unachievable in that time frame. However, a SMART goal would look like this: Increase our page views from 5,000 to 10,000 views from January to July, with a budget of $10k for content marketing.

You can use this free SMART Goal template from HubSpot, to set your business and content marketing goals.

2. Conduct Audience Research 

If you don’t know who you are writing for, then you can’t know what would or how to attract them. So, in creating an effective content strategy for your business, you need to know the people you are targeting. 

See what Dominic Kent, a freelance content marketer said about this on Twitter.

Thus, this is where audience research comes to the fore. And one great tool you can use to carry out audience research or survey is SurveyMonkey. 

With SurveyMonkey, you can easily create surveys to get information from your target audience. And with the right questions asked, you would know what your audience wants, how they want it, and other vital information you need to create an audience-centric strategy.

Researching your audience is also important, as this would help you know certain things about them. This includes information about their demographics, pain points, the solutions they are currently using, where they hang out online, the type of content they enjoy, etc. And this helps in creating a buyer persona or profile for your ideal audience. 

You can create a buyer persona with this Free Buyer Persona Template by SEMRush.

3. Content Audit 

After defining your goals and knowing your audience, the next thing is to audit the existing content on your website, blog, social media, etc. However, if you are just starting with content marketing, you can skip this. 

A content audit involves organizing, analyzing, and checking the existing content you have. This is to know how past content is performing and how they link to one another. It also helps in detecting outdated content that needs to be updated or discarded. Content audit helps you to take a holistic look at the existing content you have. 

In the HubSpot content strategy course, AJ Beltis, a Senior Content Strategist at HubSpot stated another benefit of content audit, which is helping you not to create duplicate content. Then he recommends that you audit your content based on these parameters: content title, buyer’s journey stage, lifecycle stage, content format, target buyer persona, topic, etc. 

And one great tool you can use for a content audit on your website is the SEMRush Content Audit Tool. With this tool, you can collect your content URLs, group the content into various categories, identify content gaps to write new content for, identify content that needs to be updated/discarded, etc. Also, the tool would provide you with data on backlinks, metadata, content author, content length, etc.

4. Choose Content Format and Distribution Channels

After auditing your old content, it is now time to decide the content format for the new content you would create and the channels you would publish them on. And the knowledge of your audience would help you ‌here. This is because from the audience survey, you would have gained insight into the form of content your audience enjoys, and where they mostly stay to consume this content.

For example, if you are a fashion brand targeting young people, you would do well with creating visual content and posting them on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc. However, if you are offering paid courses on how to run a B2B Startup to CEOs, Co-founders, etc., long-form content showing your expertise in the field, posts on LinkedIn, emails, testimonial videos, etc. would do the trick. 

Now, in determining the content format for your content strategy, it is important to consider the content that would appeal to your audience based on where they are on the buyer’s journey. Below are the stages in the buyer’s journey:

Stage 1: Awareness

This is the first stage in the buyer’s journey, where the buyer is just gaining awareness of their problem. At this stage, blog posts, ebooks, checklists, questionnaires, educational webinars, infographics, thought leadership content, etc. would work. This is because the user needs to be educated on the problem.

Stage 2: Consideration

This is the second stage of the buyer’s journey. And at this stage, the user is aware of the problem and considering how to solve it. Here, you can use case studies, samples, demos of your product, templates, etc. to attract them.

Stage 3: Decision

This is the third stage, where the user is ready to buy. Here, user testimonials or reviews, live demos, etc. would help in conversion.

After deciding on the content format, it is equally important to decide on the distribution channel. Great content is useless if it doesn’t get to its target audience in the format they like it. So, you can create stellar content, but if you don’t take it to where your audience is, no one would value it. 

Some channels of distribution you can take advantage of for content distribution include blogs, email newsletters, social media, podcasts, etc. 

5. Brainstorm Content Ideas

The next step is to come up with content topics and ideas to explore. And to do this, you need to clearly define the one thing you want to be known for in your industry. Then create a  topic cluster around that topic.

What is a topic cluster?

A topic cluster is a group of content or multiple pieces of content that covers a broad topic. It has a pillar page and other smaller topic cluster pages that are linked to one another, to keep readers fully informed on a topic.

In building a topic cluster, the pillar page covers the target topic broadly while the smaller topic cluster pages focus in-depth on an aspect of the topic and link back to the pillar page. 

For example, if you want to be known as a content strategy expert, your pillar page would contain broad information on what a content strategy is and other general information on the topic. While the smaller cluster pages would go in-depth on the various aspects of creating a content strategy and then link back to the pillar page. 

See what Chima Mmeje said about the topic cluster approach.

And what did taking this approach do for her?

Lily Ugbaja, a content strategist, also said this about the topic cluster approach, “The smartest way to approach content marketing is to find one topic that is important to your business. Then focus on building authority and brand recognition for that topic. It helps you focus your resources so that you are getting more returns on investment faster. It also helps to build brand recognition with Google and your target audience, since your readers would now recognize you as an expert on that topic.”

