If you don't have a good content strategy, you’re likely going to get lost (or already are). Not having a strategy is a perfect recipe for potential burnout and failure.
Think of your content strategy as the map you need if you want to get where you're going. You've got to be strategic and intentional if you're going to succeed. Especially when competition for attention is so tough.
So how do you create a content strategy?
In this article, you'll learn everything you need to know to create a successful content strategy that consistently drives traffic to your website.
What Is a Content Strategy?
A content strategy is a plan of action purposely designed to guide content marketing activities and ensure they deliver against a specific business objective.
This includes content planning, production, publishing, promoting, tracking, and SEO optimization. It also includes every type of content you produce, including videos, blog posts, podcasts, and social media posts.
Different types of content serve different purposes. For example, you might create a blog post to rank on Google for certain keywords so that you can hook in new leads. Or you might create a case study video to show your products in action to educate leads about your products.
When you lack a strategic approach, your efforts can turn into busywork. But when executed properly, your framework should generate measurable returns on the resources you put into marketing through content. The right strategy will enable you to maximize the return on the time and money you invest in content marketing.
How to Create a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
1. Define Your Goal
Every single piece of content you create should have a clearly defined purpose, such as:
- Earning backlinks from other websites and social accounts to drive traffic to your website.
- Ranking high in the search results on sites like Google and YouTube.
- Educating and nurturing your customers, leads, and existing social audience.
- Moving readers or viewers further along the sales funnel by taking an action (e.g., signing up to your mailing list).
- Driving engagement on social media sites like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram.
So before you begin, make sure to set clear goals for your content marketing efforts. These goals should be SMART:
- Specific: There should be no room for interpretation.
- Measurable: Your goals should be quantifiable.
- Attainable: Be ambitious, but also realistic.
- Relevant: Your goals should lead to the final outcome you want.
- Time-bound: There should be a clear start and end date.
Here's an example of a content marketing SMART goal:
- Specific: We aim to boost blog traffic by increasing our publishing frequency from two to five times a week.
- Measurable: The goal is to boost traffic by 12%.
- Attainable: We grew our blog traffic by 6% last month when we increased our publishing frequency from one to two times a week.
- Relevant: Increasing content production will boost brand awareness and generate more leads from SEO and social sharing.
- Time-bound: We will do this by the end of this month.
- SMART goal: By the end of this month, we will increase blog traffic by 12% by increasing our publishing frequency from two to five posts a week.
To create a content marketing strategy SMART goal, consider questions like:
- How does this contribute to our overall marketing goals?
- Is this the most effective way to achieve our desired end result?
- Do we have the necessary resources to make this goal a reality?
Once you've set your content strategy goals, it's time to move on to step two.
2. Define Your Target Audience
What is a target audience exactly?
In short, a target audience is a group of people who are likely to respond positively to your content. You should be able to define a target audience for every single piece of content you produce.
By defining your target audience, you can better understand how to create content that appeals to their interests, needs, and emotions. In turn, this will lead to a stronger brand and higher conversion rates.
So how do you do it?
First, you'll want to create a buyer persona. Let's look at an example.
The Buyer Persona Institute provides a detailed example of a buyer persona. This includes all of the basic demographic information and psychographic information such as their priorities, potential objections, criteria for making decisions, and what they consider valuable.
OK, but where do you get this information?
If you already have an existing customer base, take a deeper look and try to draw out commonalities. And if you don't, start by investigating your closest competitor's customer base.
You can gather this data through multiple methods. Start with direct conversations: conduct interviews with shoppers and review their written feedback. Survey tools can reveal patterns in buying habits and preferences. Additionally, examine website visitor data to discover which pages attract attention, how long people stay, and where they came from.
Ask questions like:
- Where do they live?
- How old are they?
- How do they identify?
- What are their interests?
- Who do they follow online?
- What is their level of education?
- What kind of jobs do they have?
- How much money do they make?
- What motivates them to purchase something?
- What concerns them most when making a purchase?
Develop a fictional character representing your ideal shopper. Assign them specific details: a name, career, age range, pastimes, where they live, earnings, and dreams. Document which material formats they prefer. Reference this profile when planning future material to verify it will connect with your intended viewers.
Once you've defined your target market, you can begin to identify effective content topics.
3. Develop Effective Content Topics
Your target audience should define everything about the content you create.
Simply put, if you want to generate leads from search engines or boost your social media engagements, you need to create content your target audience will love.
How?
