How to Create a Content Strategy That’ll Help You Achieve Your Goals
By: Annaliese Henwood
Tags: Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, Content Creation, Strategy, Marketing

What Should Be Included In Your Content Strategy?

Mission Statement

According to Joe Pullizi at the Content Marketing Institute, your mission statement should answer three questions:

Who is your audience?

What content do you create?

How does it benefit others?

Your answers give your content purpose. It shouldn’t be more than one long sentence or two short ones. It can be more specific to your blog or take a broader look at all your content marketing.

What is your content mission statement? Create one to add to your strategy.

Main Goal

Your main goal should already exist. It’s the overall goal for all your marketing efforts. More often than not, it relates somehow to lead generation.

Include your main goal in your content strategy to help you create your subgoals. When your main goal is visible, you’ll be better able to create subgoals that correspond with it.

Sub-Goals

Creating content goals helps you stay focused and on track. They are the driving force for all your future activity, so you want to make them count.

Goals aren’t going to work unless you make them SMART.

What does that mean? Create goals that are…

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Relevant

Time-bound

Don’t cut corners when creating your content goals. The more thorough they are, the easier you can follow, measure, and achieve them.

But wait!

What if you don’t know what to use as a goal? Copyblogger created a list of some of the best goals to go after with your content efforts. They don’t make the goals SMART for you, but they are a great starting point.

These are just a few of the content goals they include:

Build trust and rapport

Increase customer loyalty

Discover new business ideas

Sometimes, you only need one content goal. This can be true when you only have a blog. If you also have a resources section, videos, etc., you’ll want to tie each of them in with their own goal.

For example, a goal for your blog may differ from the goal for your ebooks. A goal for your videos may differ from the goal of your blog, and so on.

Develop your own content goals, and add them to your strategy.

It might help you to keep your main and subgoals accessible throughout the content creation process. Printing them out and putting that document near your desk might help you stay aware of them.

Audience Personas

When you’re creating content, you need to know your target audience. You should have established personas to guide you as you write. If you start your content efforts without them, you won’t know who your content is for or how to tailor it for them.

By having your audience defined in your strategy, you have what you need to keep your content directed at them. This will make your efforts more effective. Your audience will receive a more personalized experience.

What do you need to know to create these audience personas?

These are the key steps:

Collect demographic information on your existing audience.

Use your existing demographic data to create the data for your ideal audience.

Research what your audience’s needs and pain points are.

Examine how your website visitors behave after landing on your content pages.

Get input from your sales team.

Survey your existing readers for their input.

Do a content audit to see what’s working and what’s not.

Create your own audience personas and add them to your strategy. They will come in handy every time you’re creating a new piece of content.

Competition Research

A competitive analysis is key to your content strategy. You’ll want to create content that beats your competitor’s. The only way to know whether your content is doing better than theirs is to do thorough research on their efforts.

Auditing their existing content is the best approach. You’ll discover the content types that work and the missing gaps in their content that you can fill.

When you audit their content, you not only learn what and how they’re doing. You generate ideas for your own content.

These are key actions you’ll want to take in your competitive research:

Don’t restrict yourself to just their website. Check social media, guest blogging efforts, and other blog hosting platforms, such as Medium. Your competitors might use other platforms to host their content. You don’t want to miss those content materials.

Check social media, guest blogging efforts, and other blog hosting platforms, such as Medium. Your competitors might use other platforms to host their content. You don’t want to miss those content materials. Ask the right questions during your audit. How often do they publish content? How much content at a time? How do they promote their content? When you know this information, it can help you decide on your own content schedule.

How often do they publish content? How much content at a time? How do they promote their content? When you know this information, it can help you decide on your own content schedule. Examine the content for quality. Is their content long-form? How thorough are they? Is anything missing from their content? Use this information to create your own content that’s better and more helpful than your competitors.

Your competitive analysis is never final. Your competitors will change their own approach over time. Make sure you’re checking their content regularly to see what they’re doing to improve.

You don’t want to ignore this. You’ll just fall behind. Gain the upper hand by doing a competitive analysis on a regular basis.

Content Audit

This is the time to audit your own content if you already have anything published.

Adding a content audit to your strategy will help you see what has worked and what hasn’t. It’ll teach you what you can do to improve in the future.

Your content audit should include these tasks:

Check which content has performed the best in visitor traffic and their time spent on each page.

Check the content that has the most social shares and engagement.

Look at your blog comments for engagement and sentiment.

Look at the content that’s less popular and learn why that is.

Examine your worst performing content for ways to improve.

Find the content that you haven’t created yet to use as inspiration.

Your content strategy will benefit from having this audit.

Why?

An audit will teach you many things about what you need to do to create effective content in the future. It’ll show you the mistakes you can learn from, and it’ll help you develop ideas for the future.

Add your content audit to your strategy, but be prepared to update it regularly. You can audit your content every month, quarter, annually… It depends on how active you are in production and what your goals are.

Content Types

A good content strategy will include a list of content types. You don’t want to stick to just blog articles if you have the resources to expand. You have so many content types to choose from!

These content types have become popular and effective lately:

Videos

Podcasts

Infographics

Content upgrades

Ebooks and whitepapers

The list goes on, but you have an idea now as to what you can include in your own content strategy.

