How to Build a Content Strategy in 6 Steps

Ask most people what their content strategy is and you’ll hear something like: “We blog three times a week.” Maybe they’ll add that they’re going after a certain type of buyer, or covering a few key topics. Sounds reasonable. But are those actually strategies? And if not, what does a real content strategy look like?

If you do any kind of content marketing, you need a framework that helps you build something solid instead of just publishing and hoping. We’ll walk through examples from a few different industries and give you tips for applying these 6 steps in your own niche. So the next time your marketing director or your client asks about the content strategy, you’ll know exactly how to answer.

What is a content strategy?

A content strategy spells out what you want your content to accomplish, which kinds of content will get you there, and how you’ll create it, distribute it, and measure how it performs.

Defining that strategy gives your work focus and a point. A clear one becomes the foundation you lean on when it’s time to make the small, tactical calls. Picture your content marketing as a highway. You have to decide where it’s headed, lay down some pavement, and figure out how many lanes you need. Start driving before you’ve planned the road and you’ll burn a lot more fuel — and you might never reach the destination at all.

Remember, content marketing is a business investment. It costs time, money, and (sometimes) extra people. Like any investment, you’ll want to tie it back to results. That means starting with clear goals and the KPIs (key performance indicators) that tell you whether you’re hitting them.

How to build a content strategy: the 6 core steps

Before you can shape a strategy, you need to think through the main inputs — the ones inside your company and the ones outside it. Those are your goals, who you want to reach, the competitive landscape, your resources, what it’ll cost, and how you’ll measure results. All of that gives your strategy its shape.

Content strategy inputs:

• Goals
• Audience
• Competition
• What makes you unique
• Investment
• Measurement

Let’s go through each one.

Step 1: Define your goals

Every content strategy starts with deciding what you’re trying to achieve. Think about what your brand stands for, your marketing objectives, and what the business actually needs. And get buy-in from all your key stakeholders, because your biggest decisions are going to flow straight from that goal. A few goals a content strategy can tackle:

• Growing awareness of your products
• Supporting your customers
• Shifting how people think about something
• Attracting and keeping good employees
• Driving free-trial sign-ups
• Turning leads into customers
• Building loyalty with repeat buyers

Your goals will naturally shift as your business grows. Early on, you’ll want to focus on building brand awareness. Once you’re more established, the focus can move toward nurturing leads. Plan to revisit your goals on a regular basis so they stay in step with where the business is headed.

Step 2: Know your audience

Knowing your audience is the make-or-break part of any content strategy. Spend real time with your sales team and pull together every scrap of information you can find about the people you’re trying to reach.

Who are you trying to reach? For B2B marketers, that’s usually a handful of people: the buyer, the end user, the experts who weigh in on the decision, the business owner, and so on. For B2C products with simpler buying cycles, you want a feel for two things: who makes the purchase, and who can help you spread your content.

What do they care about? Think about the problem your company solves, your prospect’s pain points, and the related topics your target audience will happily spend time learning about.

How and where do they like to get information? Is video what pulls them in? Does your audience hang out on certain social platforms, like Facebook or Instagram? When do they turn to Google to look something up? Are they the type to subscribe to a newsletter?

The answers point you to the media types worth using (video, audio, images, long-form blog posts, influencer or celebrity backing, and so on), the topics to cover, where your intended audience sits in the buying process (top, middle, or bottom of the funnel), and the distribution channels that make sense for you (SEO, paid search, social, email, forums, PR, and the like).

Step 3: Study your competition

Look at what your competitors are doing. What seems to be working? Is there anything nobody else is touching that you think would land with your audience? (Right now only a small slice of content budgets go to podcasts — could that be an opening in your industry?)

Step 4: Figure out what makes you unique

What do you do better than anyone else in your space? Do you have a point of view no one else has? A blunt founder whose voice you can put to work? That’s the hook that lets you stand out from the pack. (If your customers knew “that one thing” about you, they’d love you for it.)

Flip it around, too: are there tactics or angles you know you can’t own because of budget or some other limit? Better to spot that early — it helps you narrow your options before you waste effort on them.

Step 5: Work out your investment

The average B2B marketer put a sizable share of their marketing budget toward content last year, and most plan to hold that steady or spend more. Start by estimating what your strategy will cost. Where do you need to ramp up in-house? Which pieces might you have to hand off to an outside team?

Factor in the shelf life of your content, too, because keeping it fresh and eventually retiring it both cost money. Take stock of the resources you’ll have before you lock in the strategy, so you know the budget is really there.

