An intelligent content strategy aligns content creation and distribution with core business goals. This allows brands to attract and engage clearly defined audiences for marketing and sales impact. Follow these steps to build a high-performing content strategy:
Understand Your Audience
Creating detailed buyer personas is the foundation of an effective strategy. Identify target customer demographics, common pain points, and how to align content to their interests. Current customers provide insight through interviews and surveys. Analyzing competitors’ audiences also helps optimize personas.
Audit Existing Assets
Take stock of all current brand content across channels like social media, the website, and emails. Review performance metrics to identify what content types and topics resonate most with your audience. This audit clarifies content gaps and opportunities.
Define Goals and KPIs
Align content goals with specific business objectives like increasing website traffic, generating leads, or boosting brand awareness. Define quantifiable key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress, like sales qualified leads and conversion rate.
Create an Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar outlines the content you will create across channels over a set timeframe. Include topics, formats, publishing dates, and promotion plans. Coordinate cross-channel content for amplification. Leave room to create timely content around trends.
Develop Content Guidelines
Document guidelines around tone of voice, branding, formatting, and style to ensure consistency across content creators and channels. Offer examples of high-performing content that follows the guidelines.
Promote and Distribute Content
Distribution gets content in front of your audience. Leverage channels like email marketing, social media, SEO, and paid ads. Make sharing easy with share buttons and links. Repurpose content across formats for greater reach.
While organic traffic is the end goal, eight in 10 marketers use paid distribution to extend their reach.
Analyze and Optimize
Continuously analyze content performance data to identify successes and underperforming areas. Use these insights to refine the strategy over time. Agile optimization leads to consistent improvement.
An effective strategy combines audience insights, goal alignment, organized workflows, distribution muscle, and analytics. With all pieces working in harmony, content marketing fuels sustainable business growth.
Content Marketing Resources
Additional reading to improve your content marketing skills
- Research Says These Two Choices Determine Your Content’s Shelf Life
- Writing Better Titles Without Using Clickbait Tactics
- What Is Contextual Link Building
- Understanding and Tapping into the Emotional Triggers of Your Audience
- Digital Marketing Strategies to Increase Customer Retention
- Evergreen Content vs. Fresh Content
- Does Word Count Matter for SEO?
- Why You Should Stop Paying for Low-Volume Keywords
- Social Media Content Creation Techniques for Higher Engagement