What Is Content Strategy? A Practical Guide for Growing Brands
Content strategy is the plan behind how a brand creates, publishes, and maintains content to meet specific business goals and audience needs. It helps define at the outset who the content is for, what it should say, where it lives, who owns it, and how success is measured. Without this strategy, content becomes a backlog of disconnected posts instead of a system that supports growth.
What Does Content Strategy Include?
Content strategy is not the same thing as content marketing, but they can be intertwined. Content strategy includes all parts of content from the message on a homepage to the SEO/AEO/GEO-specific blogs to email newsletters to the ads a company is running.
A good content strategy takes into account all of the pieces that content touches:
Goals
Audience
Messaging
Formats
Channels
Workflow
KPIs and other measurements
Content strategy is like a web that encompasses a person’s or a brand’s online presence, which is what makes it so critical to be well-planned. It doesn’t stop after initial creation either. Once content is created, you need to have a plan for how it will continue to live online, how it will be part of a linking ecosystem and support other content, as well as whether it will be updated or retired in the future.
This long-term content strategy applies to every piece of content, not just blog posts. Product pages should be regularly revisited to ensure they’re up-to-date, help docs should address the latest FAQs, and any in-app text should be consistently revised.
Content Strategy vs. Content Marketing
Once you have a content strategy, you can execute the content marketing plan. Without a strategy, content marketing is just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. When you’re thinking about your strategy, ask yourself who your audience is and why you’re making this content for them.
Think of your content strategy like an ecosystem, and your content marketing is what populates that ecosystem. The population includes all areas of content, like blogs, newsletters, ads, social media, etc. Then the strategy determines how they interact with each other. Content strategy also includes non-marketing copy like the UX and UI copy (this is the copy on your webpage that guides your visitors. Even though it’s not part of the marketing funnel, it still needs to match the tone and style.
For example, if you saw a really funny ad that made you click to the site, but once you arrived, the color scheme was bland, and the language didn’t seem fun, you’re going to wonder if you’re even in the right place. This is all part of the content strategy ecosystem.
What Problems Does Content Strategy Solve?
Content strategy solves problems you may not know you have or may not know you’re setting yourself up for, like scattered topics that don’t connect to a business goal. If you have a website and business, you are working towards something; what is that? Let this be your guiding question as you create a content strategy.
Ensure that you have a consistent voice and messaging across your various channels and authors (if you have different people writing on the site). The strategy should also account for regular content audits. If you can do this annually, that’s great. This will help you spot content that is no longer aligned with your messaging.
For example, if your company started out as an ad agency then pivoted to produce online courses, your ad-focused content may not fit as well anymore, and, in fact, it may be confusing the search engines as to what you do. You want to make sure you are always writing with SEO and AI-generated answers in mind. Look at this blog, for example. Each header is a question, and the first line answers that question. This is the new way that search results are being presented to people.
Content strategy also solves the problem of who/what departments own which pieces of content. This prevents overlap and helps the entire team work better together.
The 5 Parts of a Useful Content Strategy
Here’s a basic content strategy framework to get you started:
Goals: Determine what your business goals are and how content can help you achieve them. This could be leads, retention, or product adoption.
Audience: Determine who your audience is so you know how to best appeal to them. If you’re looking to target the decision-makers at a company, you’ll present your offering differently than if you are targeting one-off conversions. Anticipate their needs and questions in your content.
Core topics and messaging: Determine a few core topics you want to center your content around. There’s always an opportunity to broaden this later, but at the beginning of your content strategy, you want to be laser-focused on what your goals are.
Formats and channels: Match your topics with their most relevant channel. Post longer pieces on your website or maybe even on LinkedIn, and post shorter pieces where you think they’ll meet the audience you’re trying to attract.
Workflow and governance: Decide who owns what part of the content strategy. This includes the production, editing, content calendar, strategy, etc.
You don’t need a huge, long, formal content strategy document to get started. Decide what your goals are and create a smaller one-page plan that allows you to start working towards them today.
How Do You Know Your Strategy Is Working?
You know your content strategy is working by measuring it against your goals. Always look back to the goals that you set for yourself. If you’re making progress towards them, then the strategy is working. It may be exciting to see that you’re getting a lot of website visits, but if you want to convert those visits to sales and you aren’t, then it’s time to revisit the strategy.
You can also use other metrics for validation, like what people are searching for on your site. This can help you discover any content gaps that you have and show where you can do better. Little cues like this help you understand your customer: why they’re visiting your site and what they’re looking for once they get there.
Some pieces of content strategy can work right away, like driving sales, while others might take some time, like building organic search results. Check in with your content performance quarterly.
