How to Create a Content Strategy [with Free Template]

Aiming to drive visibility, engagement and trust on your site? It all starts with well-considered content. Great content backed by the right intentions can be the foundation that helps build long-term success, so hitting the mark with your strategy couldn’t be more important.

In this guide, we’ll explore the importance of content marketing, everything your strategy should include, and how to refine your approach with success in mind.

Why is content marketing important in digital marketing?

Content marketing isn’t just an important part of your wider digital marketing strategy – it’s essential to its success. Good content enables you to establish authority and trust with your audience, while also fuelling organic traffic from SEO efforts. It nurtures customers throughout the buyer’s journey, from awareness through to decision-making.

It can also support the efforts of other marketing channels, including social media, email and digital PR. Ultimately, this all drives engagement and visibility for your brand, helping you meet wider business goals.

What a content marketing strategy includes

A content marketing strategy is about more than just the content. From the research to the optimisation, every step of the way should be intentional and well-thought-out, so here’s everything it should include:

• Audience research: Knowing exactly who your writing is targeting.
• Keyword & topic research: Identifying high-value search opportunities.
• Content planning: Scheduling the creation of blog posts, guides, product/service pages, and resources.
• Content creation: Creating high-quality, helpful, optimised content.
• Content distribution: Sharing content through organic and earned channels.
• Measurement & optimisation: Tracking traffic, engagement, rankings, and conversions to help improve content moving forward.

How content marketing aligns with technical SEO and digital PR

Content marketing works alongside technical SEO efforts to ensure content is crawlable, indexable and optimised for speed and mobile. Specific tasks, such as developing structured data, can improve the discoverability of your content, which, in turn, improves user engagement. Users should also experience fewer errors when your content marketing and technical SEO strategies work together, since the user experience should be more refined.

It also aligns with your digital PR strategy, since the content you’re creating provides the assets that journalists, bloggers and influencers want to link to. PR amplifies content reach and visibility, driving backlinks and brand mentions.

How to create a content marketing strategy

Let us walk you through our step-by-step framework for building a content marketing strategy – from setting measurable goals to learning from your past successes and mistakes.

Set goals 

What results do you want to see from your content strategy? Every good strategy should be working towards specific, measurable goals, so think about what you want to gain from your content efforts. This will help guide your strategy in the right direction to see meaningful results.

Aiming to increase site traffic by 30% month on month? Consistently publishing and sharing valuable content should be your priority. Focusing on boosting annual conversions by 10%? You should be creating and optimising content for all stages of the buyer’s journey.

Research your audience & competitors

If you don’t know who your ideal audience is, then it’s going to be tricky to tailor your content to their needs. So, whether you’re producing B2C content aimed at targeting consumer interests or targeting other businesses, you must have a good understanding of the specific pain points your audience is facing. Put together an audience profile covering your typical target demographic to help you craft the ideal tone of voice that’ll resonate with them.

It’s also a good idea to assess what your competitors seem to be doing well. Competitor research gives you a good indication of what works, and what doesn’t – helping you shape your own strategy and benchmarks. 

Perform keyword & topic research

Once you know who your audience is and their most common pain points, you should be in a position to begin coming up with topics relating to audience interests, search trends, behaviours, product keywords and relevant questions. SEO tools like SEMrush can help you look at search volumes and competition, so you can understand where the best targeting opportunities are.

It’s a good idea to build out groups of keywords you want to target by topic, since this will help shape your content plans. 

Download free Content Strategy Planner here

Need some support with planning the perfect strategy? Our free downloadable planner can help you get organised and ensure the strategy admin stays fuss-free. 

Create a content calendar 

After setting your goals and delving into the research stage, it’s time to create top-level content ideas and plan these into a calendar. These should include content headers, key points to include, insights from keyword research and where the content sits in your buyer’s journey.

For best results, maintain momentum and ensure new and enhanced content is published consistently. 

Develop content 

Your plan can then be used to produce content that’s optimised, valuable and targeted to user intent. This might be product or service pages, blogs, resources, or guides – it all depends on your goals and the type of content that’ll resonate with your audiences.

You should ensure that the team has the resource available to develop and complete the planned content within agreed timelines.

Promote & distribute 

It’s not always enough to develop great content – it needs to be promoted and shared in the right places at the right times to reach your audience.

Promoting and distributing your content once it’s published ensures that the content isn’t lost on your site, and that you’re driving engagement from channels outside of your organic search efforts. You can link to a blog from a relevant social media post, promote resources via email marketing, or share product pages in digital PR.

The biggest thing to remember here is that the platforms you’re using to promote the content matter. If your audience doesn’t typically engage on a particular social media platform, for example, then it would be pointless to push your content on there.

Measure results 

Whatever the format of your content, it’s important to keep track of how well it performs. This can be measured using KPIs, OKRs, analytics tools, SEO performance metrics or a mixture of all of these.

You should measure the results at set intervals, such as monthly or quarterly, to gain a wider picture of your success.

Refine & improve 

Noticed that a particular type of content underperformed? Or spotted a spike in site traffic after publishing a new content campaign? Instead of moving on to the next thing straight away, reflect on insights from data, analysis and feedback to refine your content strategy and keep improving it. 

A great content strategy is essential for building and sustaining organic growth. But don’t forget – content, technical SEO and digital PR all work together as a powerful trio to help make it happen.