Step 6: Plan how you’ll measure results

Pick the metrics and KPIs that actually make sense for judging your strategy against your goals. Here are a few common ones.

Content marketing metric examples

Treat content strategy as a long game. It takes time before the returns show up on your bottom line. If SEO is part of the plan, for instance, it can be six months to a year before you see any effect in the bank. You can still track progress along the way by watching keyword rankings, backlinks, page visits, and leads.

4 content strategy examples

Let’s look at four content strategies across different industries.

1) Retail

M.M. LaFleur is a luxury clothing retailer for professional women. It uses content to reach its target customer, knock down the hesitation people feel about buying clothes online, and earn the loyalty that brings them back.

A few things M.M. LaFleur leans on in its content strategy:

• Featuring professional women on its blog and building an email-subscriber audience to distribute it. (The company’s blog, The M Dash, won a Digiday Content Marketing Award for best brand publication.)
• Writing short, tight copy for a time-strapped audience.
• Putting real weight on imagery so the shopper can picture herself in the clothes. Strong images pull traffic from social and help convert site visitors.
• Working in motion and video to show off the unique textures in their pieces.

Is it working for M.M. LaFleur? Founded in 2013, the company has reached an estimated several million dollars in revenue and a large Facebook following. Its share of search traffic runs higher than its competitors’ and its bounce rate runs lower, so we’d bet that strong content has a lot to do with it.

2) Manufacturer

Formlabs is a global maker of 3D printers and materials for engineers, designers, and manufacturers. It uses content to reach buyers at several different stages.

A few things Formlabs leans on in its content strategy:

• Pulling in top-of-funnel traffic and leads through SEO with its blog, teaching site visitors with a resource library, and helping customers (and encouraging referrals) in an open 3D-printing forum.
• Telling the company’s story and the industry’s story. One example highlights how 3D printing is reshaping the dental industry — the kind of piece that keeps people coming back.
• Producing content that’s detailed but easy to take in. That’s a departure from the dry, technical copy you usually see on industrial products. Their materials use eye-catching imagery with motion, video, short paragraphs, and clear, simple writing.

Is it working for Formlabs? The story-driven approach seems to pull audiences in on social: the company has a large combined following across LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and its YouTube videos routinely rack up tens of thousands of views apiece.

Pull up the traffic stats in a site analytics tool and you’ll see Formlabs has far more links driving referral traffic, well above its competitors’ average. That tells you they’re making content valuable enough that other people want to link to it.

3) Consumer service

Enjuris gives information to injured people and their caregivers, and lists local attorneys in a directory. It uses content to build awareness and trust, educate, and then show consumers how to find a lawyer. A few things Enjuris works into its content strategy:

• Connecting with people through an authentic, empathetic voice that comes straight from the writing team’s own experiences. Images and captions back it up and create a sense of hope.
• Building a deep library of long, thorough articles. The site also gives away free, ungated worksheets for consumers to download.
• Forming partnerships and placing active contributors on industry websites. Partnerships help spread brand awareness and earn backlinks that boost the site’s authority.

Is it working? When the SEO agency behind Enjuris launched the content strategy, the site was getting very few views a month. It took about a year to multiply its monthly views several times over in an ultra-competitive industry — and then SEO’s compounding growth kicked in.

After three years of steady growth, the site now pulls in vastly more views a month. It’s managed to capture brutally competitive search terms that keep feeding growth in the personal-injury attorney directory.

4) Tech company

Hotjar is a SaaS tool for website usability testing. Its content builds awareness of the product and affinity for its culture, backing a fresh way of thinking and nudging free trials among marketers, product managers, and UX designers.

Hotjar’s content includes:

• Skipping the usual tech-company play of “pump out massive amounts of high-quality blog posts and hope you attract users.” Instead, it focuses on purpose-driven content built around “transparency, vulnerability, honesty, and humanity.”
• Pulling in search traffic with deep content organized in a hub-and-spoke structure.
• Growing its email subscriber list to encourage repeat engagement and nurture leads.

Is it working? With a large audience signed up to get the company’s blog posts by email, Hotjar’s content is clearly striking a chord.

Key takeaways

Nailing down the right content strategy can set your company up to win. But here’s an underrated payoff of putting in the work to define it: you get to do more with less. You’ll know when to run with a new idea and when to say no to the ones that don’t fit.

At a moment when companies keep cranking out content at record volume, stay locked on your mission. Set your strategy and get your team aligned on goals and priorities. Keep an eye on the results and revisit your strategy on a regular basis. Work with your team and document your content research as you go. There are tools out there that can help you analyze your competitors’ content, spot keyword gaps, and more.