How to create a content marketing strategy

Capture the attention of your target audience with content in order to build trust and establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry. Discover the power of compelling content in driving traffic, generating leads, and ultimately, fueling business growth. Let’s dive into how you can leverage content to make your business thrive. 

By: Olof Strömbäck on May 28, 2024 | Reading time: 15 minutes

Content strategy vs content plan 

In this article, we will focus on how to create a content marketing strategy. Even though content strategy and content plan can seem to be the same there is a difference between the two.  

A content marketing strategy sets the direction and goals for your content marketing efforts, while a content plan on the other hand outlines the specific actions and tactics to execute that strategy. 

So, with this in mind, let’s continue to dive more into how to create a content marketing strategy.  

The full-funnel content marketing strategy 

Ensure that you create audience-relevant content at every stage of the customer journey by building your content strategy upon the See, Do, Think, Care, framework. This model will cover all steps in the customer journey and is a solid foundation for a content strategy that will drive leads, and conversions and build relations with your customers.  

An efficient content marketing strategy takes a stand in the customer journey. Make your content strategy successful by planning for content that covers all stages of the customer journey. Practically this means laying out a content strategy with content that caters to each step in the customer journey and help your audience to take the next step towards conversion and onwards to loyal ambassadors.  

The process of developing a content strategy 

Let’s get practical and go through the different steps in the process of creating a content strategy. There are five different steps listed below that conclude a content strategy.  

1. Content strategy goal 
2. Setting your scope  
3. Defining of audience 
4. Content audit 
5. Follow-up and optimize 

We will elaborate on each and every step, one by one starting with the goal.  

1. Set your content strategy goal 

Start to create your digital content strategy by setting one or several goals. Do you want to generate leads, drive traffic, increase organic visibility, or strengthen certain steps in the customer journey? Maybe you want a combination of these, or your focus lies elsewhere. In any case, it’s vital to have your goals set before moving on with your content plan and going into production.  

Document your goals and break them down into measurable KPIs. If you are aiming to increase brand awareness, for instance, you might want to look at branded searches. But if your main goal is to increase your organic visibility, the ranking of important keywords will be your main focus. Think about what KPIs connect to your goals. 

Clear goals are required to be able to track your success. Without goals, you can’t distinguish success from failure. But with clear and measurable goals you will know if the work you and your team are putting in creates business value, or if you should shift focus.  

2. Setting your scope 

The next step will be to select what needs to be included in your scope. Set your scope based on your goal since that is your leading star to what type of content you need to create. Base your scope on relevant information that is connected to your content strategy goal. Have your goal in focus and think about what aspects of your business need to be supported by content for you to reach your goals. Let’s have a look at how to do this.  

How prioritize your scope 

To support your goals and create business value, you need to identify the key aspects that are relevant to your specific needs. 

Let’s say that you’re a player in the e-commerce industry and want to create engagement around your products to drive more sales. To plan your scope around this goal you need to get an overview of what parts of your assortment that have the most business value potential. You should ideally include all your product categories but prioritize those that you consider the most valuable from the data that you have. With the e-commerce example in mind, these factors can be relevant when scoping your project: 

• Competition 
• Product Margin 
• Consumer demand 
• Time of year 
• Category size 

As mentioned, the bullet list above fits well together with e-commerce in mind, but no matter what business you are in, the principle is always the same. Your content strategy needs to be anchored in your goals and your scope should be prioritized from what has the potential to create the most business value.  

3. Define your audience 

Define the respective audience with the See, Do, Think, Care framework as a starting point. Considering customers’ different stages in the customer journey is an important puzzle piece when creating an overview of who you are creating content for. Later, you will also take into consideration any customer data that you already have available. But before diving into that, let’s go through the different stages in relation to the audience. 

Aligning customer data with the customer journey 

Use the list above and apply this to your audience and what you are offering. Do an audit of all customer data that you currently have available such as demographic data and map that to each stage in the customer journey. Analyze what content a customer needs to take the next step in the funnel. Base this on the data that you have and combine it with the consideration stages in the funnel.  

Your next step will be to see what type of content you need to create for each step in the customer journey. 

4. Content audit 

Now it’s time to have a look at what type of content you should put in your strategy. Just like when we defined our audience, we will have the same funnel framework in mind when adding the content types to our strategy. Setting content categories for each stage is an important pre-step of keyword research that will come later when you start to gather ideas on specific topics to create content about. Let’s refer to the framework again and have a look at examples of what type of content is suitable to create for each step.  

Filling the gaps in the customer journey 

Create an overview of what content you have online today and place it in the funnel so that it becomes obvious in which stages you are lacking content.  

You want to cater for the whole customer journey in your content strategy. But let’s say that you have a really complex product but only inspirational content. In this case, you want to create more mid- and lower-funnel content to turn your audiences into customers.  

The scenarios can be many, but in general, analyze what content you have and what you haven’t created yet. If you are not supporting every step of the customer’s journey, you are missing out on business value.  

5. Follow-up and optimize 

The success of a content strategy lies not just in the planning and execution, but also in the continuous evaluation and improvement of the content. In this section, let’s have a look at the crucial aspects of follow-up and analysis, where we measure the impact and effectiveness of our content efforts.  

Have the basics in place  

If you haven’t yet, start with setting up your tracking tools before you start publishing content. Ensure that everything is working as it should so that you can collect the data you need to measure your result. When you have taken care of basic hygiene factors like this it’s time to make a routine to follow up on performance. 

Create a follow-up routine 

Decide when you will analyze the performance of your content and refer back to your goal when it comes to what KPIs to focus on. The goal is the central part of your analysis and what you refer to when looking at the results. For example, if your goal is to support the customer journey and increase engagement around your products, you want to look closer at specific engagement metrics to see if the content seems valuable to your audience. With the same goal in mind, it could also be interesting to track how much traffic you are driving from your content section to your product categories or track your organic ranking. Be responsive to your audience to see what works and what needs to be optimized.  

Act on your insights and optimize the content accordingly. Optimization involves improving your content to boost overall performance. It’s an ongoing task, essential for ensuring you’re on the correct path. By regularly examining the performance of your content, you can identify the most successful topics and the type of content that resonates most with your target audience. Thus, optimization plays a crucial role in maximizing the value of content marketing.