What Are the Elements of a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
What does success in content marketing look like? Sure, a big spike in traffic or a well-timed social post that goes viral seems fantastic—until executives call a meeting to ask how content marketing as a whole is driving the business. That’s when hard numbers (and dollar figures) start to matter.
The most powerful action you can take to ensure your content marketing makes a measurable impact—one that delivers lasting ROI for your company and creates a far better experience for your audiences—is to create a comprehensive content marketing strategy that defines your goals and the specific path you’ll need to take to achieve them.
Developing these strategies is something I’m passionate about: I’ve been creating and updating them for years with our clients at Masthead. I want to walk you through some of the questions I hear most often from marketers who are considering a content strategy initiative, and get into the nitty gritty of what’s required to bring a fully fleshed out strategy to life.
In this article, I’ll cover the questions you might be asking yourself as you prepare to put together a content strategy—along with the specific steps you should take to build one.
What is the Purpose of a Content Marketing Strategy?
A content strategy is designed to help you:
Define the audience(s) who may be interested in and influenced by your content
Craft the voice and tone that should be used when creating content for your brand
Set specific measurable goals and KPIs that will help you determine if your content efforts are working
Assess your current content to determine which already published pieces should be optimized—which new assets need to be created.
Find opportunities to improve the content development process
Ensure your content development needs align with the resources and budget you have—or need to request
Who Needs a Content Marketing Strategy?
The short answer is: Any brand who doesn’t have one in place already—or hasn’t updated theirs within the past three years. So much is changing so quickly in the content marketing space (thanks, AI!) that you may even need to update yours even sooner.
Some brand marketers already know they want or even need a content strategy. In some cases, different departments at a company have been producing content for years without any kind of a plan in place, and now it’s the marketer’s job to make sense of it all—and make it all perform better than ever.
Other times, a brand may have little to no content created, and top brass is eager to get assets live—like, now. When this happens, marketers can feel a lot of pressure to skip the step of creating a strategy and dive immediately into content production. They want to show executives that they’re producing tangible results quickly—even if they have no plan in place for what to create.
While I definitely understand that urgency (the boss wants what the boss wants!) skipping this step ultimately makes it harder for marketers to develop content that aligns with their brand’s marketing objectives and performs reliably. That means it will also be tougher to demonstrate measurable ROI and maintain (or grow) the content marketing line item come budgeting season.
How Long Does It Take to Put Together a Content Strategy?
It typically takes anywhere from 6 weeks to 12 weeks to develop a content strategy, depending on the depth of your current site content. If you’re including multiple channels and content formats (e.g., social, email, B2B assets, etc) you’re looking at the upper end of that timeframe or potentially even longer.
This schedule applies if you’re working with an external resource; working with an exclusively in-house team can take significantly longer. More on this below.
Who Should Work on a Content Strategy?
If they’re willing to take part, these are the potential in-house stakeholders who should be involved in the creation of your content marketing strategy:
Content and marketing department leaders and decision-makers
Executives who are versed in the broader business goals outside of marketing
Content operations team members who work directly on or publish the content. They can usually offer insights into the current process (and challenges) of bringing content to life at an organization
Representatives from other relevant departments (e.g., customer service, HR) who need content to achieve specific goals
I also recommend tapping a trusted external resource, like a content marketing agency to develop the strategy—rather than relying solely on full-time staffers.
That’s because developing a content strategy is a time and labor intensive project. Even if you have a dedicated in-house team, their professional duties and unexpected “fires” can easily cause meetings and deadlines to get pushed.
Additionally, an outside agency has typically developed best practices (learned from working across clients, verticals and many similar projects) that enable them to quickly overcome obstacles and streamline the process of developing a content strategy.
Which Content Channels Are Included in a Content Strategy?
Early in your planning process, you’ll determine which content channels your brand or organization wants to leverage—and which should be addressed within your content strategy. If you’re working with an agency, you’ll want to establish the included channels prior to the start of the work, as it will influence the overall scope of the project.
Here are some of the channels you may choose to include in one cross-platform content strategy:
Company Website and Blog: This can include all website copy, landing pages, blog articles, and product description pages (PDPs)
Email: This includes editorial-style and promotional newsletters: for B2B brands, it may also include sequences and other prospect nurturing campaigns
Social Media: You know the biggies—Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tiktok (for now, at least!)—but depending on your target market you may also explore Quora, Whatsapp and emerging social platforms.
