A well-crafted content strategy addresses essential questions for brands, such as "Who is our target audience?" and "What key messages do we want to communicate?". When executed effectively, it ensures consistent results, enhances visibility, and boosts conversions. Without a strategic approach, even experienced teams can lose direction, and waste substantial budgets.
Despite its importance, many brands still approach content creation as a task rather than a strategic initiative. Only about 40% of businesses have a documented content strategy. Decisions about channels, tone of voice, and content types are often based on entrenched presets that are difficult to alter. Our practical experience reveals that many brands struggle to understand what a content strategy entails, how it differs from an overall marketing strategy, and why it is crucial. Here’s an outline of what a comprehensive content strategy should include and how to develop one for your brand.
What is a content strategy?
Very simply, a content strategy describes a brand's desired presence across various channels. It is a comprehensive plan that guides the creation, delivery, and management of content to achieve specific business goals.
It defines how content will be used to meet the needs of both the business and its audience, ensuring consistency, relevance, and value.
Why it matters
At its core, a content strategy provides a roadmap for creating, distributing, and managing content in a way that aligns with business goals and audience needs.
Clear purpose
This strategic approach ensures that every piece of content serves a purpose, whether it's to inform, entertain, or persuade, ultimately leading to a more cohesive and effective marketing effort.
Increased visibility
Ultimately, a content strategy is not just about creating content; it's about creating the right content that aligns with your business goals and audience preferences. By implementing a strategic approach to content creation and distribution, businesses can enhance their visibility and drive better results in terms of traffic, leads, and conversions. For instance, brands who blog actively generate an average 67% more leads per month than companies that do not have blogs. Moving from the second to the first position in search engine results can lead to a 50% increase in organic traffic.
Higher engagement
Another critical aspect is audience engagement. A robust content strategy allows you to tailor your messaging to different segments of your audience, ensuring that each piece of content resonates with the right people at the right time. Social media platforms, blog posts, videos, and email newsletters are all integral components of a content strategy that can drive higher engagement rates.
Improved efficiency
Internally, a content strategy ensures that all content creation efforts are aligned with business goals, maximizing the use of time, budget, and resources. This alignment prevents wasted efforts and focuses resources on high-impact activities.
What a winning content strategy looks like
Creating a content strategy can be a complex task, as there is often confusion about what it should encompass. To help clarify this, we've distilled our approach, drawing on over 10 years of experience working with leading brands. Our model outlines the essential components that ensure your content strategy is both comprehensive and effective.
Here are the key elements that should be part of a content strategy:
Performance metrics: Clearly defined goals that the content aims to achieve, such as increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or boosting conversions.
Audience: Detailed profiles of the intended audience, including demographics, interests, pain points, and preferences. Understanding the audience helps tailor content that resonates and engages effectively.
Content Mission: What is the purpose of the content? Should it inspire, inform, educate? What emotion should it transmit?
Topics: Identify the main topics to cover in your content, such as tips, events, or team updates. This ensures that your content is varied and addresses different aspects of interest to your audience.
Messages: Primary messages you want to convey, such as price, quality, sustainability, or vision. These messages should align with your brand’s values and objectives.
Actions: Actions you want your audience to take after consuming your content, such as subscribing, purchasing, or sharing.
Formats: The types of content to be created (e.g., blog posts, videos, infographics, social media posts). This ensures a variety of content that can appeal to different segments of the audience.
Style: The tone and style of your content to ensure consistency and alignment with your brand’s identity.
Products / Services: The specific products, services, or ranges to highlight in your content strategy.
Channels: The platforms and channels where the content will be distributed (e.g., website, social media, email newsletters, third-party platforms). Selecting the right channels is crucial for reaching the target audience effectively.
Guidelines: Guidelines to ensure content is produced and published consistently and meets quality standards. This should include guidelines for visual elements.
Workflow: The workflow for content creation, validation, optimization, and publication, including roles and responsibilities.
Partners: The influencers, partners, and publications that can help amplify your content.
Budget: Budgets for advertising, if applicable, ensuring you have the resources to promote your content effectively.
Competitors: Active brands in your space or that compete for your audience’s attention. Monitoring competitors helps stay competitive and adapt strategies as needed.
Keywords: The key search terms for each channel (site, blog, and ads) to improve search engine visibility and reach your target audience.
By following this structured approach, businesses can create a robust content strategy that is aligned with their goals and audience needs, ensuring that each piece of content serves its purpose effectively.
How to create (and maintain) your content strategy
Developing and maintaining an effective content strategy requires a systematic approach. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you build a comprehensive content strategy, with a focus on process rather than elements:
1. Review past content
Your past content holds precious insights on what worked and what didn’t. Use these them to refine your strategy and improve future content efforts. This step helps you identify successful formats, topics, and channels.
2. Gather key data
Understanding your landscape provides a solid foundation for your content strategy. Collect essential data about your customers, social media platforms, products and services, industry trends, and competitors. This information is crucial for defining a strategy that is informed and targeted.
2. Build the content strategy with the team
Involve key team members from various departments to ensure the strategy aligns with overall business objectives and incorporates diverse perspectives. Collaborative planning helps gain support and ensures that all aspects of the strategy are covered.
3. Document and share your content strategy
Once the content strategy is developed, document it and share it with the entire team. This ensures that everyone agrees and understands the goals, processes, and expectations.
4. Set up a formal content strategy review process
Schedule regular follow-up meetings to review the content strategy’s performance, make necessary adjustments, and discuss new ideas. These meetings should be separate from content planning meetings to focus on high-level strategy rather than day-to-day operations.
