Picture this: It’s the end of the year, you’re in the middle of Q4, and you’re starting to plan your content for next year. Problem is, you don’t have a documented content strategy, and you’re confused by all the available content strategy templates.
It’s not just you, though — according to The Content Studio’s “State of (Dis)Content” report, in a survey of over 500 content marketers, a lack of strategy was cited as one of the top 5 challenges content marketers face.
The problem is that not a lot of people know what a content strategy is, what it requiresf, or what goes into creating one. And there are a lot of misconceptions — with content strategy templates often diving into elements that belong on a content calendar or within a content plan rather than identifying the bones of a content strategy. Choosing the right content strategy template depends on your knowledge of content strategy itself.
So let’s start there: What even is a content strategy?
What Is a Content Strategy?
A content strategy is your company’s documented framework that defines why you’re producing and publishing content. Critically, it should reflect your business strategy, tying together your customers’ wants and needs alongside your organization’s strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to differentiate from competitors.
A content strategy is not a content plan, though your content plan will 100% be informed by your strategy. Your content strategy is your “why” while your content plan is your “how.”
If you were creating a content strategy from scratch, your first step would probably be to search for a template. There are various content strategy templates out there, including those from content marketing agencies, platforms, and project management tools. But you can’t choose a template if you don’t know what to look for to begin with, and that starts with knowing what a content strategy is.
Most content strategy templates are actually content plans, consisting of both the core aspects of your content strategy — such as your goals, your value proposition, and your audience. They also may include items that you’ll find in your content plan and calendar, such as individual topics, their purpose, their call to action, and more.
While it might be helpful to have your content strategy documented alongside your plan and calendar, it can get complicated fast. Content plans are long for good reason. Even if your entire strategy consists of repurposing content you already have, you still have a lot to do and keep track of. Therefore, trying to document your strategy in an ever-evolving document or spreadsheet is going to muddle the message.
Your strategy isn’t static by any means, but it won’t fluctuate as often as your content plan. You need to document and store your content strategy somewhere that’s visible to everyone on your team while being flexible enough to evolve with your business and customers’ needs. Keeping it simple by answering a few critical questions — which should make up the core of your content strategy template — will ensure your content marketing strategy is top of mind for your entire team.
6 Elements of a Good Content Strategy Template
Your content strategy will be the basis of your content creation, distribution, and measurement. To create it, you’ll need to tap into that curious 4-year-old you used to be — you know, the one who asked “Why?” after every question (speaking from personal experience).
Your internal monologue should go something like this:
We want to create content because we need more customers.
Why?
Because we haven’t been getting very many leads lately.
Why?
Because our current content isn’t aligning with our audience’s needs.
Why?
Because we need to dive into our target audience more to determine if we need to pivot to a different audience.
By drilling down, you can find out if your current content is working and what you need to do to create a plan and calendar that aligns with your goals. But you won’t learn this in every content strategy template. To know which template will work for you, here are a few key actions a content strategy template should help you complete:
Determining Your Content Goals
According to the Content Marketing Institute, over 50% of B2B marketers recently rated their content strategy as “moderately effective,” and half of those respondents state that it’s because they lack clarity on their goals. So your first question should really be “Why am I creating content?”
As mentioned above, your content strategy should tie into your business goals, so you should be able to determine your content goals pretty easily. If not, then you’ll need to work with your senior leadership to clarify your company’s current business goals. Whether you have one (unlikely) or many content goals, each of them will typically fit into one of these buckets:
- Brand Awareness: For example, is your organization interested in improving market share or launching a new product offering?
- Lead Qualification and Nurture: Are you interested in establishing more marketing qualified opportunities or converting more leads?
- Retention: Are you working on improving your customer lifetime value (CLV) or upselling your current accounts?
These goals should be clearly defined and should be tied to qualitative results that you want to accomplish. For example, if you’re focused on lead qualification and nurture, how many more marketing-qualified opportunities do you want to gain in the next quarter? What do you want your CLV’s percentage increase to be?