Video: Content posted to platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo
Thought Leadership: That’s content written (or ghostwritten) on behalf of brand leaders and published or broadcast via media websites (Forbes, Inc, etc.), social media channels, industry publications, guest blogs, podcasts, or speaking engagement
Podcasts
Live Event Content: This can include webinars, keynotes, firesides, panel discussions and breakout session talk tracks
Once you’ve set the scope—it’s time to dive in the strategy itself. In the next section, we’ll explore the steps you need to take to put together a comprehensive content marketing strategy.
Step 1: Provide the Brand Framework
Your content strategy is designed to be read and used by everyone who touches content within your organization, and potentially, outside contributors. Each reader may have different levels of familiarity with your company and what you’re hoping to achieve with content.
That’s why it’s important to kick off your strategy by defining who you are as a brand, the people you want to reach, and how you’ll measure success. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 65 percent of the most successful content marketers have a documented strategy.
Conduct Stakeholder Interviews
There are probably at least a few—if not several—people within your company who are invested in the creation and success of your content. Your strategy stands a much greater chance of success in the long run if you take the time to really listen to these contributors, influencers, and leaders.
Set up a half hour to an hour with key content stakeholders: This group may include company executives, marketing leaders, representatives from key departments (like sales and customer service) and individuals who work daily on content development.
Ask them about how the content your team creates impacts their job function, what type of content they would like to see in the future, and any operational challenges they have working with the content team.
You may even want to ask them about overall business challenges they face—sometimes seemingly unrelated tidbits may inspire content that services other departments.. You’ll gain invaluable insights into the needs, expectations, and goals of everyone involved—and can anticipate (and overcome) challenges before they arise.
Identify Your Goals and KPIs
Setting goals for your content program is all about clarity and accountability: Clear benchmarks help your team members understand where to direct their efforts and what success actually looks like.
Whether you’re focusing on enhancing brand awareness, driving website traffic, or nurturing leads—or all three—it's important to establish goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
KPI—or key performance indicators—provide a way to measure progress and determine what's working (and what's not) so you can make adjustments as needed. Depending on the channels you decide to include in your strategy, here are some of the types of goals and related KPIs you may want to include:
Website and Blog Metrics: The biggies include pageviews, unique visitors, sessions, bounce rate and traffic from all sources (particularly organic traffic).
Search Engine Rankings: Monitor your content's performance in search engine results pages (SERPs) and measure boosts in keyword rankings.
Social Growth & Engagement Metrics This includes likes, shares, and comments across platforms
Email Metrics: Track subscriber growth, open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates for your email campaigns to gauge the effectiveness of your design and messaging.
Conversion Rates: Track the percentage of visitors who take desired actions, such as completing a form, making a purchase, or subscribing to a newsletter.
Lead Generation: How effective is your content in capturing and nurturing leads through sign-ups, downloads, or inquiries?
Return on Investment (ROI): Calculate the financial return generated by your content marketing efforts compared to the costs incurred.
Brand Mentions and Sentiment: Monitor brand mentions and sentiment across social media and online platforms to gauge brand perception and sentiment.
Customer Retention and Loyalty: Measure customer retention rates and loyalty metrics to assess the impact of your content on customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Outside of these, you should include any metrics that are specific to your company’s priorities. For example, you might consider webinar signups and attendance to be a top KPI, as these events produce great warm leads for your brand. Whatever the goal, make sure you have a clear and specific KPI to go along with it.
Establish Your Target Audiences
It’s very likely you have multiple audiences that you’re trying to reach with your content. Those might include:
Prospective customers (this could include more than one group)
Current customers
Brand advocates/influencers
Investors
Employees
Candidates
Determine which groups you’ll be targeting within this content strategy and create audience profiles for each. To get that information, leverage existing audience research commissioned by your company.
If you don’t already have that information, take a look at any demographic data and consumer insights you have available to you to create a persona for each audience type that you’re trying to reach. You may want to include potential interest and pain points that could influence the type of content you create.
Step 2: Take Advantage of Existing Content
Now that you’ve established your goals and KPIs, it’s time to take a closer look at the content your brand has already produced and whether it’s actually performing (chances are, it could be doing a lot more for you!)
