While it’s true having content is one of the best ways to market your brand, simply posting a few blog posts and articles won’t automatically yield the results you want. Even more so if you don’t have a plan.
Essentials For Your Content
Developing a content strategy takes you to the drawing board to conceptualize ideas and put them into practice. Aside from considering Slickplan’s article about planning, enumerated here are some important factors you need for a killer content strategy.
1. Goal And Mission
Any content strategy should have a clear goal and mission to know the direction your organization is heading into. Consider what your marketing objectives are, what the needs of your business, and what your brand stands for.
Some of the goals a content strategy can address include:
- Nurturing leads
- Repeating customers
- Growing awareness for your products or services
- Changing people’s ideas
- Encouraging sales
- Supporting customers
Your goal will gradually change as your business grow, so make sure to periodically replan and revisit your content strategy objective. Keep them aligned with your needs and recalibrate the ones you think you’d need to improve.
2. Audience Persona
After the why, you need to consider the who. This is particularly important for those new to marketing. In terms of content, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. This is a classic trap of trying to target everyone only to end up targeting no one.
If you’re speaking to everyone at the same time, then no one will truly feel like your blogs are written for them. Defining the target audience of your content can help you produce more valuable and relevant materials people will want to read, increasing the chances of conversions.
3. Content Kinds
You should think about what types of content you’d want to have. There are various kinds every content strategy should include depending on the purpose of the post.
Blogs remain as core content for your marketing mix as they’re known to deliver effective results. Ideally, a blog post should be valuable, actionable, and sharable. Also, it should have various article types.
Videos are great means to engage visitors and to have them on your website longer. In addition, video marketing also helps reduce abandonment and increase leads. Meanwhile, visual content like infographics can also improve enticement.
Audio blogs and podcasts are also becoming more popular as delivery mechanisms to keep users engaged. Other content types you can include are eBooks, webinars, worksheets, and checklists, which are all great for improving lead generation.
4. Resources
The next thing you should consider is your resources. Who’ll be producing and maintaining the content? You have to identify who’d be in charge and who’d be responsible for delivering individual items. You can do everything in-house or outsource content production if you have limited human resources.
You also need to figure out how you’re going to create your content. Your team can write blog posts via online sharing platforms. Also, there’s free software for creating infographics and images. You’ll need equipment for creating professional videos and podcasting, not to mention arranging for hosting on various sites.
In addition, you should also consider tools for collaboration and content managing. An editorial calendar should be your top priority since it brings your strategy together. Plus, it also allows you and your team to view everything needed to be created, so collaborate in managing the submission and in meeting due dates. There’s plenty of calendar software your organization could try.
5. KPIs
How do you know if you’ve achieved your content goals? Measure the results by having key performance indicators (KPIs) in your strategy. Your KPIs can guide you in knowing whether you’ve reached your targets by indicating markers you can tick off from your list.
KPIs indicate what you want to attain with regard to search engine optimization (SEO), sales, traffic, revenue, and other aspects aligned with your overall digital marketing strategy.
Usually, KPIs have figures. Some examples of items you can measure are:
- Signups
- Revenue
- Site traffic
- Email subscribers
- Number of comments, shares, and mentions
In addition, you may consider measuring and tracking your expenditures as well as monitoring the price of making sales and obtaining leads.
Conclusion
Crafting a strategy with the help of the above considerations allows you to leverage your content to grow your business rather than sitting idly on your blog. Whether you’ve been creating content for a while now or just starting with your marketing, creating a content strategy can set you up for success and for seeing results in the long run.
Related reading
- 5 Essentials for Successful Content Creation
- 5 Reasons eCommerce Retailers Should Start a Blog
- From Spark To Signal: How Strong Content Travels A Modern Marketing Ecosystem
- How Your Content Skills Can Help You Write a Book
- how to make money blogging
Why most content strategies fail: The gap between planning and execution
I’ve reviewed hundreds of content strategies, and the disconnect between what’s written in the document and what happens is staggering. Most teams spend weeks workshopping brand voice and buyer journey mapping, then launch content that bears no resemblance to the plan. The problem isn’t the planning itself. It’s that nobody accounts for resource reality.
Here’s what I mean: You decide you’ll publish three blog posts weekly, a video series, and daily social media updates. That sounds reasonable on a spreadsheet. But when you factor in actual approval chains, the person who knows your industry retiring, the client who demands rewrites, or the tool that breaks mid-month, you’re suddenly operating at 60% capacity. Your content gets thin. Quality drops. Audience engagement suffers.
The mistake is building a strategy that assumes perfect conditions. Instead, audit your actual capacity first. Not the capacity you wish you had. The capacity you have right now, with the people available, the tools working, and the approval structure that exists today. Then build your strategy around that number.
I worked with a B2B SaaS company last year that committed to monthly whitepapers. They had one content person, two subject matter experts who were busy with client work, and a legal team that reviewed everything. One whitepaper took four months to publish. They abandoned the plan after two attempts. What worked instead: I had them commit to one quarterly deep-dive piece instead, plus a weekly newsletter pulling from existing materials. Same person, same approvals, but realistic expectations. They hit 100% of their targets because the targets matched their world.
The second gap I see is between “strategy” and “distribution strategy”. Teams write brilliant content in a silo, then hope it reaches people. Distribution isn’t an afterthought. It’s not just posting a link on LinkedIn. Where does your audience spend time? Are you following them there, or are you pushing content into channels where they barely show up? This changes everything about what format you should create and how often.
I also see teams ignore the measurement piece entirely. They pick metrics that don’t matter. Clicks don’t matter if they don’t convert. Impressions don’t matter if they’re from people who’ll never buy. Page views don’t matter if people bounce in eight seconds. I push clients to pick one or two metrics that tie directly to business outcomes. For a SaaS company, that might be “demo requests from organic search” or “qualified leads from content downloads”. For e-commerce, it’s different. But it has to connect to money.
The last thing: most strategies are static documents that live in a folder nobody opens. I recommend building in a quarterly review that’s brutal. What didn’t work? Stop doing it. What’s overperforming? Double down. What’s taking effort but producing nothing? Kill it. Strategies need to evolve based on actual performance, not assumptions made in the planning phase.
More questions
How often should I refresh my content strategy?
At minimum quarterly. Do a proper review every three months: which content drove results, which didn’t, where did your audience shift, what new opportunities showed up. Every year do a deeper audit of your overall approach. But don’t wait for the review to kill things that aren’t working. If a content pillar is dragging after two months, pause it and reallocate. Strategies live in the real world, not spreadsheets.
What’s the single biggest mistake when choosing content formats?
Copying what your competitors do or what worked for other industries. Your audience has preferences. Some segments will engage heavily with video, others will skim it and read instead. Others want podcasts. Test small, track which formats get engagement from your actual audience, then double down on those. The format doesn’t matter. Audience preference matters.
Should I invest in content management systems or focus budget on hiring writers?
Both, but prioritise people first. A person who understands your market and can write on brand matters far more than fancy software. That said, if you’re publishing across multiple channels regularly, a tool that centralises and automates distribution saves enormous time. But a broken workflow with great tools is worse than a smooth workflow with spreadsheets. Get the process right first. Then layer in tools that support it.