Defining Your Audience
Once you know why, you then need to know who, as in; Who are you marketing to? Who interact with your content? Defining this audience should be part of any good content strategy template.
You should already have a clear idea of who you’re marketing to based on who you want purchasing your product. The more specific your organization’s vision and value proposition, the more targeted your audience will be. With this information in mind, think about who needs your solution the most. What’s their job title? What industries do they work in? Are they the ultimate decision maker, or do they report to someone else?
Get as specific as you can, and dive into customer research alongside market research to create a clear picture of who will be consuming your content. The more you understand your audience, the better you’ll understand what types of content they’ll interact with, what platforms they use the most often, which messages resonate and more to guide your future content plan.
Finding the Right Channels
Your business won’t benefit from developing content if you can’t get it in front of your audience. Each piece of content will need to “meet them where they are” on the channels they frequent the most.
Since you have done the work to define your audience, you should also have an idea of where they spend their time to inform your content distribution. For example, are you mostly targeting B2B enterprise organizations? Then you’ll likely need to share content on LinkedIn, and you should work with the trade publications in their industry to publish content. On the other hand, if you want Gen Z consumers to buy your clothing, then you’ll probably have to produce videos for TikTok.
Assessing Your Current Content
After you’ve defined your current goals, audience and content channels, you can conduct a content audit and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Going back through content you’ve already published, and comparing it against that of your competitors, will help you create a content strategy that speaks to the goals and audience you’ve already defined.
I like to create a spreadsheet of all the content my company has produced and outline how each piece is doing in terms of its goals. In other words, if it’s an SEO post, I’ll check where it’s ranking, how many people have visited the page, check bounce rates, and more. From there, I can then determine if the content needs to be updated, removed, or repurposed. For competitor content, I’ll analyze their content against mine, looking at how much of each content type they’re producing, their search engine rankings, and their social media metrics.
After reviewing all this information, I’ll create a list of recommendations that include items to stop, start, or continue. This is also helpful in identifying content gaps — places where you need to create additional content to remain competitive and cover anything missing from the top, middle, or bottom of your marketing funnel.
Please note that your audit is not the strategy itself. When I mentioned your content strategy shouldn’t be long, I meant it. Sharing the audit will be helpful among certain team members (and in some cases, I’ve used my audit as a content library, too). But if you share your content strategy and include the full audit along with it, be prepared for glazed eyes.
Clarifying Your Calls to Action
Armed with your content goals and audience, you probably already have a basic idea of what actions you want your audience members to take. That will help you easily determine the content types and formats you’ll need during content planning. Here are three examples:
- Looking for more leads? You’ll need prospects to fill out a form at some point. That means you’ll need thought leadership content like webinars, gated guides or reports.
- Need to improve brand awareness? Then you might want prospects to click through to your website or talk about you on social media. SEO, influencer and thought leadership content — formatted as SEO, partner and POV blogs — naturally lend themselves to brand awareness efforts. Social videos from subject matter experts and placed articles can also help here.
- Interested in improving retention and upselling current customers? You’ll want them to take action by reaching out to their success agents. They’re more likely to do that after interacting with company news, explainer videos for new products, case studies and other brand-related content.
Measuring Success
How will you know if you’ve achieved success with your content marketing strategy? A good content strategy template will help you outline what metrics you’ll need to measure to know if your organization is heading in the right direction. Again, these align with your business goals.
You should already have a clear understanding of the metrics you need to evaluate based on the goals you set. However, are there additional metrics or key performance indicators that you can measure based on the different types of formats? Are there more metrics you can measure to back up the goals you’ve already set?
The Final Product
Once you’ve taken these six steps, you can write out your final content strategy, defining your goals, audience, channels, formats, content types, what sets your organization apart from your competitors and what metrics to track to reach those goals. Keeping your content strategy brief — no matter what template you use — will be key to keeping it manageable while you move on to the planning stage.
You’ll know you’re going in the right direction if everyone on your team can describe your content strategy in a few sentences. Simplifying your content strategy opens up new opportunities, because it gives your team the freedom to experiment and iterate, grounded in the big content ideas you set as the foundation of your strategy.