5. Track competitors
Use tools to monitor competitors’ content strategies, including the keywords they target, the types of content they produce, and their performance. This helps in identifying gaps and opportunities in your own strategy.
6. Monitor performance across different channels
Regularly track content performance across various channels (e.g., website, social media, email) to understand which platforms are most effective for your content. Adjust your strategy based on these insights to optimize reach and engagement.
7. Celebrate important milestones
Recognize and celebrate significant achievements and milestones in your content strategy. This helps in maintaining team motivation and highlighting the impact of the content strategy on business goals.
Content strategy case studies
Let's dive into three impactful content strategies that made a difference.
Defining a content strategy for a leading investment firm
Sparkfood is an investment firm dedicated to healthier, sustainable companies in the food, pharma, and well-being sectors. They needed a solid content strategy to communicate their mission and establish a strong online presence.
Challenge
Sparkfood faced several key challenges:
Defining Vision and Mission: They needed a clear vision and mission to align their content strategy.
Competitor Insights: Understanding competitor strategies to find ways to stand out.
Strategy Development: Creating a comprehensive, actionable content strategy.
Team Alignment: Ensuring the whole team understood and supported the strategy.
Ongoing Monitoring: Keeping the strategy dynamic and responsive to changes.
Solution
Workshops for Vision and Mission: We started with workshops involving Sparkfood's senior team to define their vision and mission. This foundational step was crucial as it directly influenced their website and social media profiles, ensuring that the entire content strategy was aligned with their core values and goals.
Competitor Analysis: We conducted a thorough analysis of key competitors to understand their strategies, strengths, and positioning. This helped us identify opportunities for Sparkfood to differentiate itself. We focused on creating rich, practical content that was jargon-free and easy to understand. While most competitors produced very in-depth, time-consuming content, we developed practical guides with insider tips that were accessible even to those with little time.
Strategy Workshops: Additional workshops were held to define critical aspects of the strategy, such as target audiences (founders, managers, other VCs), primary channels (LinkedIn, email marketing, blog), publication frequency, long-term KPIs, intermediate milestones, and key topics (management tips, company portfolio, team interviews, sustainability best practices). For instance, we identified the need to summarize key portfolio companies and team members in social media-ready profiles that could be read in under one minute and easily shared. We also produced interviews where high profiles guests highlighted key issues affecting their field and explained their solutions.
Finalizing Strategy Elements: With the main strategic components in place, we finalized the communication style, content formats, and workflow for content creation, validation, and publication. This ensured a consistent and efficient content production process.
Documentation and Team Alignment: We documented the strategy comprehensively and shared it with the entire team, ensuring that everyone was aligned and understood their roles. This step was essential for maintaining coherence and commitment across the organization.
Regular Review Meetings: We established a schedule for regular review meetings, including monthly high-level progress reports to the senior team and weekly editorial plan discussions. These meetings focused on reviewing KPIs, content plans, and competitor tracking, allowing us to make necessary adjustments and keep the strategy dynamic.
Results
Strategy Defined: We clearly defined Sparkfood’s content strategy within the first month of the project.
Guided Content Production: The strategy provided a solid framework that guided content production in the following months, ensuring consistent and aligned content.
Team Alignment: Our collaborative approach ensured the entire team was on board and aligned with the strategy.
Ongoing Updates: Regular review meetings kept the strategy dynamic and responsive to market changes and performance metrics.
Standout Content: Sparkfood’s practical, jargon-free content helped them stand out from competitors, providing value that was easy to digest and share.
By working closely with Sparkfood from the start, we developped a comprehensive and adaptable content strategy that resonated with their mission and audience, setting them up for long-term success.
Communicating effectively at a new Education Foundation
Fundação José Neves (FJN) is a charitable foundation based in Portugal. The foundation focuses on initiatives related to education, entrepreneurship, and innovation, aiming to support social and economic development through various programs and projects.
Challenge
Fundação José Neves faced several key challenges:
New Foundation with a New Offering: As a newly established foundation, FJN needed to build awareness and trust in their brand and initiatives. They introduced Income Share Agreements (ISAs), a novel concept in their home market, which required careful and clear communication to build understanding and trust.
Communicating Extensive Data: FJN had vast amounts of data on the education panorama that needed to be communicated in a clear, actionable way. This complexity made their communication efforts more challenging, especially to a younger audience.
Solution
Competitor Analysis: We began by collecting data on FJN's competitors to see where we could stand out. It became clear that we needed to present data in bite-sized, highly visual formats, such as infographics, motion graphics, and structured blog articles. Topics like employment, salaries, and opportunities resonated with their younger audience. This strategic focus guided the first months of content production.
Building Trust: To introduce the new ISA services effectively, we prioritized student testimonials and partnered with more established brands to enhance credibility. We created clear, informative website content and comprehensive FAQs to address common questions and concerns.
Partnership and Content Distribution: Collaborating with educational partners (universities, postgraduate institutions) and large companies helped increase FJN's reach significantly.
Translating Research Content: We established a process to "translate" the new content produced by FJN's research departments into more manageable digital content. This included breaking down complex reports into easy-to-understand visuals and summaries that could be quickly digested and shared.
Regular Review Meetings: We established a schedule for regular review meetings, including monthly high-level progress reports to the senior team and weekly editorial plan discussions. These meetings allowed us to review KPIs, content plans, and competitor tracking, making necessary adjustments to keep the strategy effective.
Articulate, content strategy experts
Creating a content strategy might seem daunting, but it’s a vital step for any business looking to make a mark in the digital world. Now it’s time to put your strategy into action. Need help crafting a winning content strategy? Contact our team of experts at Articulate and let us help you create content that drives results.