One of the best ways to build trust and connection with customers is through your content strategy.
“Content is a free tool that allows you to get brand awareness and traffic,” says Anaita Sakar, cofounder of Hero Packaging. “Especially when you’re starting out as a bootstrapped business, it is critical that you are just pumping out content, whether it’s educational or product-based. Because when you are creating more content, it builds up your credibility and therefore the search engines will actually point to your website.”
A carefully planned content strategy allows you to demonstrate your brand’s unique point of view and appealing products—which ultimately helps bring in more (and better) customers.
What is content strategy?
A content strategy is the practice of planning marketing content—which can include blog posts, emails, posts on social media platforms, videos, and podcasts—that speaks to your audience and serves your business goals.
A successful content strategy is the framework that helps you plan what kind of information you publish—and to whom. If your content isn’t backed by strategy, it can become busywork; a solid strategy should deliver return on investment (ROI).
How to develop a content strategy
- Choose your template
- Define your goals
- Research your target audience
- Audit your existing content
- Assess the competition
- Decide what types of content you’ll create
- Create engaging content
- Build an editorial calendar
- Measure content effectiveness
1. Choose your template
You don’t necessarily need a content strategy template to create your own content marketing strategy, but a good template will make the process easier. The free content strategy template linked in this article includes everything you need to get started.
2. Define your goals
Select concrete goals for your content strategy, and choose the KPIs you will use to measure success. Think about what kind of content would help you reach these objectives.
Examples of content marketing goals include:
- Increasing brand awareness by tripling your social media following within six months
- Increasing customer acquisition by growing your conversion rate from 2% to 4% in six months
- Increasing brand authority by growing organic traffic (visits from unpaid search results) to your landing pages by 20% in a year
3. Research your target audience
Study your target demographic’s interests and preferred content channels so you can create content that will appeal to them on platforms they use. Two ways to find your audience include:
1. Market research. Use market research tools on consumer behavior and trends, as well as conduct your own primary research through surveys, customer interviews, and reading customer feedback. This legwork can help you understand your target audience, their buying preferences, preferred social media channels, and the way they consume content.
2. Using web analytics. Web analytics will tell you not only who’s visiting your site, but also how much time they spend there, which pages they visit, and how they find your site.
As you move through this process, consider creating a buyer persona to help you understand how to create content that will resonate with your audience. Give your persona a name, occupation, age, hobbies, geographic location, income, and aspirations, and list the types of content they consume. Use your buyer persona as a guide to shape your content marketing efforts.
4. Audit your existing content
If you have already created content, audit your existing assets. Ask yourself:
- Is my current content still relevant?
- Will my planned content be a significant departure from my existing content?
This may be the time to phase out some of the old stuff. Use social media analytics tools and Google Analytics to see what content is most popular and what falls flat. Consider ending production of content that doesn’t resonate with your audience or that diverges from your goals.
5. Assess the competition
Do a competitive analysis so you can compare and measure the success of similar companies’ content strategies. Create a list of your direct and indirect competitors, then visit competitor sites and go through their customer experience—identifying content you like and dislike. Subscribe to their newsletters, read their blog posts, follow them on social media. Check out what types of content they post—and how often.
If you like their content approach, consider what you could do better or differently. Use SEO tools to see which keywords drive traffic to competitors’ sites. This can help you determine which keywords are worth building content around to help your audience find you.
6. Decide what types of content you’ll create
Understanding how your target audience engages with content will help guide your content decisions. Refer to the sales funnel, which is the process by which prospective customers become aware of your brand, consider your products, and eventually make a purchase.
Producing different types of content aligned with each stage of the funnel can help your target audience arrive at the sale. Here’s what that might look like:
Awareness
At this stage, you’re introducing your brand. Create educational content in the form of articles, blog posts, ebooks, explainer videos, newsletters, and social media posts. You’re not pitching a product—you’re only trying to pique your audience’s curiosity.
Charlotte Palermino, cofounder of skin care company Dieux, credits brand storytelling with Dieux’s success on social media. “For Dieux, it’s always about telling stories and getting really geeked out on different parts of the story of how we got to where we are,” Charlotte says on Shopify Masters. “I mean, one of our most viral videos right now is just talking about packaging. It’s like a five-minute video about plastic and aluminum and it’s doing really well, and that’s because it’s about storytelling.”
Consideration
Here, you’re nurturing the relationship with your audience, shifting into a combination of product marketing and helpful information that educates them about areas where you can claim a competitive advantage. This might look like how-to articles that feature your product, product reviews, and case studies.
For example, Fellow, which makes electric kettles and other coffee-making tools, has a collection of brewing how-tos on its website. You don’t need to own any of Fellow’s products to find the guides useful, but these educational materials feature plenty of product images. If someone is considering buying a new coffee grinder or kettle, the guides nudge them toward Fellow’s versions of those products.