By leveraging and optimizing existing content assets—and pairing them with “net new” pieces—you can maximize your resources and hit your content goals more quickly.
Perform an Audit of Your Current Content Assets & Process
At many organizations content has been produced for years on end, by a lot of different people, without any kind of a roadmap or consistent plan in place. As a result, there’s often a lot of duplication, outdated references and links, and content that just doesn’t perform anymore (or it never really did to begin with).
If that sounds familiar, it doesn’t mean you should ignore or scrap all of that past work as you’re preparing for the future of your content creation.
In fact, just the opposite: The best course of action is to perform a content audit as part of your larger content strategy. Auditing and updating your content can bring it back to life in a way that will make it align with your current goals—and potentially perform better than it ever has in the past.
When performing website-focused content audit, your content strategist or an SEO specialist team member will:
Use a tool like SEMRush or Screaming Frog to examine all of the content that exists on your site and how it’s currently performing.
Analyze the best performing assets in greater depth to establish commonalities, voice and tone, and other reasons these pieces might be resonating with the audience
Examine topical areas that are important to business—but are currently underperforming—to figure out what’s standing in the way of success
Review competitors’ content marketing to identify new opportunities and position your current content offerings in the marketplace
Evaluate old content to determine which pieces should be optimized and reused or removed and redirected to another piece of content.
If you’re including other channels in your content in your strategy (email, social, etc) your strategist should examine each of these channels independently—and holistically as part of your overarching content development efforts.
Address Technical Issues
As part of your strategic website audit, conduct a deep dive of your site’s technical infrastructure to identify and address any roadblocks that may be standing in the way of performance and search engine visibility.
Common technical issues include slow page load times, broken links, duplicate content, and crawl errors. Utilize tools like Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights to pinpoint areas for improvement and implement strategies to enhance site speed, mobile responsiveness, and overall user experience.
Step 3: Identify Content Opportunities and Recommendations
After completing the audit, you should gain a clearer understanding of your current content landscape, performance metrics, and areas for improvement. This insight forms the foundation for identifying opportunities and making strategic recommendations tailored to your brand's goals.
Make Strategic Recommendations
This portion of the strategy will be specific to your content goals, but may include recommendations for:
Cadence for Net New Content Creation: Outline the frequency, format, and length of new content to ensure a balanced and engaging mix across all channels.
SEO and Keyword Optimization: Provide guidance on optimizing all new content for search engines by conducting research on search intent, evaluating what each searcher sees on the search engine result page (SERP), optimizing meta tags and descriptions, and enhancing your content’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, and trust).
Optimization Priorities: Call out which published assets you should update first in order to maximize search value—and provide more value to your customers. You may also spell out how to optimize existing content to meet Google's standards for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
Branded Content Types and Franchises: Explore ideas for repeatable, recognizable content formats such as blog series, video tutorials, or case studies. These assets can streamline content production and foster audience loyalty and engagement.
Multimedia Content: Determine which multimedia formats—such as infographics, videos, podcasts, or interactive quizzes—you should use to expand upon your written articles. (Search engines are increasingly favoring these formats and displaying them more prominently on SERPs).
Content Distribution Strategy: Spell out the plan for repurposing, promoting and and distributing your content across various channels (social, email, content syndication networks, paid advertising, influencer partnership, etc). You can also explore how non-traditional sources of content, such as executive keynotes, can be turned into content across a variety of channels.
Performance Measurement and Reporting: Define metrics and KPIs for measuring the success of your content strategy, such as traffic growth, engagement rates, conversion rates, and ROI. Establish regular reporting intervals to track progress and make data-driven decisions.
Define Voice and Tone
Now more than ever, it’s essential to establish your own unique voice and tone as a brand. That’s because AI has made it all too easy to create very long form, cliché-filled content that sounds, frankly, like it was created by a robot.
As the content glut expands, one of the best ways to build both engagement and trust—is to create a voice that’s consistent, expressive, and human.
In that way, your brand’s voice is a lot like a fingerprint or a personality: it’s completely unique. It can also be the defining element that sets you apart from your competitors.
