Content Strategy

A content strategy takes your business goals and then uses content as a primary means to achieve them. When developing a content strategy, you need to ask the following questions.

Question 1

Who will be reading your content?

  • Who is the target audience for your content?
  • For how many audiences are you creating content?

Just as your business might have more than one type of customer, your content strategy can cater to more than one type of reader or viewer.

Question 2

What problem will you be solving for your audience(s)?

Ideally, your product or service solves a problem you know your audience has. By the same token, your content coaches and educates your audience through this problem as they begin to identify and address it.

A sound content strategy supports people on both sides of your product: those who are still figuring out what their main challenges are, and those who are already using your product to overcome these challenges. Your content reinforces the solution(s) you're offering and makes your customers more qualified users of your product.

Content Strategy
Question 3

What makes you unique?

Your competitors likely have a similar product as yours, which means your potential customers need to know what makes yours better — or, at least, different. This is where content comes in.

In order to prove why you're worth buying from, you need to prove why you're worth listening to.

Content Strategy
Question 4

What content formats will you focus on?

  • What forms will your content take?
  • Infographics?
  • Videos?
  • Blog posts?

Having identified the topics you want to take a position on, you'll need to determine which formats to budget for so you can best express that position.

Question 5

What channels will you publish on?

Just as you can create content in different formats, you'll also have different channels you can publish to.

These can include owned properties, such as your website and blog; and social media properties, such as Facebook and Twitter. It is important to use data to work out the best channels to use.

Question 6

How will you manage content creation and publication?

Figuring out how you'll create and publish all your content can be a daunting task. It's important for a content strategy to know who's creating what, where it's being published, and when it's going live.