How to Develop a Content Strategy: Step-by-Step Guide

With a successful content strategy, you can build a relationship with your target audience while positioning yourself as an expert in your field. Ideally, you can leverage the trust you develop with your audience through high-quality content that moves you closer to your overarching goals.

Explore how to define content strategy, why your content strategy matters, and guidance as you develop an effective content strategy.

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What is content strategy? 

Your content strategy details your plan to use content in a way that moves you closer to your business goals. It's essentially a roadmap for all of your content marketing efforts and can be included in a more comprehensive marketing strategy.

Typically, you'll want to design a content strategy the attracts and engages customers throughout all stages of the buyer's journey. In implementing a content strategy, you can expect to organize your existing content library, create new content, and monitor your content's success.

What is a content strategist?

Content strategists specifically work with content strategies to create branded content for their organization’s channels, both print and digital. Their goal is to reach new customers and audience members, and they play an important role in a business as the content they write, edit, or publish helps a company reach its overarching goals. 

Common responsibilities for a content strategist are gathering information about their target audience, creating content strategy frameworks, maintaining SEO guidelines, managing and training a team of content collaborators, and more. 

Why is content strategy important?

Every piece of content tells a story, and together, a body of content tells an even bigger story about who you are, your expertise, your values, and your place in the world. Developing a strategy for your content ensures that you're telling a cohesive narrative every time you hit publish.

With an effective content strategy, you'll create opportunities to educate and serve your audience, establish yourself as an authority in your niche market, and show your audience why your business matters.

How to create a content strategy 

Review the following seven steps of the content strategy planning process:

1. Define your goals.

2. Research your target audience.

3. Conduct a content audit.

4. Choose your content types.

5. Create your content plan.

6. Develop a process for content creation. 

7. Measure the success of your content.

Take a closer look at each step.

1. Define your content strategy goals.

With clearly defined desired outcomes and success measures, you can design a strategy that moves you closer to your business goals. Think about what you'd like to achieve with your content. (At this stage, focus specifically on the "what"—we'll get to the "how" in later steps.)

It may help to structure your goals with SMART methodology. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Below are some examples to draw from:

• Generate 50 percent more qualified leads in 90 days. 

• Double the number of social media followers in 60 days. 

• Get 100 new email subscribers in 30 days.    

2. Research your target audience. 

Who are the potential customers you'd like to introduce to your business? This group of people makes up your target audience, and they likely have some shared characteristics worth keeping in mind as you develop your content.

It may help to create a buyer persona, which is a fictional representation of your target customer that you use to guide your content creation process. Developing personas can make it easier to reflect on target customers’ needs and how your content can meet those needs. 

Some questions to ask as you develop your buyer persona include:

• What are their demographics and psychographics?

• What are their interests, values, and needs?

• How does your business fit into their lives?

As you prepare your content strategy, it can also help to research how your target audience receives, consumes, and engages with content, as well as their preferred communication styles.

3. Conduct a content audit.

Before you plan to create new content, it's worth revisiting the content you already have. Consider what types of content you've published, how well your content has performed, and whether your existing content has historically contributed to your company goals. Additionally, consider the opposite: whether any of your content has underperformed or moved you away from your goals.

Through assessing your current content library, you can gather hints about the types of content that your target audience might like or dislike in the future, and use this knowledge to guide future content plans.

Conducting a competitor analysis

In addition to auditing your own content, you may be able to learn more about your target audience through a competitor analysis. Evaluating the competitive landscape can help reveal industry standards and opportunities to create fresh content that fills gaps and better serves customers.

During a competitor analysis, you'll examine the content practices of businesses targeting audiences who are similar to your target audience. Take note of the types of content they publish, where they publish, how their audience engages with their content, and topics they cover.

Then, consider what aspects of their content strategy you may want to adopt and how you can elevate your content beyond their offerings.

4. Choose your content strategy deliverables.

Next, think about the types of content that you can reasonably create, your target audience is likely to react positively to, and can help you reach your content goals. You may also consider different types of content for different stages of the customer journey. Some common types of content to consider include:

• Blog posts

• Social media posts

• Videos

• Podcasts

• Email newsletters

• Case studies

• White papers

• Templates

• E-books

Once you choose the types of content that make the most sense for your needs, consider the steps you'll need to take to optimize your content types for the platform you plan to focus on. For example, if you're publishing blog posts on your company website, you may want to use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and tools, which can help surface your content on search engines like Google for relevant search terms. Or, if you plan to incorporate social media content creation into your content strategy, you may want to consider the hashtags your target audience may follow or the viral moments they're responding to.

Knowing how you'll optimize your content types for your chosen platforms is one way to think strategically about your content.

5. Create your content development plan.

At this point, you have a strong foundation on which to start strategically planning your actual content. Reflect on the work you've done so far to determine the content topics you'd like to address across your various content types. Here, consider topics at the intersection of your unique expertise and your target audience's interests, values, or needs. You may also brainstorm ways you can further conversations around content areas that have historically performed well for you or that perform well for your direct business competitors.

Leveraging your content across different platforms is another way to strategically approach your content. Audiences may have different communication expectations across different platforms. Think about how you can repurpose content pertaining to the same topic across your chosen platforms.

Some people find it helpful to organize their content plan with a content calendar or an editorial calendar.

6. Develop a process for content creation.

With your plan in place, you’ll have more clarity around what you'll need to do in order to begin generating your content. Consider the people you'll need on your content team in order to meet your goals and execute your plan, whether that's content strategists tasked with audience research and ideation, content creators willing to appear on camera, or writers who can serve as subject matter experts.

Also, consider the tools you might need as you develop and publish your content. Tools may include a content management system (CMS), social listening tools, or editing software.

Since you'll need to generate content on a regular basis, a streamlined creation process can make it easier over time to come up with new ideas and build continuous content that serves your audience and expands your goals.

7. Measure the success of your content.  

Once your content is published and your audience begins engaging with it, you’ll need to have a plan in place for measuring how well the content performs. Many websites, social media platforms, and email systems report metrics like the number of views or clicks a piece of content gets and how many people are subscribing or following over a span of time.

Determine the metrics that are most relevant to your content goals, then decide on the best way to track those metrics over time. Once you begin to see how your content is performing, this will provide you with a basis for adjusting individual pieces or content or the strategy as a whole. 

Learn content strategy with Coursera

Continue exploring how a strong content strategy can elevate your business practices. Learn Content Strategy for Professionals from Northwestern University, or expand your digital marketing skills with Google's Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate, both available on Coursera. Sign up for Coursera for free to start learning today.