Convinced? Yes!

So, after deciding the core topic you want to be known for, you can then generate content ideas for the topic cluster by conducting keyword research on the topic, using keyword research tools. You can also get content ideas by checking your competitor’s website, and online forums like Reddit, Quora, etc. 

This HubSpot Blog Ideas Generator tool is another great resource to use in finding relevant content ideas you can explore, which apply to your core topic. 

After generating content ideas, it is also important to categorize them based on where they appear in the buyer’s journey, as discussed in number (4) above.

6. Choose a CMS

Another important thing to decide when creating your content strategy is the Content Management System (CMS) to use. A good content management system helps you to upload your content and input on-page SEO practices to aid your content’s ranking on the SERPs. 

These days, I see brands that use Medium as their CMS. However, this is not advised. This is because even though Medium has its place in helping you publish content, still, it is limited in terms of optimizing your content to rank well on SERPs.

Some great CMS options I recommend are WordPress, Wix, HubSpot, etc.

7. Create an Editorial calendar

Planning how and when your content would be created, published, and distributed is as important as anything. And this is where creating an editorial calendar comes in.

With an editorial calendar, you decide and clearly state the person responsible for creating content, ‌the content topic, the keyword being targeted, the content’s goal, the target persona for that content idea, the due date for the submission of the content, the publish date, etc.

And with this Free Editorial Calendar Template by HubSpot, creating an editorial calendar would be a piece of cake. The template contains detailed information you need to fill in when creating an editorial calendar.

You can also use this HootSuite social media content calendar template, to plan your social media content creation process.

8. Create Content

In creating a content strategy, the bulk of the work lies in the planning stage. And that is what the previous steps discussed entails. And if they are done right, the rest of the work would be a walk in the park. 

So, after you have planned out your content calendar, it is now time to write the content based on the content ideas generated. 

In writing great content, it is best to start with a content brief that clearly states what would be in the content to be written. This helps to set clear expectations, speed up the writing process, and reduce the possibility of total rewrites. 

So, here is a content brief template by SEMRush that you can adopt to create great briefs and ultimately great content. And after writing, you can edit and proofread your work with Grammarly, to ensure it is error-free.

You can also optimize your content for SEO with tools, like Frase, MarketMuse, Yoast, etc. After which you publish on your chosen CMS. 

9. Distribute, Repurpose and Promote Content

After writing content for 10 hours, you definitely should not promote it for only 10 minutes. And as it is said, “Create once, Distribute forever!” 

Thus, it is important to state in your content strategy how you intend to distribute, repurpose, and promote your content. 

According to Lily Ugbaja, more brands should hop on content repurposing. She said, “Individuals are trusting Google results less these days. Thus, it is important to meet these individuals where they are. And this can be on TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms. And with content repurposing, you can use one piece of content on various platforms.”

She also spoke about how Google uses social signals as a ranking factor. This is because the more people who talk about your brand, the more legitimate your brand becomes in the eyes of Google.

And she gave an example of how she once ranked for a competitive keyword and got brand recognition on Pinterest, even as someone just starting with a Domain Authority of 18/100 at that time. Whereas, the other blogs ranking for that keyword had a DA of 70 and above. 

And what made this possible was content repurposing. This is because when the content started ranking well on social media platforms and had about 30,000+ shares, it also started ranking well on Google. 

She also stated how content repurposing helps with gaining backlinks. This is because when people see your posts on social media, they can link to them. Then those links would push you up on the SERPs, where you can get even more links.

And with the use of content creation tools, you can easily repurpose your written content into carousels, videos, infographics, GIFs, etc. You can also create LinkedIn posts, tweets, podcast episodes, email newsletters, etc. from your long-form content. 

This Buzzsumo Content Repurposing Worksheet also makes content repurposing easy.

10. Measure Content Results/ Performance 

Measuring the performance of your content is essential, to ensure that you are always on the right track. And this helps you to know the content your audience engages with more and the ones that perform poorly. Measuring your content results also help you know the ROI on content, and justify the budget for content creation.

To do this, set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help you determine if you are hitting your content marketing goals or not. And some relevant KPIs to pay attention to include page views, average page dwell time, bounce rate, backlinks, organic traffic, conversion rate, etc. For social media, you can measure KPIs, such as shares, save, comments, likes, etc. 

One great tool you can adopt to measure content performance is the almighty Google Analytics. 

Bottomline 

Creating content for your brand without having a content strategy in place is like going into battle without a plan. The result? Defeat. And I am sure you wouldn’t like that. 

So, to get the most out of your content marketing efforts, set your business goals, research your audience, decide the content format and distribution channel, create a topic cluster, choose a CMS, then write your content.

Don’t also forget to distribute the content and repurpose to reach a wider audience. And lastly, always measure your content performance. 

I hope you found this post helpful. You can leave a comment below and share this with others.