You don’t want to limit the possibilities. Add the content types that you know your audience will appreciate — even if it means leaving your comfort zone. Content creation is about your audience first.

Add the content types that you have the ability to create, but make sure you’re focusing on the content your audience wants from you.

Reserve resources for the top content types that’ll perform best.

If videos are popular with your audience, invest in everything you need to create them. If content upgrades and other gated offers are needed, consider hiring a graphic designer to make the content attractive.

Content Categories

This is a section of your strategy that might be quick and simple, depending on how complex your content creation is. When you’re filling this section out, you’ll want to organize it by content type. Your blog will have its own categories compared to your YouTube channel, for example.

What are the categories you need to include?

Add a place in this section for the categories of each content type even if they closely resemble each other. It’s important that you separate them for easy reference later on.

Staff Roles

When you’re a team of one, you don’t need this section. However, if you have a team, you need to clearly define each person’s role. This will prevent confusion and error.

If you don’t complete this section, “Sarah” might not realize she’s in charge of social promotion, so that’ll go ignored. “Sam” might not know he’s supposed to be creating the content upgrades for each blog article, so your lead generation will suffer.

Defining staff roles will save you from mistakes and team confusion. It’ll improve your workflow and make your content creation more organized and effective.

Add your team roles to your content strategy so everyone knows what they’re in charge of doing.

Content Style Guide

With multiple people on your team, you need to make sure everyone is on the same page with the tone and style of your content. When you have a team creating content, it can be easy for your content to have a wide range of writing styles.

You don’t want that.

Consistency is key for your audience to recognize you across all of your channels. Your audience will get confused if the content tone differs too much between authors. That’s why a content style guide is so important.

Add a style guide to your content strategy. You’ll keep your team or even just yourself informed of how the content should appear each time.

Your strategy is a document everyone should reference regularly, so your style guide belongs here. Having copies accessible outside of your strategy would help, too. Being able to quickly access your guide is key for efficiency.

Measurement Process

Your content creation depends heavily on your measurement process. You’ll want to know whether your content is performing as it should. So, you need to know how you’ll measure that.

With content marketing, you have several key metrics you should measure regularly. These are a few you should consider:

Page views

Time on page

Visitor path

Social click-through rate

Conversions

Measurement shouldn’t be restricted to website data. Make sure you’re tracking social shares and engagement. Track search ranking and whether people are clicking through.

Add a measurement process section to your content strategy so that you and your team can properly track content performance. Include a place for Google Analytics data while also making room for social media analytics.

This data is a must-have if you want to stay ahead of the game in content creation.

Calendar

Your content strategy should have a basic calendar included. Your content calendar is a separate identity from your strategy, but it’s still something that can strengthen this document.

Most times, your content calendar won’t be a Word or Google document. Many people use Excel, Google Sheets, or a paid program to host their calendar. This makes including it in your strategy document a challenge.

That’s why your best option is to use this space not as your main, full calendar but more as a place for defining your schedule.

Add how often you’ll publish content, in what formats, and on what platform. If you’re following a themed approach, include the content types and categories you’ll focus on per month or quarter.

Idea Generation Plan

You’ll always want to have an easy and effective way to generate ideas for your content creation efforts. Your strategy is a great place for listing a process and linking to resources for finding ideas.

Oftentimes, all you need to combat writer’s block are content topic generators (such as the one HubSpot offers). These online programs are helpful at giving you topic ideas, and the prompts make creating catchy headlines easier.

You also want to have a way of finding blog topics that appeal to your target audience. This includes keyword research, a competitor review, and knowing who your audience actually is.

When you have plenty of ideas coming in, you need to know how to organize them. Establish your own organization system for your content ideas so that they’re easily referenced.

Your content strategy is a great place for this. All your ideas will be in one place.

In this section of your strategy, make sure your ideas are clean and legible. Don’t let them get lost in a mess.

The best way to organize your ideas within your strategy is to separate them by content type and category. Make a table within your strategy document to help you keep this system clear.

Content Promotion Plan

There are many ways you can promote your content. It’s important you define each of them in this section of your strategy.

These are two typical ways you can promote your content:

Email Campaigns: create newsletters or announcements for your top content to share with blog subscribers, prospects, and existing customers. Make your email marketing campaigns count by optimizing each element.

create newsletters or announcements for your top content to share with blog subscribers, prospects, and existing customers. Make your email marketing campaigns count by optimizing each element. Social Media Outreach: use social media to spread the word about your new or top-performing content. Reaching out via social media can increase content exposure and help you reach your target audience in a way that attracts them to your site.

Those are two effective ways to promote your content no matter what type it is. It doesn’t have to be just blog articles or website content. You can share videos or any content type that appeals to your specific audience.

The important part about content promotion is that you must customize what you share to the audience of each platform. If the content doesn’t appeal to them, it won’t bring you results.

Is Your Content Strategy Ever Finished?

Quick answer: No, it’s not.

Your strategy is never finalized. It’s always a working document. You’ll be changing and growing it with time.

You’ll have new content types or different promotional tactics. You might change how you schedule your content, or even your goals might change.

This is why your content strategy should always be available and ready for adjustment. It is essential that you keep your strategy current with your efforts and even external trends.