When developing your voice and tone, consider who you are as a company—as well as the preferences of your target audience. Here are some elements that you can include in the voice and tone section of your strategy.
A narrative snapshot of your brand’s personality.
Descriptive terms that define how the brand would sound if it were a real person.
How your tone may change based on content channel
Are you aiming for a casual and irreverent voice that appeals to Gen Z? Or a more insightful and authoritative approach to resonate with c-suite decision-makers? Whatever the case, ensure that your voice and tone align with your brand identity and resonate with your target audience.
Step 4: Establish Your Content Execution Process
With strategic recommendations in place, you need a few essential tools to ensure your team can successfully put your game plan into action.
Take the extra time to put together these documents, spreadsheets and workflow as part of the strategic process (not afterward, if possible!) so that you’re truly ready to hit the ground running as soon as the strategy is approved.
Create a Content Routing and Approvals Process
By now, you might have a good sense of who will be working on your content (and if you don’t, this is a great time to start drafting your dream team!).
To ensure every contributor and stakeholder understands exactly the part they play in content success, create a document that clearly defines:
Roles & responsibilities
Deliverables
Timelines for submitting, reviewing and approving content
How content should be routed (e.g., through a specific project or content management system)
Instructions for using that system successfully (e.g., how contributors and stakeholders can assign content to the next member of the team)
Set up an Editorial Calendar:
Another very important source of truth for your content team: The editorial calendar. This is a fundamental (and usually highly visible) document that keeps all content assignments, key milestones and final deadlines organized.
At Masthead, a project manager typically develops the editorial calendar after learning about all brand, strategic and SEO priorities for a given month or quarter. They’ll work with the content team to develop themes and pitches based on these priorities, and recommend an editorial lineup to the brand.
The final, approved assets are then solidified—and milestones set—within the editorial calendar.
Beyond keeping the entire team on the same page on timing for upcoming work, the editorial calendar can provide an excellent record of the work that was done in the past—particularly if it’s updated with a link or a copy of the final finished asset.
Here are the sections that may appear in an editorial calendar:
Title and description
Word count
Theme, brand priority or vertical
Audience
Meta and keyword information
Writer
Designer
Deadlines for initial submission, plus all necessary revisions
Asset code (optional, for tracking purposes)
Final asset (link to live story or file of finished asset)
Anything else that may be valuable to track as content flows between team members
Don’t worry if you don’t already know what you want to create—that part can come later, following approval of the strategy. For now, all you need is a blank template for your editorial calendar.
Set Up Your Reporting Documentation
By the same token, it’s very helpful to set up a tracking document that can help establish your baseline metrics—where you are now, before the strategy gets executed. This can begin as a simple spreadsheet listing the relevant numbers (later, it may evolve into a fully designed document that’s shown to executives and stakeholders).
You can refer to the potential KPIs in Step 2 above to determine what you may want to include in your Reporting Documentation. You may want to continue adding to this documentation (additional metrics) once you get feedback on the strategy.
This documentation can serve as the backbone for any regular insights reporting or analytical feedback you provide to team members on the health of your content marketing efforts
Step 5: Adjust Your Strategy
Even if your strategy is an absolute work of art (and I’m pretty sure it’ll feel that way after you spend months developing it!) you’re probably going to need to change it. Or, at the very least, you’ll want to modify it based on the feedback you receive from your team and any stakeholders reviewing and approving the strategy.
In addition, technology is moving so quickly (particularly in the AI space) that you should make periodic tweaks to your strategic approach to adjust for the way that business is being done, along with any data you’re seeing in your reporting.
How Often do you need to update your content strategy?
Ideally, each month, you’ll provide fresh strategic insights as part of your reporting (they’ll give your metrics much greater context). Then, on a quarterly basis, you should return to your documented, approved strategy and make updates.
Returning to your strategy on a regularly scheduled basis will not only help remind you what you had originally planned—and how much you’re sticking with or deviating from it—but it can save you the trouble of repeating this entire process every 1-2 years.
How often do you need a brand new content strategy?
Even if you’re making frequent strategic updates, you should start fresh with a brand new strategy—and a fresh set of eyes—after three years. By then stakeholders, priorities, technology (and potentially, the way business is done) will have completely changed.
Start working content strategy refreshes and new documentation into your roadmap now—so you can plot your content success well into the future.
