Content Marketing Strategy

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy is an ever-evolving plan that determines the types of content that you share with your audience, how it’s aligned to your business goals, who the content is intended for, and what content formats you’re using. 

This is an ongoing process for content marketers. It’s very important that content marketers don’t work in isolation, but to work with those around them to define:

•      What content is created
•      What purpose the content has in relation to your wider business goals
•      How effective your content is in helping achieve these goals. 

Moving through a complete content strategy process will help you create meaningful content, share it with the right audience, and measure and optimize it to inform future content campaigns. 

Each of the main steps includes a number of activities. These must be carried out sequentially to make logical sense, so it’s best to avoid investing time ahead of schedule in an area that may be undermined by later learnings. 

Creating a content marketing strategy

Developing a content marketing strategy is a cyclical process. The learnings from the second last stage (the measurement phase) should always be fed via the last stage of strategizing back into the research and planning phase of each campaign to help evolve your strategy. 

Looking at a typical content marketing cycle, you can see here that there are six phases.   
1.    You start off with the research phase. Here you’re looking at your intended audience. You need to find out as much about them as possible, where they live, and what content formats they react to. Key tactics and activities to support your research during this phase are social listening, competitor audits, audience segmentation, and platform research. 
2.    Next, you need to align your business objectives, wider business targets, and your KPIs with your content plans. This is the planning phase, where you look at the range of content formats that you need to create, the channels you need to be active on, and the pain points, information, and education you’re going to supply to your target audience.  
3.    Then you move into the content creation and curation phase. This phase starts with a decision on the nature of the content to be produced. Creating original content is always desirable but it comes with added cost and time. Curating content that has been produced by other sources and third parties is another option that requires lower resource investment, but has a rather limited scope and does not provide the same levels of brand credibility as your own original content.
4.    Next, you need to decide how  your content is published into the content ecosystem? The activities involved here are platform selection, content promotion, and content outreach. 
5.    Furthermore, it’s important to understand how you measure your content performance. Key activities involved here are social listening, monthly content reports, and content audits. 
6.    Finally, the measurement, insights, and analytics gleaned from the measurement phase can be implemented to strategize for the next content cycle and the process starts again.  

The entire process follows a cyclical fashion, and, typically, you’ll revisit the content strategy at least annually, or potentially even two or three times a year.