A content strategy is a strategic approach to creating, managing, and distributing content. It involves planning and executing a roadmap for content creation, distribution, and optimization. A content strategy provides a framework to create valuable and purposeful content by focusing on the needs of the audience.

If you're reading this, you likely are involved with content creation. The purpose of this article is to round out your knowledge of a content strategy through examples, so that you can take a more strategic role within your organization.

A content strategy may fall under the purview of marketing (namely, content marketing) or it may be elevated to a wide-spanning corporate role. While the approaches to content and content strategy will differ for B2C marketers and B2B marketers, a baseline understanding of what we mean when we talk about content strategy is industry-agnostic.

What is Content?

Before we dive into content strategy, it's worth noting that the meaning of content is elusive.

Content is anything to do with awareness and education and might take the form of technical white papers, in-depth blog posts, TikTok videos, infographics, even newsletters.

What about the writing on a landing page: is that content - or copywriting? Some say, since its aim is to convert, landing pages aren't content. The great news is, when you create your strategy, you can decide if conversion pages, emails, documentation, or community notes are content - or something else.

"Content" is a single word loaded with different connotations and meanings that depend on its context.

In the realm of content marketing, content encompasses four core elements:

  • Information - What are the actual contents of your message? It can be factual, practical, entertaining, or some combination.
  • Context - What is the content supposed to help you and the reader accomplish? Who is the target audience for this content? Why is it being published?
  • Medium - What channel are you publishing the content on, and how does that influence the overall message?
  • Format - Is the content text, graphic, audio, video, interactive, virtual/augmented reality, etc.?

Content is information that is relevant in a given context and has a form shaped by the medium through which it's transmitted.

Many definitions of content focus too much on the information and not on the rest of the elements. Information without context is just noise. Information that isn't presented with the form and medium in mind risks being lost on the recipient. For example, you could write out the steps of changing a tire, but including images would make it a lot clearer.

Likewise, the material you include in a piece of content has to reflect the medium and form - you wouldn't publish an in-depth guide to a complex topic in a single social post. It also has to make sense in the context of the target audience you want to reach. For example, at Siteimprove, we want to reach content teams, SEO teams, and digital marketers.

Social media memes are content, but a meme would quickly lose that audience, even a well-made one. Any definition of "quality content" has to take this into account.

6sense's B2B Buyer Experience research finds that buyers do most of their research on their own and usually make the first contact with sellers themselves, well into the buying process. Content is vital in providing that education. Optimized correctly, great content can pull in potential customers without relying on traditional "push" digital marketing techniques. And of course, you can't have paid campaigns without having an arsenal of well-crafted content. So paid or organic, digital content allows potential customers to discover and engage with you.

Effective content pulls people through the sales funnel as it helps people learn something new, solve their problems, do better work, and ultimately find the solutions they need. But to propel prospects forward, you need to be showing expertise and awareness by addressing all the questions your target audience might have. And that all is a mighty big challenge for a lot of content teams. The knowledge usually sits with subject matter experts across the organization, in product, sales, support, and leadership, which is one reason content strategy can't live in marketing alone.

What is Content Strategy?

As noted, a content strategy is an organization-wide approach to content creation. It shouldn't live in isolation, buried in marketing. It's dictated by organizational goals, objectives, and resources. The right content for the wrong purpose won't drive consistent results. Further, a strategy should incorporate a service level agreement (SLA) across departments. To succeed, you need to have ‌buy-in from different groups and subject matter experts across the organization.

Every other facet of a content strategy - your content audit, ideation, content governance, a content plan, content production, editorial calendar, etc. - starts once you have a clear idea of how content will solve your business objectives. Sample business goals might be to

  • Increase Brand Awareness
  • Lower the cost of customer acquisition
  • Reduce Customer Churn
  • Increase velocity through the sales funnel
  • Reduce questions for your support team
  • Reduce friction with peripheral members of buying group (SaaS providers might need something that addresses security concerns)

Content strategy is the ongoing process of translating business objectives and goals into a plan that uses content as a primary means of achieving those goals.

That also means more content isn't the goal. As Robert Rose of The Content Advisory has argued, set goals that move an audience to act with the least amount of content, rather than targets like five white papers a year or four blog posts a month.

Once you've established your core objectives, the "how" of your content strategy is honed by asking simple, yet vital questions.

