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What is a Content Strategy?
A content strategy is a scheduled plan for creating, managing, and distributing content. This means that a strategy is in place regarding what types of content to create, how to manage its creation, and how to optimize it to generate conversion.
Content is any information or material created and shared to inform, engage, or entertain an audience, e.g. a blog post.
Key Takeaways
- A content strategy is a planned way to create, manage, and share content. It helps guide people through the sales funnel and reach business goals.
- A content strategist plans, designs, creates, edits, and publishes content that matches business goals and user needs.
- A good content strategy includes attraction, authority, affinity, and action content to engage, inform, and convert audiences.
- Content strategy is about planning and managing content for the whole company, while content marketing strategy focuses on specific marketing goals and getting leads.
- The four phases are planning, creating, maintaining, and unpublishing, making sure the content stays relevant, high-quality, and good for SEO.
Who is a Content Strategist?
A content strategist plans, designs, creates, edits, and publishes appropriate content that relates to the business goals and user needs. Therefore, they must ensure that the content strategy achieves company objectives.
Why Do You Need a Content Strategy?
Developing a content strategy gives a clear plan for creating content that helps guide people through the sales funnel.
Advantages include:
Content Strategy Goals
For an effective content strategy, you need to meet a number of goals:
Types of Content in Content Strategy
If you’re wondering, “What should a content strategy include?” – here’s your answer. There are four key types of content that should make up your content strategy basics:
Content Strategy vs. Content Marketing Strategy
| Aspect | Content Strategy | Content Marketing Strategy |
| Scope | The whole company, general | Specific to digital marketing goals |
| Focus | Planning, creating, managing, controlling | Promoting content, sharing it, getting leads |
| Objective | Achieve business goals, provide steady value | Increase sales, engage customers, keep customers |
| Target Audience | Wide (inside and outside the company) | Specific customers and possible leads |
| Components | Brand voice, content control, user needs | Campaigns, promotions, types of content |
| Approach | Strategic, long-term | Tactical, short-term |
Content Strategy and SEO
Content strategy and search engine optimization (SEO) often go hand in hand since your target audience cannot find your content if it doesn’t rank in the search engine results page (SERP).
Here’s a list of SEO content strategy components you should consider to meet your business goals:
5 Questions to Ask When Creating a Content Strategy
Developing a content strategy involves answering a few key questions to map out the content strategy process:
- Who is your target audience?
Understand their needs and preferences to solve their problems. - What are your business goals?
Determine if you want more awareness, potential customers, or to retain current ones. - What type of content will you create?
Choose formats like blog posts, videos, and infographics. - How will you distribute and promote your content?
Use channels like social media, email marketing, and SEO. - How will you measure success?
Set key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and adjust your strategy.
How to Create a Content Strategy
We’ve already covered the content strategy basics in the above text. Now, it’s time to combine all the information into one concise how-to for ease of reference.
Here’s how everything comes together:
Planning
- Audit content: Review existing content and check if it meets current business goals.
- Set objectives: Define clear goals (e.g., attraction, authority, affinity, action).
- Know your audience: Research and create profiles of your audience to aid in building a content strategy.
- Assign roles: Decide who will create, review, and manage the content.
- Create guidelines: Develop documents for brand voice, tone, and editorial standards.
Creating
- Brainstorm topics: Think of topics that reflect your business and audience.
- Content calendar: Plan when and what to publish.
- Develop content: Create high-quality content following your guidelines.
- SEO optimization: Use keywords and optimize on-page elements.
Maintaining
- Update regularly: Review and update content to keep it relevant.
- Quality management: Have a team to manage content quality.
- Track performance: Use KPIs and analytics to monitor content.
Unpublishing
- Remove outdated content: Archive or delete old content and manage redirects.
- Maintain SEO: Ensure removals don’t harm SEO.
Content Strategy Benefits and Drawbacks
- A good content strategy makes your brand more visible and recognized
- Interesting content keeps your audience involved and encourages interaction
- Good content with the right keywords helps you rank higher on search engines
- Useful content can lead to more sales and customer actions
- Creating and managing a content strategy needs a lot of time and effort
- You need to keep creating and checking content for long-term success
- Spending on quality content and tools can cost a lot
- Content must be updated often to stay relevant and useful
The Bottom Line
The content strategy definition revolves around planning, creating, and sharing content to meet business goals, engage audiences, and improve SEO.
Although it needs time, effort, and regular updates, the benefits are clear: better brand visibility, more audience interaction, and higher conversions leading to overall business success.
