How to create a content marketing strategy: A comprehensive guide for business owners
If you’re a business owner, you already know that strategy is essential. No matter what you’re working on, you need a strategy to work toward specific goals, stay organized, and keep yourself (and your team) on track.
But when it comes to creating a content marketing strategy in particular, it can be hard to get started. After all, content marketing means different things to different business owners: it can mean social media, SEO blogging, email marketing, customer education, and much more.
That’s why I created this comprehensive guide to building a content marketing strategy. It takes a 10,000-foot view so you can start with understanding your business landscape first, then put together the building blocks of a solid strategy.
Let’s get started!
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What does content marketing include?
First, let’s level set. Before I guide you through creating a content marketing strategy, we need to make sure we’re on the same page.
Content marketing is an inbound marketing strategy that uses a variety of channels to give your audience the information they need to further a relationship with your business.
It can include SEO and social media to reach your audience at the top of the funnel, branded content to reach and convert the audience who’s already in your funnel, and email marketing to communicate with your existing leads or customers.
Content marketing isn’t just social media marketing–this is something I see a lot in the small business space, but it’s very limiting. When you understand the breadth and depth of what content marketing really is, it allows you to put together a more comprehensive strategy across your channels and sales funnel.
“Content marketing isn’t just social media marketing. ”
Review your current content marketing analytics
Now that we’re on the same page with content marketing, the first step is to understand your current benchmarks. Even if you’ve just been marketing on the fly, your data can tell you a lot. But if you haven’t even started marketing yet, don’t worry–just skip to steps two and three to gather insights from your audience and competitors.
If you do have marketing analytics, here’s what you can take a look at:
Where do you get the most engagement? Take a look at which channels and content types generate the highest reach and interactions.
Metrics: Reach, views, likes, comments, follows
Where do you get the most interest? Take a look at which channels and tactics lead to the most website traffic and leads.
Metrics: Traffic, leads,
Where do you get the most customers? Consider where your bookings or purchases are actually coming from.
Metrics: Conversions, sales
Overall, these questions can help you determine the channels, content types, and topics that are performing well.
2. Determine your target audience and positioning
Now that you have a good sense of your current performance, you need to get a clearer picture of your audience. With any content you create, you need to know exactly how you should be talking to them and what messages you want to get across.
You need two documents that will help inform your content marketing strategy and the tactics you use:
Ideal customer profile: This should include your average audience demographics as well as details about the brands they like, where they hang out online, what pain points they have, and what types of solutions they’re looking for.
Brand marketing messaging: Your brand messaging is how you introduce yourself to this audience and describe your business as the best solution to their pain points. This should include your core value proposition, brand promise, differentiators, and your voice and tone.
The way I use these documents is to refer to them quarterly as I’m thinking about the topics I want to market. It’s a ton of information, so don’t worry about memorizing it all or keeping it on your desktop. I also pull them up whenever I have writer’s block and need a refresher about the core messaging I’m trying to communicate.
3. Audit your competitors
It’s important to keep in mind that you’re not the only one speaking to your audience. Successful content marketing not only positions you as a solid solution but also shows why you’re the best solution out there. And in order to successfully position your business, you need to see what the competition is doing.
There are a lot of competitive analysis tools out there that you can use, but conducting a SWOT analysis is also something you can do for free with your own research. Just pull up your competitors’ websites, social channels, and a doc where you can jot down your notes.
Here’s what you can document:
Strengths: What content is performing well for them? (blog posts, Instagram Reels, case studies, etc.)
Weaknesses: What does it look like they’re missing? (maybe they don’t offer any free resources)
Opportunities: Based on the weaknesses, what are the opportunities for you to fill those gaps?
Threats: Where do they have a competitive advantage over you?
4. Document your sales funnel
Now it’s time to consider the journey, or sales funnel, that your audience takes before they book with you or make a purchase. For most small businesses, the good news is that this sales funnel is usually shorter than the funnel for an enterprise business, but that still means your strategy needs to be very intentional about reaching your audience at each step.
