10 Things to Remember When Creating Your Content Marketing Strategy

You just launched your SaaS product or a new website for your brand and you’re looking to create content to market your brand.

Would you rather write about random topics or sit down to plan your content, making sure you’re reaching the right people?

I bet it’s the second option, which is why creating a content marketing strategy is important to the success of your business.

This checklist can help you review your strategy, whether you’re developing your first one or you already have one in place.

By evaluating this, you can continue to provide relevant and valuable content for your target audience and clients.

In the words of Robert Rose, the Chief Strategy Advisor, at Content Marketing Institute:

Successful marketers use content marketing to generate demand from new and unknown audiences — not just to locate demand that already exists.”

In this post, you’re going to learn about 10 things you shouldn’t miss in your marketing strategy.

But before then, let’s talk about what a content marketing strategy is and why you need it.

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a detailed plan done to monitor and analyse the creation and distribution of content to grow your audience and reach business goals.

Your strategy can cover various forms of content like blog posts, newsletters, videos, podcasts, ebooks and many more. The goal of content marketing is to share the right information with your audience and potential customers.

In the Semrush 2023 Global report, over 80% of marketers who are successful in content marketing have a documented strategy.

Building your content marketing strategy is like using Scrabble tiles to build a word. Every letter is important if your word must make sense and the higher the value of each letter, the higher the score.

Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Strategy?

Coming up with a plan before creating and sharing your content is the way to go. Here are a few ways this will benefit your brand:

• Helps in setting and achieving your goals

Your plan to share and distribute content is with a goal in mind. Creating a strategy allows you to set the goals you want to achieve and how you aim to achieve them.

• Create brand visibility

Having a strategy in place helps you to post consistently and, as you keep publishing content, you attract more readers and prospective customers.

• Aids in producing content that converts

Every piece of content has a purpose, and if yours is to convert readers, you’ll need a plan to help you achieve it. You cannot post carelessly and expect amazing results.

• Useful for tracking results

If you have no goals planned, it’s harder to track your progress. To monitor results, assess your progress, and make improvements, having a content strategy is your best bet.

Now that you know why you need a content marketing strategy, what questions do you need to answer when creating one?

Essential Questions To Ask When Creating a Content Strategy?

• Who is going to read your content?

Who are you creating for? Identifying this is important to tailor your content to address the needs of those people.

If your product caters for business owners who need help with creating a catalogue of products and a seamless checkout for their customers, then you should target B2C business.

• What problem will you be solving for your audience?

Considering the same product, the problem your SaaS product would solve is making it easier for those businesses to create a catalogue and ease checkout.

You can target the goal of your strategy as helping them understand your product and its use and then making them sign up.

• What makes your content unique?

You’ll need to find out what makes your content different from every other brand like yours. Bringing your Unique Selling Point (USP) into your strategy is a game changer.

Considering the same product, your USP could be that they can access their catalogue on multiple devices or you offer seamless integration with their eCommerce platform.

• How often will you publish content?

We often downplay this in content strategies due to wanting to focus on quality over quantity. The goal is to do both at the same frequency.

Find a sustainable rate at which you can create content and publish it long term. You may need to hire a freelance writer or an agency to help with this.

• What channels will you use?

Finding a suitable content distribution channel is a key need for your strategy. Where do you want to promote your content? Are you considering repurposing? Answering this question will help in your overall marketing.

Following the example I made above, you can consider LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram because of the large number of B2C businesses on those platforms.

Things You Should Remember in Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

You’ve seen how important a content marketing strategy is for your brand or business. If you’ve answered the necessary questions, then you should learn how to create an effective one.

Here are 10 things you shouldn’t miss when developing your strategy:

1. Have a Definite Marketing Goal

Remember what we discussed: ‌How having a plan can help you set and hit goals? Your strategy won’t work without an expected outcome.

Always try to have a clear objective in mind for each piece of content you create for your audience, as well as how your efforts will advance your brand.

Examples of goals you can set are hitting 1000 sign-ups for your new productivity tracker SaaS product, making $10,000 in sales or driving 1M impressions to your website.