Find out what your target audience is currently searching for and interacting with. There are plenty of ways to do this, but one of the most effective is to use SEO tools to see what people are searching for on search engines.
There are tons of tools out there, such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMRush. There are even plenty of browser extensions like Keywords Everywhere.
Conducting Keyword Research To Identify Content Opportunities
You probably already have some knowledge of your target audience. So begin by making a list of some relevant and important topics. Then, it's time to see how many people are searching these terms.
In this example, we'll use the browser extension Keywords Everywhere. This tool is simple, quick, and easy to use.
Once you've installed the extension, you'll see keyword information whenever you use a search engine like Google, YouTube, eBay, Etsy, Bing, or Amazon. Specifically, Keywords Everywhere will show you following for each keyword:
- Volume: How many searches a keyword receives per month.
- Cost-per-click: The average cost-per-click of the keyword when engaging in pay-per-click advertising.
- Competition: How competitive the keyword is.
When starting out, try to find keywords that have a monthly search volume in the thousands or tens of thousands. The volume should be large enough to draw in substantial traffic but not so large that your content will be lost in the noise.
With these tips, you should have some solid keywords that you know your target audience is actively searching for.
Turning Your Keywords Into Content Topics
For example, if one of your keywords is “snowboard helmet,” you could brainstorm the following topic ideas:
- The Top 10 Snowboard Helmets in 2025
- How to Choose the Best Snowboard Helmet for Your Needs
- 7 Reasons to Always Wear a Snowboard Helmet
Just remember the golden rule of content creation: It's never about you, it's about your readers.
So aim to be helpful and engaging.
If you're struggling to come up with great content ideas, then consider checking out BuzzSumo, which allows you to see the top performing content for certain keywords.
Once you've got some great topic ideas, it's time to choose your content's format.
4. Identify The Most Effective Content Format
Today, there are tons of different content formats available. Here are some of the most popular types used by content marketers:
Now, each of these formats also has plenty of options.
Take video marketing: you can create vlogs, reviews, how-tos, behind the scenes, interviews, skits, Q&As, and a whole lot more.
You also need to decide on the length of your content and which platform you plan to publish it on according to where you hope to engage your audience most.
For example, if you plan to create a video, will you publish it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram Stories, or your own website? You can also opt for a multichannel approach, but remember that each platform has different audiences and success factors.
But here's the thing: You can't do them all and you shouldn't do them all.
Unless you have a massive team and an endless budget, trying to produce content in many different formats will stretch your resources to the limit.
For small businesses, it's best to just have one or two content formats that you can really throw yourself into.
Consider where your viewers already spend their time online. Business-focused companies might find their audience on LinkedIn, while younger shoppers might prefer TikTok. Match your material format to the spaces your ideal customers already frequent.
5. Determine Your Posting Frequency
Consistency is key.
Without a consistent content schedule, you won't build the necessary momentum to attract organic traffic.
On top of that, the type of content you create will largely inform how often you should share it. For example, it's likely you'll post more social media updates than long-form blog posts.
There are two main things to keep in mind: Your limited resources and your audience's appetite.
Creating long-form blog posts or videos takes a lot of resources, which likely means that you won’t be able to create as many of them. The longer the content, the less often you post.
You also want to provide the right amount of content for your target audience.
Too little and you won't effectively nurture deep customer relationships. Too much and you'll overwhelm them and send them looking for the Unsubscribe button. Curata's content marketing pyramid provides a helpful way to see how often you should post different types of content.
You also need to decide when to share your content. Think about when it's most convenient for your target audience to consume your content. Plus, check your social media analytics to work out when your audience is most engaged online.
Once you've decided on a posting frequency, create a content calendar. You can use a simple spreadsheet to keep track of your content or use a tool like CoSchedule, Asana, or Trello. Start by making simple columns to track where each piece of content is in your overall content strategy.
Establishing a predictable rhythm for publishing shows your viewers they can rely on you as a trustworthy information source. Regular output keeps you visible and maintains interest over time.
6. Plan Your Content Promotion Activities
Every great content strategy includes content promotion.
Marketer and entrepreneur Derek Halpern recommends spending 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time marketing it. While this recommendation harkens all the way back to 2013, it still has a ton of merit. Halpern says:
“If you spend time writing a piece of content, and that content only gets 1,000 readers, chances are there are one million other people in the world who can benefit from what you wrote,"" writes Halpern. ""Why then, would you spend more time creating content when you already have something that your ideal customers can benefit from?”
