A content strategy is a formal plan that guides your overall content creation and publication campaigns before execution. Content strategies help your business have a more efficient lead generation system, inform potential customers about your products or services, build relationships with them, and, ultimately, sell your products/services.
Unfortunately, many businesses make do with creating content first, strategy second. And that’s if they even think about strategy at all.
If you’re thinking about developing a content strategy for your business, you’re already several steps ahead of many companies creating content online. That’s why I wrote this article so you can have as much information you need to create a foundation for your basic content strategy.
Your Ultimate Guide on How to Create a Content Strategy
What is Content?
Before we find out how to make an effective content strategy, we should clarify what content is. But defining content is tricky in itself when it’s best to define content through the context surrounding it.
With that said, we’ll define content from the context of business.
One way to define content is by categorizing it. When you’re making a content strategy, you can categorize it by asking two questions:
- At what stage in the marketing funnel is your target audience?
- What is the goal of the content?
For this guide, we’ll define content through these two questions.
Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel
When creating your content strategy, you need to outline the buyer journey to create a better marketing funnel strategy.
Marketing Funnel: a concept that tracks the buyer’s journey from the awareness stage until the end goal of purchasing a business’s product or service.
Once you understand the specificities of your marketing funnel, you can start creating content based on each stage of the funnel a.k.a. a content marketing funnel.
1. Top-of-Funnel Content
When the potential customer is at the top of the funnel, they aren’t aware of the existence of your business. Therefore, Top-of-Funnel (ToFu) content is all about making your target audience aware of you.
The best ToFu content for a B2B audience is informational content that’s straight to the point as much as possible. For the B2C audience, shorter, bite-sized, informative, but entertaining content is vital.
2. Middle-of-Funnel Content
Middle-of-Funnel (MoFu) Content would then target the audience that’s more aware of your brand but has yet to transact with your business. When creating MoFu content, your goal is to market your product or service as the right choice for their problems.
Unlike ToFu content, MoFu content is more self-aware of your business and that you are marketing your brand. HOWEVER, you shouldn’t make the mistake of going too sales-y too fast.
Through your MoFu content, leads should feel your expertise and authority, and they should now be aware that whatever problem they have, you happen to have a solution for.
3. Bottom-of-Funnel Content
Your leads are now aware of their problem, and they know that you have a solution that can help them. Now your Bottom-of-Funnel (BoFu) content should show them that you are the best solution they’re going to have.
At this point, it’s all about persuasion. Testimonials, case studies, free trials, and coupons are typical examples of BoFu content.
Here’s a handy infographic of the marketing funnel and the content you can create based on each stage.
Four Purposes of Content
Aside from the stages within the marketing funnel, another way to define content is by its purpose. There are four primary purposes of content:
Entertain
Entertaining content is engaging and usually very shareable, and it requires you to trigger an emotional response from your audience.
Content for entertainment purposes is a lot harder than you think since so many brands often miss the mark. Don’t focus too much on virality or creating an emotional response to get more eyes on your brand. That’s the time when most businesses start missing their goal.
Inspire
Content to inspire targets leads that are more aware of your brand, but you still wish to elicit an emotional response in them.
Inspiring content aims to make your target audience, who is aware of you or knows you exist, to like you. The more your target audience likes you, the likelier it is for your target audience to support your business.
Inform
Informational content offers a more practical use for your target audience. Content to inform is less emotional, but it will address pain points that your audience will have. Common examples of informational content would be infographics, blog posts, how-tos, and many more.
You can insert your product or service here in a subtle or obvious manner, depending on what stage of the funnel they may be.
Persuade
Although all content has an indirect way of persuading a lead, persuasive content takes a more direct approach.
Content to persuade takes the bull by the horns and directly acknowledges the struggles and needs of the target audience. It then positions your brand or business as a solution out of many, or even the best out there.
The purpose of the content you create will depend on the stage of the marketing funnel. Different content purposes work better for different funnel stages, as you saw in the infographic above.
What is a Content Strategy?
Now that you have a deeper understanding of content, it’s time to build your content strategy.
Content strategy is a detailed plan to achieve specific business goals through the content you produce and distribute. Simply creating a blog article and publishing it is not considered a content strategy.
“But, Marri,” you interject. “Do I need to make a content strategy? Isn’t it fine as long as I make some sort of content?”
Sure. And many businesses have been doing just that.
You don’t need a content strategy.
However, the numbers can say more than I can when it comes to the power of content strategy.