Here’s an example of what a typical small business sales funnel might look like:
Awareness: People find your website by searching for information about the types of services or products you offer, or they see your content on social media.
Consideration: People join your email list by signing up for a free tool, downloading a resource, or reading your case studies.
Conversion: You book clients from your email marketing, newsletter, or targeted landing pages.
Understanding this process will help you figure out what information your audience needs at each step and what content will help move them toward the ultimate goal: making a purchase or booking with you.
5. Consider your budget
Steps 1-4 are more about laying the groundwork for your strategy, but now it’s time to get into the nitty gritty. Before you go any further, you need to determine your budget, both in terms of money and time.
I personally implement my content marketing strategy in quarters, and each quarter, I consider how much time I have to put into my marketing efforts. Luckily, most of it I can batch-create in advance, but I’m also thinking about my bandwidth for writing blogs and building new lead magnets or other resources.
When we think of budget, we’re usually thinking about ads, which isn’t in the realm of content marketing. However, we also need to consider the budget for things like software (keyword research tools and competitor research tools, for example), subcontractors, content partnerships, and more.
“Having a time and money budget will make it easier to set your goals, channels, tactics, and cadence. ”
6. Develop your goals and KPIs
I don’t think anyone has ever said they love setting goals, but I guarantee that these will come to you more easily with all of the information you’ve gathered. You already know what your audience wants to hear, how they currently interact with you, and the resources you’re able to put toward your content marketing.
With all of that information, you can set SMART content marketing goals. These are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based.
SMART content marketing goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based
I like to set goals at each stage of my funnel, like increasing my followers by 15% on Instagram, increasing my leads by 20%, and booking 10% more clients in a given quarter. The more specific, the better, so consider the content marketing KPIs that you want to keep an eye on.
Developing these numbers can be the hardest part, but you can base them on the benchmarks you collected from your analytics as well as the SWOT analysis you ran on your competitors.
7. Choose your channels and tactics
To reach your goals, it’s time to select the channels and tactics that will help you get there.
With each goal, I think about the content pillars or content types that align with my sales funnel. To increase my followers on Instagram, for instance, that might look like SEO education. To increase leads, I know I want to focus on gated content marketing insights.
From there, I can start planning my content marketing cadence and calendar, or how often I’ll post on each channel with content that ladders up to my content pillars and goals.
8. Create your topics and keyword list
Now it’s time to get into specifics: What will you actually say in your content, and what topics do you want to communicate? As a reminder, these should ladder up to your content pillars and goals.
I like to start with creating a list of business keywords for SEO. I know–SEO is just one part of content marketing, but discovering what people search online can inform what they want to see across other channels as well.
Your keywords will be helpful for creating content at the top of your funnel, but don’t forget about branded content as well. This can include case studies, storytelling about your business, and more.
9. Build your content marketing workflow
Creating a content marketing strategy is just the first step of the iceberg. It’s a ton of work (I won’t lie), but ideally, it’s something that can inform all of your work for several months. It’s not something that you have to be doing weekly or even monthly.
With a solid strategy, you can move forward with a content marketing workflow that ensures you’re able to take action and continuously refine the strategy over time based on your insights.
Here’s what my typical workflow looks like:
Strategy
Ideation
Planning
Copywriting
Design
Editing
Publishing
Promotion
Review
Don’t have the time? Outsource your content marketing strategy
Okay, that was a TON of information. For most business owners, you might just need help with specific parts of building your strategy. Like maybe you’re really good at coming up with topics, but you don’t know how to connect them to your business goals.
But for others, you do need a soup-to-nuts content marketing strategy. This guide is the perfect place to start, but be honest–do you actually have the time to do it all? If not, I’m here for you.
My content strategy package covers a full audit of your current performance as well as the competitive analysis, ideal customer profile, and brand messaging. From there, I’ll put together a 90-day content plan that includes your content pillars, topics, goals, and KPIs.
Yep–it’s everything you need to lay the foundation for your content marketing, which you can continue to use long-term. Let’s chat about what I can take off your plate!
