How to Develop a Content Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

Key takeaways

• High-quality content helps establish your business as an authority, builds trust with your audience, and attracts and retains customers.

• A content strategy provides direction, purpose, and structure to your content marketing efforts, making them more effective and aligned with overall business goals.

• By developing a content strategy, you'll transform content creation from a reactive, piecemeal approach to a proactive, strategic initiative that drives business growth.

Discover what a content strategy entails, why it's important, and the different steps to follow when you're interested in building one. Afterward, learn how to build a content marketing plan with the Adobe Marketing Specialist Professional Certificate.

What is a content strategy? 

For content strategists and content managers, a content strategy outlines a clear plan for developing and publishing content that supports business goals. It's essentially a roadmap for all of your content marketing efforts and can be incorporated into a more comprehensive marketing strategy.

Every piece of content tells a story, and together, a body of content tells an even bigger story about your company, brand, products, and values. Developing a strategy for your content ensures that you're telling a cohesive narrative every time you hit publish.

Typically, you'll want to design a content strategy that takes into consideration all stages of the customer journey through the marketing funnel: top, middle, and bottom. At each stage, customers have different needs and considerations, and ensuring your content addresses these will be crucial.

Why is a content strategy important?

There are many reasons why you should develop a content strategy. These include:

• Aligns content with business goals: A strategy ensures that all content creation efforts support overarching business objectives.

• Ensures consistency: It provides a framework for maintaining a consistent brand voice, message, and quality across all content.

• Maximizes resource efficiency: A well-planned strategy helps allocate resources effectively, avoiding wasted time and effort on irrelevant content.

• Targets the right audience: It helps identify and focus on the most valuable audience segments, ensuring content resonates with them.

• Supports the customer journey: A well-crafted strategy ensures content addresses all stages of the customer lifecycle.

• Improves content quality: A strategy often includes guidelines and standards that help maintain high-quality content production.

• Facilitates measurement and optimization: It establishes KPIs and metrics to track success, allowing for data-driven improvements over time.

• Coordinates cross-functional efforts: A strategy aligns different departments (marketing, sales, product) in their content-related activities.

• Fosters innovation: By mapping out content needs, it can reveal gaps and opportunities for new types of content or formats.

How to create a content strategy 

Review the following eight steps of the content strategy planning process:

1. Audit your current content.

Before creating new content, it's worth revisiting any content you already have. Consider what types of content you've published, how well your content has performed, and whether your existing content has historically contributed to your company's goals. Additionally, consider the opposite: whether any of your content has underperformed or moved you away from your goals.

By assessing your current content library, you can gather insights into the types of content that your target audience may like or dislike in the future, and use this knowledge to inform future production.

2. Define your content goals.

Think about what you'd like to achieve with your content. (At this stage, focus specifically on the "what.") It may help to structure these as SMART goals, which are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Some examples of content goals include:

• Generate 50 percent more qualified leads in 90 days. 

• Double the number of visits over the next quarter.  

• Reduce the bounce rate by 12 percent.

• Get 100 new email subscribers in 30 days.

3. Research your audience. 

How well do you know your audience? Gaining a better understanding of their needs, challenges, and goals, as well as their location and other key demographics, such as age, income, and education, can help you get a clearer picture that will inform the kind of content you eventually develop. Personalizing content is becoming increasingly important, which means tailoring emails, social media posts, blogs, and other communications to the specific audience you're trying to reach.

As you prepare your content strategy, it can also help to research how your target audience receives, consumes, and engages with content, as well as their preferred communication styles.

4. Choose your content deliverables.

Next, think about the types of content that you can reasonably create, your target audience is likely to react positively to, and that can help you reach your content goals. You may also consider different types of content for different stages of the customer journey. Some common types of content to consider include:

• Blog posts

• Social media posts

• Videos

• Podcasts

• Email newsletters

• Case studies

• White papers

• Templates

• E-books

5. Identify your topic authority.

Determine the content topics you'd like to address across your various content types. Here, consider topics at the intersection of your unique expertise and your target audience's interests, values, or needs. You may also brainstorm ways to further conversations around content areas that have historically performed well for you or that are performing well for your direct business competitors.

6. Make content and establish a process.

Building a high-performing content strategy requires careful consideration of your team composition, processes, and tools. Start by assembling a diverse, skilled content team aligned with your goals and execution plan. This may include content creators for visual content, expert writers for in-depth articles, or subject matter specialists for technical pieces.

Next, develop a streamlined, repeatable content creation process. This systematic approach will not only facilitate consistent idea generation but also enable the production of cohesive, audience-centric content that advances your strategic objectives.

Lastly, consider the tools you might need as you develop and publish your content. Tools may include a content management system (CMS), social listening tools, or editing software.

7. Measure the success of your content strategy.

Use marketing analytics tools to track the performance of your content, allowing you to refine your strategy as data reveals more insights into the story. Many websites, social media platforms, and email systems report metrics, such as the number of views or clicks a piece of content receives and the number of people subscribing or following over a specified period. If you see that an email's open rate declines, you'll likely need to revisit your strategy and refine the content itself.

Determine the metrics that are most relevant to your content goals, then decide on the best way to track those metrics over time. Once you begin to see how your content is performing, this will provide you with a basis for adjusting individual pieces of content or the strategy as a whole. 

8. Optimize your content.

A robust content strategy extends beyond publishing different content types across marketing channels. It demands a dynamic, data-driven approach to content optimization. Ensuring that you apply the insights gained from the previous step and optimize your content to enhance your strategy is crucial to success.

This is particularly crucial for SEO-driven content, like blogs and articles, where search algorithms and user behaviors are constantly evolving. Strategic content optimization involves adapting to these changes, refining your keyword strategy, updating information, and enhancing user experience. Moreover, it requires a platform-specific approach, tailoring content to the unique attributes and audience expectations of each channel. By incorporating a systematic optimization process into your strategy, you transform your content from static assets into agile, evolving resources.

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