  • What do you want your content to accomplish in pursuit of business goals?
  • How will content be measured? Remember, content is not a coupon - so it is unlikely someone will read a blog post and say, yes, I want to buy! Again, this should be an agreement as to what constitutes success.
  • What content type is best suited to produce? Maybe your content team can put together great blog content but lacks the skills to create high-quality videos. If so, you know where you'll be more likely to stand out.
  • Do certain target audiences require a content type? (B2B often has 8-12 people in the buying group - all of them need content).
  • What does a content audit of your site say about the existing content you have and your gaps?
  • How will you source content ideas? How will you ensure they align with your brand voice, goals, and audiences?
  • How will you ensure you have a documented strategy and governance, rather than relying on ad hoc requests for content?
  • How will you distribute content? How can you ensure your email, influencer outreach, and social media content strategy supports your overall content marketing effort?

Any content marketing strategy must align with your broader brand strategy, marketing goals, and business objectives. For that, you'll want to develop a roadmap.

If your content strategy doesn't start with a business objective, it's not a content strategy. It's just content.

How to Explain Content Strategy

If you need to explain content strategy to a stakeholder, three points cover it:

  • It's the roadmap that gets you to your content marketing goals.
  • It helps you create content that attracts and keeps customers.
  • It coordinates all your marketing channels to work together.

It also helps to say what content strategy isn't. A blog isn't a content strategy. Neither is long-form content, keyword research, SEO, or A/B testing. Each of these can be part of a strategy, but none of them is the strategy itself.

Content Strategy Deliverables

Since your content strategy is a blueprint for execution that can be handed to content creators, you will want to include information that addresses the following. Use as much detail as necessary to ensure the creation of good quality content. Some of these content strategy deliverables include:

  • Brand Voice
  • Product Messaging
  • Persona (Audience)
  • Content Audit
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Ideation Process
  • Content Cadence / Content Calendar
  • Content Distribution (Content Promotion Plan)
  • Benchmarks - Goals
  • Styleguide
  • Operations Process and Governance
  • Recommended Content Types (based on performance metrics)
  • Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Influencers
  • Keyword Research

Your deliverables may become more granular as you develop strategies to address different business goals.

What Do Content Strategists Do?

Content strategists are the masterminds behind an organization's content creation, ensuring it's useful, usable, and aligns with business goals. They plan, oversee, and optimize the entire content lifecycle, from crafting content that resonates with the target audience to choosing the best channels for distribution.

Why is Content Strategy Important?

Content strategy is important because it ensures that content is created to support business goals. As stated, a content strategy shouldn't be created in a vacuum. By creating one, you effectively have an understanding across your company on what you'll create and projected outcomes. This helps keep you and all the stakeholders focused.

The fact is that the content lifecycle needs to start somewhere. Here's what that looks like.

The Content Lifecycle

Strategy leads to execution - or the beginning of the content lifecycle. Create your editorial calendar based on seasonality, product releases, and campaigns. After an audit, create your SEO topic clusters, and decide if you need net-new or to refresh existing content. Take out the guesswork by having a documented governance and operations process - from ideation through editorial review to content production. Encourage executives to have SLAs with SMEs that might exist throughout the company.

By knowing what your end goals are, you can work backward in the process to figure out where to prioritize. As you make your way through the content lifecycle, you'll learn what content types resonate with your audience best.

Feedback from customers, prospects, partners, and the public about your content can help you refine your overall strategy.

Remember, this is not something you deliberate on once a year or once a quarter. You're constantly collecting learnings, adapting, and finding new ways to move through the content lifecycle a little smarter than the last time.

But again, it all starts with knowing what your strategy is. There's no other way to measure your content marketing ROI.

Content Strategy Examples

Following are examples of business outcome-driven content strategies.

Content Strategy for SEO

Content strategy and SEO often work hand-in-hand, and rightfully so. Most teams that invest in SEO-driven content are looking to increase organic traffic and leads generated via content while lowering their Customer Acquisition Costs.

So how can a content strategy serve this goal?

As search engines like Google and Bing evolve, they put increased emphasis on serving audiences quality content that satisfies their search intent. Of course, technical issues, well-formatted HTML, back links, and site performance all play a role. But the onus is creating comprehensive, credible, high-quality content.

This is how small domains can punch above their weight with authoritative content clusters that rank highly for competitive terms.

A content cluster, or topic cluster, is a way of organizing content on a website into topically related 'clusters.'

The first step is to identify and produce an authoritative page, the pillar page, on a core topic. You also need to create multiple content pages (cluster pages) related to that topic. The pillar page should link to the cluster pages and vice versa. A content cluster should cover a topic across all phases of the buyer's/user's journey - by persona.