Don’t overthink it, set the goal and work towards it.

2. Focus on Buyer Persona’s Challenge

Once you have your goals all set, don’t forget to do extensive research on your ideal customer.

Your buyer persona is a representation of who your ideal customer is. It’s created based on research and data from people who need your product or service.

Focusing on creating your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) will help in creating content that solves whatever challenges they face. It’s in solving their challenge that you get to increase your revenue.

An example of a buyer persona for a business that owns an online grocery store can be a busy parent with 3 toddlers looking to shop online for convenience or to buy quick healthy meals.

Your online store provides solutions that would help everyone in that range save time and provide healthy meals for the family.

3. Research Your Competitors

When most businesses hear this, it feels like you’re being asked to copy what your competitors are doing, but it’s far from that.

The question then is, why do I need to do competitor research? You target this research to help you understand the market or industry dynamics, especially if you’re a startup.

Gain insights from what they are doing and it’s working for them, find the loopholes and figure out how you can provide better solutions for users or customers.

Here are a few ways you can do competitor research:

• Identify your primary competitors
• Explore their online presence both on social media and websites
• Analyse their blog content, FAQ and customer reviews
• See how they engage their audience and take feedback
• Pay attention to which type of content the audience prefers
• Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Semrush to find keywords they are ranking for
• Compare their pricing or product with yours
• Participate in live events for the industry to gain insights into new and upcoming trends

While doing your research, you must be careful not to copy your competitor’s strategy blindly, forgetting your unique proposition. Ensure you stay away from every form of unethical practice.

4. Find Out The Type of Content Your Audience Consumes

Knowing what kind of content your target audience prefers will help your marketing efforts succeed and save wasted effort.

The influence content type has on your strategy is big. Spend a large amount of time to find out the right format you can adapt while you consider repurposing your content into different formats.

I created this post to help you do it right with content repurposing

Take an example from Hubspot. They are currently active on TikTok, sharing relatable videos, using LinkedIn to share videos and infographics, making fun tweets on X (Twitter) and repurposing this content on their Instagram page.

This shows their content to different audiences on different platforms achieving the same goal of helping creators with their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.

5. Invest in the Right Content Management System (CMS)

Content Management System is a software application that simplifies how users create, edit, organise, and publish digital content on the internet.

Using the right CMS should help you save time, experience ease in managing content, optimise content for SEO, scale large content, and offer the right analytics to track your progress.

When choosing a Content Management System (CMS) for your website, here’s a list of things you should consider:

• Ease of use
• Customisation and modification of plugins, templates and others
• Security of data
• Cost of management
• The system’s speed and performance
• Mobile responsiveness and many more.

You can use tools like WordPress, Wix, Shopify, Hubspot CMS or Squarespace for your content management depending on your needs and budget.

6. Develop Content Considering Funnel Stages

While crafting your content, ensure you target the stage every reader is on their buyer journey.

Why should you do this? It makes your content more personal and specific for each reader. Let’s have a practical overview of how you can incorporate this.

• Awareness

A reader in the awareness stage doesn’t need to read an email newsletter about a discount you’re offering. Don’t overwhelm them with product-centric content.

Instead, you can consider education and informational content. This is to make them aware of their challenge and your solution.

For example, if you sell skincare products content for this kind of reader can be “Best skincare for oily face” or “A guide to skincare products for combination skin”

• Consideration

Writing for a reader who is considering what you sell should aim at nurturing their interest and providing them with content to help them trust your brand or product.

You can create email newsletters, reviews, case studies, and competitor pages.

If you own an online store that sells smartphones, you can create content comparing different phone specifications to help the reader decide which products they’ll buy.

• Decision

At this stage, you have a reader who knows what they want to buy, what they need is a little push from your content. Your content should include pricing pages, demos, discounts, special offers, and free trials.

If you have a productivity tracker SaaS product, a topic you can write about can be “Using X Software to improve your workday”

• Post-Purchase

In this stage, your content is more targeted at encouraging customers to buy again, ensuring their satisfaction and prompt referrals.

