How to Create a Content Strategy
As marketers, we’re rarely at a loss for ideas.
What we do often need help with is organizing all of those ideas into a strategy and then executing a plan to support that strategy. I find this is often the case with content strategy. There are so many topics to cover, but which are relevant, and how do you manage the workload to support the production and distribution? And, how do you make sure that the content that you’re producing supports the overall business strategy?
To begin, I suggest that you start with a Marketing Plan that supports the business strategy. Ensure that you understand the priorities for which audiences you are creating content to support.
Need a hand with planning out your marketing? Download our marketing plan template.
There might be a couple of different audiences. For instance, the business might be trying to both attract leadership level prospects and engage with existing customers of a specific product.
Or, the business strategy might be focused on attracting interest and engaging with prospects in a specific industry, and working to turn free users into paid customers.
Whatever the business focus is, just make sure you know who you’re creating content for, first and foremost. Once you know who your viewer is, you can determine what their goals are and which stage of the buying cycle they are in. This information will make clear the types of content you need to produce. Here are some examples of types of content by buying stage:
Thought leadership and idea-focused content
Brand content focused on the company culture and team
Product-focused content that addresses challenges and solutions
How-to articles for prospects
How-to articles, specific to your product for free users or current customers
Business or life guidance on indirectly related topics for your buyer
With a clear picture of the business strategy, your audience, and their goals, you will have what you need to dive into a content strategy.
There are three activities we perform when developing a content strategy that I’ll outline below.
Are you looking for help with your content strategy and development? Contact us.
FIRST: DETERMINE YOUR KEY THEMES USING A MINDMAPPING EXERCISE
Using a tool like Whimsical, get together a group of people within your company and document ideas for topics and themes. This is a great exercise to flush out and log ideas so they can be used in the future. But it also surfaces the primary themes and topics within those themes that your team should invest their time in.
Here’s an example of a mindmap for Think Better:
Once you have your ideas out in the open, review them to see which themes best serve your current business goals and audience. Identify two to four themes to identify your areas of content focus for the next quarter or even year.
Note: It’s important also to consider your competition and any SEO strategy you have when deciding on your theme. If you select a theme that is highly competitive—meaning there are lots of companies already covering the topic and you don’t have anything especially unique to say, it probably won’t get you anywhere.
Select themes that you and your brand have an opinion on, are uniquely positioned to publish content about, and aren’t highly competitive.
SECOND: FLUSH OUT THE TOPICS WITHIN THESE THEMES
Again, using a tool like Whimsical, document the topics that you can produce and publish content on, related to your chosen themes. As you do this, consider the content that you already have and the resources—people, partners, and channels—that you can leverage to create the content. Here is an example of what our content brainstorm might look like.
Maybe you published a guide two years ago that’s related to your theme. Reuse that! Refresh the guide, break it up into blog posts, webcasts, an email series...whatever makes the most sense.
During this part of the process, I like to document these ideas, whether there is already related content, who might support the development and the depth of content.
This idea of “content depth” was inspired by a session at INBOUND 2019, led by Ashley Faus titled “Beyond the Editorial Calendar” Ashley suggested that marketers “Treat the buyer’s journey as a playground—people can enter and exit as they desire, they can go in any order and they can engage with the content the wrong way.”
She suggested that when creating a content strategy to cover your bases and develop resources that are diverse in their content depth. The categories of depth are:
Conceptual content (problem) - overarching themes, limited to three or four core ideas. Philosophical and abstract. This is the foundation the tactical content will be built on top of. Focus on the why and what of the ideas.
Strategic content (solution) - Focus on the process, tools, and key knowledge components that they must be included to make the conceptual ideas a reality.
Tactical content (product) - Prescriptive, step-by-step instructions, and specific exercises to help the audience implement conceptual and strategic ideas.
Diversifying your content depth ensures that you’re covering each stage of the buyer’s research process and can answer the questions that they have when they have them. Knowing that you can’t control a buyer’s process, this will provide you coverage in your content strategy.
Additionally, building out content within themes puts you in a great position to develop focused pillar pages, leveraging the content you create.
Read more on pillar pages here.
THIRD: ORGANIZE YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY INTO A PLAN OF ACTION
Now it’s time to take all of your work and document it so that your ideas can be developed and executed. We organize everything into a Google Sheet that contains the Content Strategy and an Editorial Calendar. The content strategy answers the question of “What?” and the editorial calendar answers the questions of “When and how?”
This documentation allows you to maintain focus on your primary themes, commit to producing and distributing, and collaborate with others.
Want a template to get started on your editorial calendar? Click below for the template that we use. Feel free to copy it and make it your own.
We’ve found these three steps help us flush out our ideas, focus our efforts, and create a coordinated and effective content strategy that supports our or our client’s business.