It starts at the top, driving awareness of your business through content that targets audiences doing keyword search who want answers to questions or to solve problems.

As they begin to identify your product/service as a possible solution, they will want content that educates and answers questions to help them decide whether or not to purchase.

Remember, some people will enter your funnel already solution-aware and just want to know more about your solution. Others may not have the slightest clue they need a solution at all and are searching for answers to a problem or question they have. A successful content strategy for SEO accounts for the buyer's journey and includes content for searchers in all of these phases.

One example of a successful content clustering strategy is from ISSA, a provider of personal trainer, nutritionist, and fitness instructor certifications.

For its personal training certification track, ISSA produces content that anticipates possible questions and search intents its target audience might have about certification. Here's a small sampling on how its content marketing team has covered the topic.

Awareness

How to Become a Certified Personal Trainer

How to Start a Personal Training Business - The Quick Guide

Consideration

How Much Do Personal Trainers Make?

Can You Do Personal Training Without Certification?

Purchase

Certified Personal Trainer - Self-Guided Study Program

With a robust internal linking strategy to go along with all of this content, ISSA makes it easy for users to get the information they need and take a clear next step. Their SEO gains and organic traffic growth has been steady and continues to climb even in a highly competitive space.

Content Strategy for Customer Success and Support

If your business goal is to reduce customer churn, reduce customer calls, increase customer satisfaction and/or increase customer retention, then don't ignore content creation for the "Post-Purchase" phase.

Content isn't just for SEO and attracting prospects; Post-purchase content is one of the best ways to solve the business issue of too many inbound customer support requests. A customer support strategy can measure success along the lines of reducing support tickets and, ultimately, retention.

A robust library of self-serve support content, once built out, can reduce the need to hire additional headcount for those purposes. It also allows your support teams to focus their attention on high-value clients and more significant issues that content alone can't solve.

Content can be an effective tool to educate, train, and teach customers. aircall

Aircall.io is a customer communication and engagement platform and successfully uses content to support and retain customers. In addition to a blog with useful VoIP, sales, and customer success tactics and tips, Aircall has a robust Knowledge Base that customers can use to search for answers to specific questions about the software and phone systems.

If you find that your support teams are inundated with the same issues and questions regularly, make some room in your content calendar to produce content that helps your customers learn how to use your product themselves.

Content Strategy for Sales Enablement

Sales enablement content is content that a sales team can use to educate prospects and help them build a case for purchasing your product or service. The prime business goal is to increase pipeline velocity and close deals.

Your content strategy ‌should consider common questions and objections your salespeople hear.

For example, one of the most common questions a sales team hears from prospects is how a platform will fit with their existing marketing technology stack. That's why content explaining how your product works alongside the tools a team already uses can be a valuable sales enablement asset.

This kind of content can be shared beyond the buying team, so other budget makers can understand the impact.

A Content Strategy Example for a Software Company

Here's a high-level example for a fictional company, Acme Technologies, that sells a CRM. The strategy focuses on educating its target audience, showing the benefits of the product, and establishing the company as a thought leader in its industry.

  • Goal: Increase leads and sales by showing the benefits of the CRM and establishing Acme as a thought leader.
  • Content plan: A mix of blog posts, case studies, videos, and infographics that highlight successful use cases. A detailed plan lists the pages to optimize and the content to create, with the topic, title, target intent, funnel stage, and key points for each.
  • Distribution plan: Publishing on the website, social media channels, and industry publications, plus outreach to industry influencers to promote the content.
  • Content calendar: A monthly calendar of topics and formats for each piece, with distribution channels and publication dates.

Planning for AI Answers, Not Just Rankings

Search no longer ends with a list of links. AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other answer engines summarize what they find and cite a handful of sources. A content strategy now has to plan for being one of those cited sources, not only for ranking.

That doesn't replace anything above. The same business objectives, audiences, and content clusters still drive the plan. What changes is how you judge the content: does each page answer your audience's questions clearly enough to be quoted, and does your coverage of a topic make you a credible source to cite? Our guide to answer engine optimization covers the tactics, and this breakdown of how AEO and SEO fit together explains where the two disciplines overlap.

Building a Content Strategy

Now that you understand what content strategy is and what it needs to accomplish, you're probably wondering how to put it into practice.

This is where a content strategist can help.

This article covers what content strategy is. For the ongoing practice of keeping a content strategy current and audience-first, start there. And when you're ready to map out every component of your own plan, use this content strategy framework.