How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy In 4 Steps + Template

Over the years, content marketing has become an effective marketing strategy for growing a business. However, CMI’s 13th Annual B2B content marketing study reveals that only 40% of marketers take the time to document their content marketing strategy. 

Without a well-documented strategy, your content marketing efforts will struggle to be effective. If you have problems creating and documenting a content marketing strategy because it seems too complicated, this guide is for you. 

In this post, we will show you how to create a simple yet powerful content marketing strategy that drives positive business results.

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a blueprint for how you will use content to achieve your business goals. It is the overarching vision that guides the creation and distribution of helpful content to attract, engage and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately influence their actions. 

At its core, your content marketing strategy should answer four critical questions: 

• “why are you creating content”? 
• “who are you creating content for”? 
• “what type of content are you going to create”? 
• “where will you distribute the content”?

Instead of directly pitching your business, answering these questions gives you a plan for producing valuable, relevant content that drives profitable customer actions for your business. 

For instance, if you’re creating a content marketing strategy for a website that sells coffee equipment

• “Why” might be to increase sales on your website by a certain percentage
• “Who” might be home baristas looking to experiment with different coffee drinks and brewing techniques
• “What” might be blog posts covering coffee machine maintenance or videos demonstrating brewing techniques
• “Where” might be on YouTube, social media or your website—to attract your audience via organic search

Why It’s Important to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

The ultimate benefit of creating a well-defined content marketing strategy is that it makes your content marketing efforts more successful. 

Without a strategy, your content operation will appear haphazard. A content marketing strategy aligns your entire marketing team with the goals and objectives of the business. This alignment enables you to produce content that consistently supports those aims.

In addition, a content marketing strategy also helps:

1. Guide content creation and distribution: It is a roadmap for driving your content engine. You’ll know the kind of content formats to produce and the most effective channels for distributing them. This way, you will not waste resources on work that is not valuable to your business. 

2. Optimize your resources and get support: Having a strategy enables you to allocate your resources adequately. With it, you’ll know early on the initiatives that’ll drive the most return on investment and adequately direct your time, budget and human resources. A strategy also helps you communicate the value of content marketing to management and stakeholders and get their support.

3. Build brand authority and trust: When you consistently produce and distribute helpful content, you establish a strong, lasting presence in your industry, earn mindshare, and position your business as a trusted source of information. This trust is key to long-term customer loyalty.

What a Content Marketing Strategy Should Look Like

The first thing your content marketing strategy should be is documented. The CMI Research shows that 64% of marketers experiencing the most success with content marketing have a documented strategy. 

Merely having a plan in your head is not enough. Documenting it ensures you constantly refer back to it and increases your chances of success. 

Your strategy should also be simple and unique to your business. Just as the needs of each customer and business differ, your plan for using content to reconcile business goals with customer needs should be unique. And the process of creating this strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. 

In our experience, developing a solid content strategy comes down to answering the four critical questions we outlined at the beginning of this article—“why, who, what, where.” In the next section, we’ll show you how to answer these questions strategically and create a winning content marketing strategy. 

But before that, note: A content marketing strategy is different from a content strategy and content plan. 

While a content marketing strategy focuses on WHY your organization is creating content and how it aligns with your overall goals, a content strategy builds on the marketing strategy to detail how you’ll develop specific content pieces and achieve your goals. The content plan itself is more tactical. It translates the content strategy into actionable tasks and outlines the steps for creating individual content pieces. 

With that out of the way, here’s a simple content marketing strategy template you can complete as you read through the next section.

Our content marketing strategy template Download Google spreadsheet

Let’s get started.

How To Create a Content Marketing Strategy

1. Set Your Goal (Why Are You Creating Content?)

Your goal should answer the question: 

What do you want to achieve with content?

Your answer will shape every other aspect of your strategy and its execution, so make sure the goal is clear. 

The overall essence of content marketing is to drive profitable customer action. But you can break this into more specific, measurable objectives that are easy to track. For instance, continuing the coffee website example above, specific goals could be:

• Improve product sales by 50% over the next year 
• Increase website visits from organic search by 20% over the next six months
• Increase average order value by 10% through product recommendation content 

Make sure to clarify your why. If you have trouble narrowing down broad goals, you can use the SMART framework as a guide.

2. Understand Your Audience (Who Are You Creating Content For?)

The next step is figuring out the exact audience you want to reach. This step is critical because no matter how intense your content production effort is, it’ll be worthless if it doesn’t resonate with the right audience.

If your product serves a broad audience and you’re unsure who to target, there’s a way to figure that out. Start by identifying specific audience segments using the InLinks Audience Finder Tool. Here’s how: 

1. Go to the InLinks audience finder tool.
2. Enter a keyword related to your product or service, such as “coffee equipment,” select your country and hit GO.

3. Review the potential audience segments for your keyword.

For instance, your target audience for a website selling coffee equipment isn’t coffee enthusiasts. That’s too broad. Instead, your audience segment is home or professional baristas in the restaurant and hospitality industry who use different kinds of coffee equipment. Why? Because they’re more likely to buy your product. 

To understand this audience, you need to think about things like:

• Their demographics—not just age, gender or location but more important details like skill level, priorities and budgets.
• Their biggest challenges and interests with coffee equipment.
• Their content needs and information sources. 

At this point, creating a buyer persona—a fictional representation of your ideal buyer—can help you nail down the details.

3. Choose Your Content Format (What Kind of Content Are You Creating?)

Once you’ve determined your goals and target audience, the next step is to choose the content format or type you’ll use.

Popular types of content are blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, and ebooks. Lean on the insight from your audience research and buyer persona to figure out the format that’ll help you achieve your goal. 

For example, if our goal for the coffee site targeting home baristas is to increase sales by 50%, we’ll focus on creating blog posts and videos. This way, we can target comparison post ideas or review posts that people looking to buy coffee equipment are searching for.

At this point, you might want to start searching for content ideas. But do not. The content marketing strategy only covers the big picture of what you need to achieve with content, not every detail. When you complete your strategy and get a clear idea of what you’re working towards, you can dive deeper into content planning. 

4. Find Out Where Your Audience Hangs Out Online (Where Will You Distribute Content?)

Your strategy will only succeed if customers see and engage with your content. For that to happen, you need to bring the content to the places they hang out online. The popular places you can publish content include:

• Your website’s blog, which you can promote via SEO
• YouTube
• Social channels, e.g. Tiktok, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook
• Online communities, e.g., Reddit
• Podcasts

The insights from your audience research will guide you in figuring out the best channel for your business. However, a 2019 report from Brightedge shows that 53% of all website traffic comes from organic searches. This means publishing content on your blog and promoting it via SEO will be an excellent strategy for almost every business.

In addition to that, you can also find distribution channels by:

1. Conducting surveys: Use pools and surveys to ask your target audience where they go for content. There are lots of survey companies that can do this for you.
2. Social listening: Use social listening tools to track conversations and brand mentions to discover where your audience discusses relevant topics.

Put Your Content Marketing Strategy Together

You’ve just seen how to create a simple content marketing strategy that clarifies why and what you’re doing with content. Now, it’s time to get into planning, and we’ve written a post on creating a content strategy for SEO to guide you on your next step.