In CSO Insights’ Fifth Annual Sales Enablement Study, the study showed that the organizations that had a content strategy reported a 27.1% higher win rate and an 18.1% higher quota attainment than companies that didn’t have a content strategy.
These numbers are nothing to sniff at.
If you’re still hesitating to invest time and resources towards the development of your content strategy, then you may be missing out.
“But, Marri,” again you interject. “I already have a content marketing plan.”
Content strategy and content marketing are two different things altogether. Here’s how they differ:
Content Strategy vs. Content Marketing
Given their many similarities, content strategy and content marketing often get mixed up with one another. However, it will be a good idea to keep it clear which one’s which, so let’s identify the difference between one another.
Your content strategy contains the foundational rules and guidelines that all of your content production processes should follow or keep in mind. On the other hand, content marketing is the marketing approach that concentrates on the creation, publication, and distribution of valuable and relevant content.
Although they have their differences, think of them as different sides of the same coin.
Without execution through content marketing, content strategy is all but a concept. Without a content strategy, your content marketing can be ineffective, inefficient, and wasteful of resources.
3 Phases for How to Make an Effective Content Strategy
Since you know the difference between content marketing and content strategy, it’s time to create your content strategy.
Disclaimer here: different things work for different businesses. However, what I’m about to list down contains the basics of what you need to include in your foundational content strategy.
I’ve separated the many steps of a content strategy into three phases that I call the 3Rs of Content Strategy: Research, Run, Review.
Let’s start with the first step: the Research Phase.
Research Phase
The Research phase is all about gathering information about your business, your audience, your competitors, and the market within the context of content creation. This phase should arm you with the data you need to create an actionable roadmap for your content. That way, you aren’t pulling strategy out of thin air like a rabbit out of a magician’s hat.
Define your overall goals/objectives.
Each piece of content you create will have a specific goal it’s aiming after, but that’s something you think about in the content plan. For the content strategy, you should dictate an overall business objective for your content in its entirety.
Your goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based (SMART).
Once you have a clear goal in mind, it should dictate what Key Performance Indicators (KPI) you’ll be looking at later to see if your content strategy and marketing work.
Identify your target audience.
Creating content to have everybody read it is an exercise in futility, and that’s why it’s a good idea to identify who you want your target audience to be in the first place.
With a clear idea of your target audience, it becomes easier to focus your content on their needs and wants. It also means that your content will be way more effective on your target audience than any other type of people.
According to CoSchedule’s Inbound Marketing Director, Ben Sailer, identifying your target audience helps you create not only great content but also the right content.
When identifying your target audience, you want to create a buyer persona and map out the customer journey for your content creation needs.
Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a profile and description of your target audience condensed into a single pseudo-entity. According to Buyer Persona Institute, a buyer persona is there to tell you “what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to address a problem that your company resolves.”
It sounds confusing at first, but you’re essentially creating a caricature of your target audience containing critical information relevant to your business based on the data you’ve gathered of them.
Usually, the brand strategist is responsible for crafting a buyer persona, but your content strategist might also help you create your buyer persona.
A buyer persona is a much easier way for content marketers and strategists to remember your target audience. Although demographic and psychographic data is valuable, creating a buyer persona out of it can make it easier to curate content for your target audience.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping is the process of illustrating the various ways that your target audience may interact with your business. The customer journey map allows content strategists or marketers to curate and create content based on these touchpoints so that customers get a more personalized experience.
Set your brand tone/voice.
If you’re responsible for the content of a business, you should ask them about their branding guidelines, and it should include a description of their brand personality and positioning.
By having this information, you can create content that sounds consistent even when in separate distribution channels. This consistency will make it easier for your target audience to trace the content you create to your business.
Some people think that their niche dictates their brand tone/voice, but that’s not necessarily true, which is why it’s a good idea to go over the brand guidelines or editorial guidelines if they have one.
Do a content audit.
A content audit is a process of going through the entire content inventory and your content creation process and framework to identify how you can change your future content strategy for better practices.
Goals of a Content Audit
When you’re doing a content audit, you want to achieve these goals:
- Based on the plan you’ve set, identify which parts of your content are not serving that goal (weakness) and which ones are helping you achieve it (strengths).
- If your goal is to optimize search engines more, look for SEO-relevant data through an SEO content audit.
- Figure out lapses or gaps in your content that you can fill to improve your content based on your goal.
- Identify what your current content creation process and framework are.
- What content formats do you produce?
- Systematize your content creation process if you haven’t yet.
- Identify and organize the critical players in your content creation process.
