How to Develop a Content Strategy

Anyone who grasps the fundamentals of content marketing knows that the concept isn’t all that complicated – consistently provide something of relevant value to your target audience in the hope they ultimately will return the favor.

Serving the needs of your audience with valuable, high-quality content is an admirable goal for any company. But your efforts will amount to little if your content doesn’t trigger audience behaviors that help your company reach its business goals. And that, my friends, is where complications set in.

To give your content marketing program the best chance of driving desired results, you should know the answer to these questions:

• Who should the content we produce be most relevant to?

• What benefits does this audience receive from consuming our content?

• What desirable and distinctive content experience can we consistently deliver?

You’ll uncover the answers to these questions – and plenty of others – through the process of developing your content marketing strategy.

Why you need a content marketing strategy

While your company should have a content strategy – a strategic plan for all its content usage across the enterprise, it also should have a dedicated content marketing strategy – a unified, strategic road map focused exclusively on how your business will use content to attract, acquire, and engage its prospects and customers.

In fact, according to our latest B2B findings:

• 65% of the most successful content marketers have a documented strategy vs. 14% of the least successful.

• 73% say it keeps their teams focused on established content priorities.

• 68% say it helps their team allocate resources to optimize desired results.

What goes in a content marketing strategy

Your strategy should define your key business and customer needs, as well as how your content efforts address them. Though no two strategies are alike, all should detail a few essential components:

• Your preferred business model – the investment strategy your content initiatives fall under, the role content plays in your organization, and the way you structure your team to put your plans in motion successfully

• Your purpose and goals – why your content exists, what you want your audience to do once it has consumed your content, and the value you expect its actions to provide for your business

• Your audience personas and buyer’s journey – defining characteristics of the one audience that will benefit most from your content, its current user state, and an estimate of how its needs and goals may evolve

• Your differentiated editorial mission – your company’s unique perspectives and approach to creating content and how they distinguish your content from your competitors

from: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/questions-content-strategy/