Purchase
Your audience has done its research and is ready to buy. This is where you can focus on why your product or service is better than the others using buyers’ guides, product videos, and user-generated content.
Post-purchase
In the post-purchase phase, your customer may have questions about how to use your product. Answering these questions with high-quality content can encourage customer loyalty.
For example, bike and outdoor gear company Retrospec’s guide center serves as both an FAQ page and educational blog. “If they are purchasing the product directly online, they probably have questions on how to make sure they fine-tune the bike specifically to how they want to ride it,” Retrospec founder Ely Khakshouri says on Shopify Masters.
The guides include information on how to set up your new bike, plus specific articles about charging electric bikes, repairing flat tires, performing a tune-up, and more. “We’re using the guide center as a resource to educate our customers and make sure the post-purchase experience is one that’s pleasant,” Ely says.
7. Create engaging content
In the early stages of your business, you may create your own content. For example, Charlotte Palermino of Dieux leveraged her prior experience at Snapchat to create short-form video content.
As you scale up, you might have a dedicated team member tasked with creating content, or hire a freelancer or content agency to execute it. If you’re planning to publish a series of articles, shoot video, or run a full social media campaign, you might want to add creators that specialize in social media or writing.
8. Build an editorial calendar
Create a content calendar to ensure your content has a regular cadence and is cohesive across channels. Creating a system to publish content on a regular, predictable schedule reinforces to your audience that you’re a trusted source for information.
9. Measure content effectiveness
Evaluate how well your content is performing with your audience by using tools like Google Analytics, email marketing software, social media analytics tools, and other analytics tools to track KPIs like click-through rate, website traffic, social media reach and engagement, mobile traffic leads and conversion rates, and search rankings. Depending on your results, you may make tweaks or change your strategy over time.
Questions your content strategy should answer
- What do you want the content to do for the business?
- Who is the content for?
- What will your content do for your customers?
- What channels will you use?
- How will the content reflect your brand?
There is no single way to create a content strategy, since it’s dependent on your target audience. Still, you can ask the following five questions to help create the framework for your content strategy:
1. What do you want the content to do for the business?
Content can serve a number of purposes for a business, and it’s important to get clear on your objectives. Ask yourself: What are the business goals associated with our content efforts? What key performance indicators (KPIs) will we use to assess success? Common goals and metrics include:
- Increase brand awareness, measured in impressions, traffic, and brand recognition surveys
- Drive customer acquisition, measured in sales and conversion rate
- Drive engagement, measured in email open rates, clicks, and time on page
- Increase customer retention, measured in customer lifetime value and repeat purchases
2. Who is the content for?
Identifying your ideal customer will help you understand how to communicate with them and what value your content can bring them. Ask yourself:
- What are my target audience groups?
- What needs or challenges do they have that I could fulfill with good content?
- What content formats are most likely to connect with them?
- Where do they consume content?
Answering these questions will help inform the next few aspects of the framework.
3. What will your content do for your customers?
Once you understand your audience and their needs, desires, and pain points, you can set out to solve those with content. Be clear about how your content will deliver value. For instance, if you sell fishing flies to novice fishing enthusiasts, your content might be informative—like a series of articles on choosing bait, casting techniques, and types of reels.
4. What channels will you use?
Content is most effective when it reaches audiences where they are—meaning they can discover it on channels where they already consume content. For business-to-business (B2B) companies, that might be on LinkedIn; for a Gen Z skin care brand, it might be on TikTok. Or, you might try to reach your audience when they’re searching on Google with paid search ads or a blog post designed for search engine optimization (SEO).
5. How will the content reflect your brand?
Does your content have a point of view? A distinct brand voice enables a company to reach its target audience and build connections and community. Consistent messaging in your brand voice will help you speak to your target demographic in language that resonates.
Content Strategy FAQ
How often should you update your content strategy?
You should update your content strategy when it no longer serves your goals. Monitor the results of your content marketing efforts and whether it delivers on your KPIs, and update your strategy if it’s not doing what you need.
What is the role of audience analysis in content strategy?
Understanding your audience will help you know what kind of content they interact with and what platforms they engage with regularly, as well as what their pain points are, and how you can help solve them.
How is content strategy different from content tactics?
Content strategy focuses on achieving big-picture goals, while content tactics are the practical methods you use to achieve those goals. Your content strategy is the larger framework that determines what kind of content you create, your target audience, and your goals.
What are the most common mistakes to avoid when creating a content strategy?
The most common mistakes include erratic publishing schedules and not measuring your content’s performance. If you’re not publishing the right type of content for your target audience when they want it, you risk sacrificing customer loyalty.