- Dial down which distribution channels to focus on. (Target audience research should help you with this.)
- Do a competitor content analysis and identify their content gaps that you can take advantage of and fill.
- Start building the foundations of your content marketing strategy.
- If you don’t have a website yet, start choosing your preferred Content Management System (CMS). Examples of a CMS would be WordPress, Wix, and many more.
Content Audit vs. Content Inventory
Ideally, you should already have a content inventory that your content strategist can look at so they can start the content audit. However, some content strategists offer content inventory as a service.
A content inventory is a catalog of the content on your website. the content audit is the qualitative analysis of the content inventory.
When to do a Content Audit?
You don’t do a content audit every month.
You probably should only do it once a year.
If you don’t have any content yet, you can skip the content inventory and the analysis since you don’t have any yet. However, you will still need to do the competitor content analysis, which can help you get started on the right foot.
If you already have content up and running, expect the content audit to take a while, especially if you’ve never done a content inventory and audit before.
A content audit can be a massive game-changer for established businesses. It helps steer your previous content in the right direction and salvage old content into something more productive.
Run Phase
So, you’ve done all that research and gathered all that data; what now?
Now, it’s time to take all of that information and create an actionable roadmap filled with recommended next steps and changes that will run throughout your content. That’s what the Run Phase is going to be about.
Content Strategy Roadmap
Your content strategy roadmap is a consolidation of all that you’ve learned from your Research Phase with recommended phases of action.
Aside from including a summary of your content audit, here is what you should have in your content strategy roadmap.
Questions To Answer in Your Content Strategy Roadmap
- What is the current goal that you’re aiming for through marketing?
- How is your current content strategy serving this goal?
- How do you know that you’ve achieved your goals? (KPIs)
- When is the recommended deadline for this goal?
- What are the risks and challenges when aiming for this goal?
- Who is your target audience?
- Who is your primary and secondary target audience?
- Illustrate their customer journey, specifically in terms of the touchpoints.
- Do you have enough content for each phase or touchpoint that your target audience is in?
- Which should you invest in more, ToFu, MoFu, or BoFu content?
- Which type of content marketing are your customers consuming more?
- What is the current state of your content?
- Do you have a niche?
- What content types do you currently produce?
- Where do you distribute your content now?
- When do you post your content?
- What is your content guideline?
- What is your content creation process like?
- Identify critical players/team members that are involved with the content creation.
- Which tools do you use?
- What are the recommended changes that you should implement in your content strategy?
- What are outdated practices that you found through the content audit?
- Which techniques should be eliminated or replaced?
- How can you better optimize the content creation framework/process?
- What improvements can you make in the content creation process?
- What improvements can you make in the distribution strategy?
- Which parts of their current content creation practice are working for them?
- Are there other opportunities that they could try?
- How could they get started on these opportunities?
- Are there risks that come with chasing these opportunities?
- What are the benefits that come with this opportunity?
Review Phase
The Review Phase doesn’t come directly after the Run Phase. You have to let your content strategy run for a while before going to the Review Phase.
The Review Phase of Content Strategy is the part where you look at all the suggestions that you’ve made in the content strategy and see if you’ve achieved the goals you’ve set out.
When do you start the Review Phase of your Content Strategy?
You should wait at least half a year or even nine months before going back to review your content strategy. In some cases, you might even want to wait a year.
It takes this long because it takes a while before your content strategy changes show consistent results. That’s why you should let it sit for a while before coming back to it.
Do You Need A Content Strategy?
If you’re a content strategist or a part of the content marketing team of a start-up with no content strategy, you might have to take on the job of convincing higher-ups or clients to have a content strategy.
You can also be a small business owner with limited time, energy, and resources looking for reasons to invest in content strategy.
There are many reasons why you need a content strategy. However, you would want to invest in a content strategy because it optimizes your content marketing and creation process.
Content strategy clarifies goals, keeps track of progress, and identifies opportunities to serve business goals through content. Aside from that, content strategy can help you cut costs by allocating your content marketing resources to the right places.
If you feel like your content marketing and content creation process could be better, you should look at your content strategy and start investing more into it.
Conclusion
Content Strategy is more than creating content. It’s about ensuring that your content creation and marketing processes are serving your big-picture business goals.
Hopefully, this article has helped you find everything you need to know to get started.
It’s much better to start sooner than later when it comes to content strategy, so start investing in your content strategy as soon as you can!
Got any questions or comments about Content Strategy 101?
Did I miss anything in this article? Are there any parts of the article that you want more information on?
Leave a comment down below to let me know!
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