Content is still king, and it rules supreme with a solid strategy behind it. 

Content marketing continues to be a cornerstone of successful digital marketing strategies, playing an essential role in driving customer engagement, brand loyalty, and business growth. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly competitive, businesses are under greater pressure to create content that resonates with their target audience, delivers real value, and stands out in an oversaturated market. 

Success in this space starts with a clear strategy - a detailed plan that outlines how your business will create, publish, and manage content to achieve specific goals, such as increasing brand awareness, engaging your audience, and driving conversions. It includes defining your target audience, setting clear objectives, selecting content types and channels, and establishing a content calendar. In addition to driving business growth, a content strategy done well provides valuable benefits to business operations such as planning and managing internal resources and budgets. The strategy becomes a go-to blueprint for how you 'do content' - and of course it should updated over time, keeping up with the ever changing landscapes we live and work in.

Your content strategy should include: 

In a nutshell your content strategy is a document that clearly defines the following.

• Business goals

• Audience analysis 

• Content formats & channels 

• Research, data and SEO 

• Brand Guidelines 

• Content calendar & production process 

• Tools and rules 

• Performance metrics 

How to get started

Make time to do a proper job of this, it's not a 10 min job and is most often a collaborative process.

1. Set clear goals and objectives 

What is the role of the content in your organisation and what does it need to help you achieve? Common goals include increasing brand awareness, driving traffic, generating leads, or boosting conversions. You may have multiple goals in your strategy and you can use different types of content for each goal.  

2. Audit your content 

Evaluate your existing content to identify what’s performing well and what isn’t. Look for gaps in the topics you cover, the keywords you’re not ranking for in search results, outdated information, and opportunities to improve your content. Knowing the content you already have can help you save time and budget by avoiding duplication and optimising existing resources. 

3. Analyse your audience 

Clearly define your audience, in detail - delve into segmentation and ensure the strategy shares their demographics, pain points, interests, behaviours. Creating personas that reflect different segments of your audience is the best way to do this. Personas give you someone to talk to directly with your content, ensuring your messages, tone and style are tailored to their needs. 

4. Research, research, research 

Keywords and search intent is critical for a great content strategy, however your research should extend much further than SEO - audience, competitors, market, and category research should all be in the mix and cross-referenced to create the insights that drive your strategy. Detail the findings of your research, provide listings for target keywords, content clusters, gaps or opportunities. The strategy should also record your technical SEO requirements e.g. url structure, header tag usage, metadata formats and guidelines for image optimisation. You should also include methodology and the tools available.

5. Specify content type and key channels

Decide on the types of content and channels that will resonate most with your audience. These could include blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, or social media posts. Identify where you can multi-purpose content by switching up the format – creating it once for repeated use. For example, a blog can easily become a video, social media post, and email newsletter. You can spread your reach by using different formats, especially if different customers prefer to consume content in different ways. 

6. Develop a content calendar 

Plan ahead for when and where your content will be published. A well-structured calendar helps keep you drive momentum, organise resource, maintain consistency and importantly ensures you are relevant – aligning content with right place, right time to meet audience needs and business outcomes.  

Consider monthly or quarterly -themes and tie content into the theme. Themes are helpful because they make your content more relevant and helps to avoid delivering content that is sporadic, confusing and disconnected. They also provide a tool to run an 'editorial calendar' for internal collaboration and planning.

7. Reference brand guidelines

Connect the strategy to your brand guidelines and note any additional dos and don’ts from a brand perspective that related to content – e.g. you might want to provide more detail on the format of a social post, web page templates to use or detailed and specific rules for writing for digital formats.   

8. Define your performance metrics

Implementing analytics and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) allows you to measure the success of your content strategy. This data-driven approach helps you understand what's working and what needs improvement. Your strategy should outline how your content is helping you achieve your business goals, detailing clear key performance indicators (KPIs) such as page views, engagement rates, conversion rates, and bounce rates.  

9. Set up your content governance process

Establishing clear processes for content creation, approval, and management helps maintain consistency and quality. This includes defining roles and responsibilities within your content team, agencies and suppliers. It’s important to socialise your strategy and calendar across the business to ensure consistency and buy-in – often people throughout the business will be contributors, advisors and/approvers of content. 

10. Drive continuous improvement

Things change, from audiences to business goals and market conditions, it’s therefore important to keep refreshing your strategy to align with this. Use the data and analytics from your performance metrics to continuously improve results and evolve your strategy. 

Need help with your content strategy? 

Whilst the steps are straightforward there is a lot to gain from fresh perspective and specialist skills, not to mention access to the latest tools and best practice knowledge. Across Deepend and History Will be Kind (our sister agency) we have a dedicated and specialist team of pros who work with clients across the depth and breadth of digital marketing and content strategy.