Let’s say you sell a smartwatch. You can send the customer an email with set-up instructions or create FAQs for recurring challenges.

Examples include: “How to set up X for your workout,” “Where can I find X on my smartwatch?”

7. Create a Content Calendar

Having a content calendar is important in your strategy, especially if you’re outsourcing content. This will help you know what content goes out and who is in charge of the content.

Here’s a list of things you can include in your calendar

• Content topics
• Content brief (Optional; writers may come up with this on their own)
• Deadline and publication dates
• Content Format
• Platform
• Content creation status
• CTA (Optional, you can include it in the brief)
• Visuals
• Assignee

You can use tools like Trello, Asana, Notion, Airtable, or Monday to plan and manage your content calendar.

8. Have a Content Workflow

Content workflow is the step-by-step process you follow while creating your content. It’s a structure that helps to create, edit, approve, and distribute content.

You shouldn’t miss this in your content marketing strategy. It helps in maintaining the quality and efficiency of your content.

Here’s a template workflow you can follow:

• Idea generation: Generating ideas from social media, customer needs and keyword research.
• Content outline: Creating a brief for the content to know what to incorporate into writing while considering unique selling points.
• Content developing: Writing or creating the content fully based on the outline.
• Editing and review: Editing to ensure content is fluff-free and grammatically accurate.
• Content approval: Depending on the organisation, the head of marketing or content marketing manager can approve the content.
• Optimisation: Done to ensure content fulfils all the requirements for SEO and user experience.
• Publishing: After completing all these tasks, you can publish the content on selected platforms and sometimes schedule it with tools.
• Performance tracking: Tracking the page views, engagements and other relevant conversions
• Content repurposing: You can transform content into different formats on other channels
• Content result and analytics: Insights from overall content marketing efforts to help future strategies and see if you achieved the goals

9. Document Your Ideas

Have you been scrolling on your favourite social media platform and you found a valuable post that caught your attention?

You stop to read that content and suddenly an idea pops up in your head about something you can create too. Then you continue scrolling and forget to document the idea.

Most times, those content ideas are never recoverable. You should document ideas to develop them later when you’re planning a strategy.

Here’s something I do personally to document my idea using Trello. On my Trello board, I have a tab named Brain Dump. That’s where I drop raw ideas and then use them when planning content at the end of this month.

You can download Trello on your mobile phone or use it on the web.

Image of my Trello Workspace

10. Establish Your KPIs

Don’t forget to know what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you want to target when creating your content marketing strategy.

In the words of Rebecca Lieb, a strategic advisor:

“There is no content strategy without measurement strategy. Before embarking on a content initiative, irrespective of medium or platform, it’s important to know what you want to achieve.”

Having a well-defined KPI helps you in assessing performance, achieving goals, and making data-driven decisions. Content marketing is a long-term game. You can measure these indicators every 3 months and evaluate your strategy.

Here’s a list of KPIs you can measure:

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
• Page load time
• Bounce rate
• Organic search traffic
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Conversion rate
• Dwell time
• Click-Through Rate (CTR)
• Cost per Click (CPC)
• Open rate (Email and website)
• Social media engagement

Key Takeaways

• Creating a strong content marketing strategy is a no-brainer if you want to drive success for your brand or business. Your investment in a strategy will help hit your goals, build your visibility and help with your SEO efforts.
• Your strategy should include answering some essential questions like who your content is meant for, the problem it solves, what makes it unique, and how you plan to publish it.
• While creating your content, remember to research your competitors, create audience-focused content, find the right content management system, plan your calendar and distribution, and then identify your KPIs.

Creating a Content Marketing Strategy Requires Intentionality

It takes careful study and creativity to build your content marketing strategy. While your target audience may constantly change their taste, the fundamentals of content marketing are unchanged.

This shows how much you should invest in having a strategy tailored to your business goals. As you follow this checklist, keep in mind the need to adapt to new objectives to keep creating valuable, informative and entertaining content for your audience.