So how do you go about marketing your content?
Here are a few ways you can promote content you've already published:
- Promote your content to your existing mailing list to deepen customer relationships.
- Share your posts on your social media platforms.
- Repurpose parts of your content into different formats (e.g., take short clips from your long videos to create Facebook and Instagram Stories).
- Pay to promote high-performing posts on social media.
You can also use social media tools like Buffer or HootSuite to schedule your social media posts in advance.
To supercharge your content marketing promotion activities, it's best to build them into the content itself:
- Create new research in your niche that other people will link to.
- Include material and sources from prominent brands in your niche, then email them in the hope that people read, share, and link to your content.
- Ask influencers for a quote to include in your content and then convince them to share the finished piece.
Remember to circle back every now and then to promote previous content that still performs well.
7. Continually Improve and Optimize Your Content and Strategy
Content audits are where the real magic happens. By doing a content audit, you can extract valuable takeaways for improving your content strategy on a continual basis.
Ideally, you should have a simple spreadsheet that allows you to clearly measure your content's performance.
The data that you track will depend on your goals and the format of your content. For example, you might track:
- Video metrics (e.g., views, subscribers, watch time, etc.)
- Website data (e.g., pageviews, clicks, signups, bounces, etc.)
- Social interactions (e.g., comments, shares, likes, etc.)
You could even use URL shorteners to track clicks from individual videos and social media posts to your website.
Examine your results regularly to determine what needs adjustment. When your output stops delivering on your objectives, revise your approach. Watch for patterns that reveal which topics connect most strongly, then double down on that success.
8. Update and Expand on Previous Content
An important part of search engine optimization (SEO) is refreshing previous content. Thankfully, these changes don't need to be massive.
For example, it's inevitable that parts of your blog posts will become outdated. When this happens, you should remove those parts, add new relevant information, and optimize the keywords.
This simple practice can be extremely effective since newer content is more likely to be relevant to searchers. That's why search engines like Google prioritize up-to-date content. If you have a high-performing piece of content that your audience loves, why not create more content on the same topic?
All in all, it comes down to one simple phrase: Do more of what works and less of what doesn't.
Content Strategy Summary
A content strategy is your roadmap to content marketing success.
Without one, you won't be able to create effective content or enable your performance to consistently improve into the future.
In summary, when creating a content strategy make sure to:
- Define your goal: Create SMART goals to ensure you effectively utilize your resources.
- Define your target audience: Make sure you know exactly who you're creating content for.
- Develop effective content topics: Identify the topics that your target audience will love.
- Identify the most effective content format: Create content in the formats that your audience prefers.
- Determine your posting frequency: Post enough to engage your audience and not so much that they feel overwhelmed.
- Create a content marketing calendar: Be consistent in your content marketing strategy to build momentum.
- Plan your content marketing strategy promotion: Spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time promoting it.
- Track and improve your content marketing efforts: Have a documented strategy to draw out insights that you can use to learn and improve your content efforts.
- Update and expand on previous content: Refresh old content to improve SEO and expand on high-performing topics.
Don't start producing content without a proper strategy. Have a plan and an end goal in place to get the most out of your content efforts.
Content Strategy FAQ
What Is A Content Marketing Strategy?
A content strategy is a plan of action purposely designed to guide content marketing activities and ensure they deliver against a specific business objective. It can include content planning, promotion, tracking, optimization, production, and many more related steps.
Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Strategy?
When you lack a strategic approach, your efforts can turn into busywork. But when executed properly, it can generate measurable returns on the resources you put into marketing through content. The right strategy will enable you to maximize the return on the time and money you invest in content marketing.
What Are the Steps to a Successful Content Marketing Strategy?
Creating a content marketing strategy is complex and depends on your business, but there are nine steps you want to follow for any chance at success:
- Define your goal.
- Define your target audience.
- Develop effective content topics.
- Identify the most effective content format.
- Determine your posting frequency.
- Create a content marketing calendar.
- Plan your content marketing strategy promotion.
- Track and improve your content marketing efforts.
- Update and expand on previous content.
What Is the SMART Framework?
The SMART method is a helpful framework for ensuring that your strategic goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
What Are the Most Effective Content Formats?
There are many content formats out there, so it’s challenging to know what’s the most effective. Marketers can write blogs and targeted emails, make visual content like videos and infographics, host webinars, publish podcasts, and develop social media strategies, to name a few. The most effective format will be what connects with your specific audience.