What are the key components of a content marketing strategy?

Content marketing is the strategic creation of valuable, relevant content that serves the purpose of engaging your target audience to build relationships and credibility. It supports a company’s overarching marketing strategy of reaching new customers to promote its products and services. The right content educates your prospects and clients, as digital marketing agency co-founder Christian Anderson, discussed in his Rolling Stones article. As he writes, “Businesses that master the art of content marketing are better positioned to not only attract more clients but also thrive in the evolving digital landscape.”

Anderson is one of many marketing leaders that understands the power of content marketing. It unlocks growth opportunities and when combined with journalistic techniques, it can develop the larger story that a company wants to tell. At its heart, content creation is a marketing strategy – an approach to reaching customers. However, the content strategy is a separate arm; it delves deeper into the creation and publication process. It is the top-level plan for managing and distributing content to ensure that it gets results, which includes several different elements, as explored below:

Business goals

The first step of any content marketing strategy is outlining clearly stated goals. This is a crucial stage because it provides a roadmap and the foundation for everything that follows in your strategy. Whether your goals are building brand awareness, increasing organic traffic, or growing an email list, they need to be specific, measurable, and achievable. It’s perfectly acceptable to have multiple different goals, but the objective you decide on will determine the pieces of content you create. For example, the goal of my personal website is to build authority on the topic of content marketing. It’s a simple goal and one that will shape the direction for all the articles that I plan to write on this site. Overall, it’s better to have one or two goals than several, as this will enable you to create specialised content that has a clear focus and drives more growth and engagement.

Competitive research

Effective competitive research is the key to understanding your business’ standing in the market, your target audience, and their pain points. There are essentially two main parts of competitive research. The first is looking at major competitors’ content strategies to gain insights into their marketing tactics. This can help you identify gaps in your own content and potential opportunities where you can outperform the competition.

Secondly, competitive research helps you gain valuable insights into your target audiences’ interests and trending topics. Every piece of content you create should be backed by data and research to justify it – and there are several tools to find this information. With tools like Advanced Web Rankings, Semrush, Google Trends and Answer the Public, you can get a better understanding of your audience and the type of content and keywords they’re searching for. In this process, you’ll be able to find out things like keyword volume, which is the average number of times a keyword is searched for in a particular time frame. As a result, you’ll be able to create a data-driven content strategy that’s specifically targeted to your audience’s needs and preferences.

Targeted Topics

Once you’ve outlined your goals and performed competitive research, you can begin compiling topic ideas that will attract and engage your audience. The best way to do this is to identify which topics are most important and relevant to your business, and how they fit into your company’s goals. Then, you can start building topic clusters, which are grouped topics and pages that cover a particular subject. Topic clusters are beneficial for SEO because they allow for greater keyword focus, so they can help your content rank more successfully in search engines. Each cluster topic relates to the central theme and set of keywords, making your content much more relevant and cohesive.

But it’s important to note that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel when you’re creating new topics. There’s a lot of value in using existing content, like blog posts and videos, and repurposing them into an engaging piece of social media content, or a long-form report. Tapping into existing resources for ideas, and being creative, will help you solve any challenges along the way when developing your content strategy.

Content calendar

A content calendar has a range of benefits, from daily planning to helping maintain consistency – and it’s one of the most important components of a successful content strategy. With a detailed plan, you’ll be able to keep your content organised and strategic. Using a content calendar improves efficiency because it enables you to monitor several different factors, such as publication date, content type, author, topic, etc. Content planning gives you a broader perspective of the content marketing process and strategy, leaving you plenty of time to generate new ideas. A content calendar reinforces the goals of your business and serves as a framework for what you plan to create and promote across all marketing channels.

Distribution channels

Multi-channel marketing has become a standard practice. It refers to promoting and distributing content to audiences on a variety of channels. The key is identifying which channels are the most popular and relevant among the target audience. For example, a B2B content strategy should include LinkedIn and email as primary channels. Unlike consumer marketing which targets individual customers, B2B is often much more specific as it focuses on reaching stakeholders within a business, such as CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers). That’s why LinkedIn and email campaigns are effective modes of content distribution because you’ll be able to target a niche audience, with tailored messaging.

There are many opportunities to promote the content you’ve created so that it achieves quality engagement. Using Google display ads, for instance, is one of the most effective content promotion methods. Display ads can appear as text ads or digital banners that appear on distinct sections on websites, so it’s an excellent way to showcase valuable content. There are also channels such as social media, paid search ads and native advertising, all of which are effective distribution channels that can be used in a content strategy.

Measurement and reporting

Measuring and reporting on the performance of your content marketing is crucial. No matter how creative and engaging your content is, the asset will be judged on the impact it has on your business, so using data is important for understanding this. Content marketing metrics can show how well your content is performing in organic search, the number of total views, keyword rankings, as well as impressions and traffic sources.

But you’ll want to measure for priority goals. In my experience, it’s better to focus on the metrics that are relevant to what you’re trying to achieve with your content strategy. Whether you’re looking to attract your target audience, grow your subscribers or rank on the first page of Google, you need to understand your company’s priorities so can analyse the most valuable metrics. Regardless, monitoring and reporting on the metrics helps you make better decisions for the direction of your content strategy. Optimisation and measurement should be an ongoing activity throughout this process. All of the data surrounding your content’s performance can be used to modify your strategy over time and help reach your goals.

The power of content strategy

Quality content marketing depends on a data-driven, cohesive strategy which covers the production itself, and where and how it will be promoted. The planning, idea generation and execution, involving many writers and subject matter experts, is essential for creating excellent content that meets those all-important KPIs. A successful content marketing strategy delivers the information that your customers need across channels and reinforces your company’s brand identity and mission.