A Guide to Content Marketing Strategy for Your Business

By Shridha Dugar

Building a successful business starts with creating the right content!

Every business decision, marketing move, or even recruitment needs backing with analysis and strategy. That’s pretty much what drives the world – intelligent decisions based on numbers and facts.

Similarly, content marketing requires a strategic approach to be beneficial to the business.

Enter, content marketing strategy.

Content marketing strategy at its core is the WHY behind every content marketing decision that your business makes.

Why do you want to do content marketing?
Why is topic X relevant to the audience over topic Y?
Why are we publishing content X on Facebook and not on Twitter?
Why is video preferred over text?
Why hasn’t our content shown results in 3 months?

And so on.

For understanding content marketing strategy, it’s essential to understand its two fundamental components – content and business objective.

What is content?

Content is any piece of communication that may be informative or entertaining and is relevant when put in context.

Quick note: Content without context is noise.

In digital marketing, content needs the correct context, form (video, images, blogs etc.) and medium (website, social media, ads) to reach the target audience.

Image Courtesy: Unsplash

At first glance, you are probably trying to understand why there is an image of a shoe. Ironically, that’s the point. It is an image of a shoe in a marketing blog. It’s content but in the wrong context.

What is a business objective?

Business objectives are specific, measurable goals that the company hopes to attain to grow the business. These objectives may be long-term or short-term and are often reviewed and revised depending on how the company progresses.

What is a content marketing strategy?

Content marketing strategy is an ongoing process of aligning business objectives with content marketing efforts and producing content to drive growth.

When implemented effectively, it can help build trust with new audiences and drive growth. Without a clear content marketing strategy, the content businesses produce is equivalent to shooting a dart in the dark – you might hit, miss or maybe injure someone.

When your business puts together a content strategy, it benefits the organization in multiple ways –

Align teams to work together towards a common goal
Help set processes to receive feedback and optimize content
Measure ROI on content marketing efforts on overall business
Allows businesses to gain trust through thought leadership
Build an editorial calendar backed by research

How to make a content marketing strategy?

For an effective content marketing strategy, it is essential to answer the following 15 questions:

Why do you want to do content marketing? Define the objectives and goals of content marketing. Your aim could be to increase brand awareness or even get more leads. It is essential that you clearly define the purpose behind your efforts.
Who is going to watch/read/listen to your content? Identify your target audience. Define their demographics and psychographics. The more you understand your audience, the easier it will be to address their needs.
Where will they watch/read/listen to this content? Analyze where your audience consumes content. Publishing content for Gen Z on Facebook does not make sense anymore.
What do you know about your audience? Illustrate their pain points through the customer journey. What kind of information do they seek at every stage of their decision-making process?
Who is your competition? Track your competition and their marketing activities.
Pro tip: Understanding how the audience reacts to your competitors can help you improve your strategy.
How are you different from your competition? Identify your unique selling proposition (USP).
What content do you already have? Conduct a content audit to understand how your content has performed in the past.
What content does the audience want? Identify the gaps in your content for each stage of the customer journey.
How will you produce the required content? Identify the gaps in content production (if any) and plan a content creation calendar.
Who will be in charge of the content? Your content marketing strategy is effective only if it executes correctly. Therefore, it is essential to have a team member overlooking the entire production phase.
How will you distribute the content? Once you have identified where your audience consumes content, you can repurpose your content for each distribution channel.
How will you measure the success/failure of the content? Define the KPIs to measure the effectiveness of the content.
How often will you publish content? Create an editorial calendar to streamline content publication.
How will you track the content? Set up efficient tracking systems with UTMs to track your content. Track the content (concept, creation, review, publication, and distribution) to measure the impact it creates.
How frequently will you review the content? Reviewing the content marketing strategy will help in optimizing it for success.

These questions will help set the ground to build an effective content marketing strategy. It aims to bring clarity to the process and helps your marketing team understand the requirement.

What makes a good content marketing strategy?

A good content marketing strategy has clearly defined goals, target audience, KPIs, processes for collecting feedback and optimizing the content. Content marketing is an ongoing process and requires optimization for maximum success.

Content marketing strategy is a long-term process applicable to businesses of all sizes. It has a compounding effect, and you may not see results immediately. However, in a data-driven digital world, it is a fundamental tool for every business to succeed.

If you want someone to create and execute a content marketing strategy.