What Is Content Strategy? + How to Create Yours

A content strategy is a roadmap guiding all your content marketing efforts, from the individual pieces of content you create and publish to how you design content for different stages of the buyer’s journey. Include your content strategy in a more comprehensive marketing strategy, and it should align with your business goals.

A content strategy allows you to:

• Organise your library of existing content.

• Produce new content more efficiently.

• Attract target customers and engage them throughout every stage of the buyer’s journey.

• Educate and serve your audience more effectively.

• Become an authority in your niche.

• Spend your marketing budget more effectively.

• Coordinate your paid advertising and organic content.

Read on to create your content strategy and discover courses for improving your content marketing.

How to create a content strategy

The instructions below offer a step-by-step guide to developing your content strategy.   

1. Identify your content goals

Your content strategy will be most effective when based on clear, specific, outcomes-oriented goals to guide your team. Here are some examples to draw from:

• Generate 50 per cent more qualified leads in 90 days. 

• Double the number of social media followers in 60 days. 

• Get 100+ new email subscribers in 30 days.

2. Create content marketing personas

A content marketing persona is similar to a buyer persona in that it’s a fictional representation of a target customer that you can use to guide your content creation process. Developing personas can make reflecting on target customers’ needs easier and how your content specifics can meet them.  

Here, you’ll review (or begin) your market research and any buyer personas you’ve created and add details that address how your target customers consume content. Here are some questions to get you started:

• What are the demographics and psychographics of your target customers?

• How do target customers search for information, including internet searches or scrolling social media?

• What hashtags, search terms, and keywords do they use to narrow their searches?

• What sources of information do they trust?

• Which marketing channels do your target customers use the most, including social media, email, and offline channels?

• What types of content do they engage with the most? How do they engage?

• What actions do they take when engaging with content?

• What’s their preferred method of communication? 

Read more: Marketing Strategy: What It Is and How to Create One

3. Refine your SEO practices

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving your website and its content to increase your visibility when a potential customer searches related keywords on a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo!. SEO includes the strategic development and structuring of content, use of search queries or keywords, adjustments to your site’s source code, and more to ensure that your site ranks high in a search engine result page (SERP). 

Explore the following tactics to optimise your website, create compelling content, and generate more organic traffic:

• Use SEO tools like SEMRush or Google Keyword Planner to gather keyword and related data.

• Discover and analyse high-volume keywords your target audience would use to find products like yours that you’ll build content around. For example, if you have an online maths tutoring business, relevant keywords might include "online maths tutors" or "online maths tutoring." If you sell graphic t-shirts, relevant keywords might be "graphic t-shirts" or "women's graphic t-shirts."

• Discover searchers’ intent for each keyword. Are they searching for information in general information to learn more about a brand, find a specific website, or make a purchase? When you know searcher intent, you can design content to satisfy that intent and establish your content and brand as authoritative, trustworthy, and relevant.

• Review search engine result page details. What kinds of content do top-ranking articles produce? What do these content creators do well? What opportunities exist to create better content? 

4. Analyse competitors’ content and marketing strategy

Evaluating competitors’ content can help reveal industry standards and opportunities to create fresh content that fills gaps and serves customers.

• Where do competitors publish content, including websites, landing pages, social media platforms, and email?

• How do followers and subscribers engage with this content?

• What topic areas do competitors cover?

• What type of content do you see, including articles, videos, eBooks, reports, and short-form content?

• What pain points does this content solve?

• What topics and customer pain points can you cover that your competitors don’t?

• What fresh approaches can you take to generating content that exceeds industry standards?

4. Audit your content library

Along with examining competitors’ content and identifying gaps you can fill, review your library of published, drafted, or planned content for improvement opportunities.  Explore the following:

• What are your highest- and lowest-performing content pieces across platforms? 

• What new pieces of content can you develop from high-performing content?  

• How does your audience engage with content on your marketing channels? 

• Which pieces of your drafted or planned content could you prioritise, delay, or eliminate entirely based on your goals?

5. Design a content-focused customer journey

In this section, your goal is to create content to guide customers through each stage of the buyer’s journey. Important questions include:

• What do customers need at each stage?

• What are the touchpoints at each stage?

• What kinds of content will best serve customers at each touchpoint? 

• How will each content piece help you achieve your content goals?  

The table below offers a guide for laying out your content-focused customer journey.

6. Develop a process to generate content

Meet your goals and make your customer journey successful by generating content regularly. A streamlined process can make it easier to develop ideas and build content that serves target customers at all touchpoints over time. 

Here’s an example of a content creation process you could adopt:

• Track topics that are trending amongst your target customers.

• Discover relevant, high-volume keywords using your SEO tool.

• Brainstorm content topics with the customer’s journey in mind.

• Determine the types of content you’ll generate for each topic, including blog articles, eBooks, videos, podcasts, polls, quizzes, email campaigns, and more.

• Fill in a content calendar for each week, month, or quarter.

• Draft, review, and edit content.

• Publish and distribute content across channels.

7. Measure the success of your content

Once your content is published and your audience begins engaging with it, you’ll need a plan to measure how well it performs. Most websites, social media platforms, and email systems report metrics, like the number of views or clicks a piece of content gets and how many people subscribe or follow over a period. You can also set up a content management system (CMS), such as Salesforce or HubSpot, to streamline your efforts across all platforms. 

• Determine the metrics you’ll monitor on each platform or CMS.

• Decide how often you’ll take insights from these metrics, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

• Once you see how your content is performing, this will provide you with a basis for adjusting individual pieces or content or the strategy as a whole.

Content strategy key takeaways and best practices

Remember that creating a content strategy can improve your marketing efforts so you serve and educate your audience effectively, lead them through all stages of the buyer’s journey, and become an authority in your niche. 

Keep these best practices in mind: 

• Ensure all team members have a copy of the strategy and are trained to implement it in their respective roles.

• Update the strategy periodically to account for new products, customer segmentation, efforts to brand or rebrand your business, and other areas of business growth.

Improve your content marketing with Coursera

Online courses like the Content Strategy for Professionals Specialisation and the Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate can be great ways to learn about content marketing, build digital marketing skills, and explore career options. Some skills you can gain as you work through the programme include search engine optimisation, customer awareness, and marketing analytics.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)