Content marketing strategy: A practical guide

A content marketing strategy is a data-driven plan to create and share valuable content to attract and engage a target audience. A strategy is essential to create content that helps your audience and drives business goals like revenue growth.

Too often, content is created based on what feels right. That’s not a bad place to start.

But there’s a better way.

With a successful content marketing strategy, you can produce content that’s true to your brand, supports your business, and creates an efficient content production machine. Plus, you’ll have supporting data confirming that the content you invest in is impactful. 

This guide explains what a content marketing strategy is, why it’s important, and how to set your strategy up for success. Plus, there’s a nine-step comprehensive guide to creating your strategy so you’ll know exactly how to do it.

What is a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a plan for creating and distributing content that supports prospective buyers and customers throughout their entire customer journey. A content marketing strategy also supports both business and marketing goals by keeping them central to the content created. With a reminder of what matters to the business and marketing, content drives brand awareness, builds trust, generates qualified leads, and nurtures long-term customer relationships.

Why is content strategy important

A strong content marketing strategy allows you to build a data-driven content plan that supports prospects and customers and drives business goals.

The benefits are undeniable:

• You’ll know why you’re creating a piece of content, who for, and how to get it in front of your audience.
• Strategic content plans are highly measurable. You’ll know how content performs because you created it to reach specific people or meet business goals. 
• Content strategy aligns marketing teams because you think about every marketing channel’s role in an effective strategy.

With content assets that effectively serve multiple marketing teams, investment in content becomes a no-brainer for financial decision makers. The more a content asset is shared and repurposed by marketing, the more valuable it becomes.

Elements you need before creating a content marketing strategy

The best content strategy is created with business goals and target audiences in mind. Let’s look at these two essential elements.

Business and marketing goals

Before creating a content strategy, you need to know why you’re creating content. What exactly are you trying to achieve?

You may need support from leaders to guide you on the wider business objectives and marketing objectives. 

It’s not enough to have goals like “increase brand awareness” and “boost lead generation.”

What you want are SMART goals, which are:

• Specific: “We’ll generate 50 new web hosting plan signups per month via the company’s blog content by adding contextual calls to action (CTAs) on the assets representing high-intent traffic.”
• Measurable: “We’ll use conversion tracking on Google Analytics to set up a report that accurately enumerates the new customers converting from these blogs.”
• Achievable: “We’re currently earning 30 new customers per month via the company’s blog content, with a current growth rate of 10% month over month. Without any further changes to the strategy, we would achieve 50 new monthly signups in around six months.”
• Relevant: “By adding contextual CTAs, we can more effectively direct high-intent visitors toward converting.”
• Time-bound: “With our updated strategy, we’ll achieve this goal within three months of starting.”

Defining SMART goals—then following through—will provide you the roadmap you need for impactful results.

Why?

Because you’ll know:

• Exactly what you need to achieve
• How you’ll measure success
• That the goal is achievable
• How you’ll achieve your goal
• When you expect to see results

How business and marketing goals help your content marketing strategy.

Well-defined goals will help you determine what content fits into the strategy, what can sit on a future wish list, and what content doesn’t quite align with your goals at all. 

---

Any content that makes it into the strategy must support your SMART goals.

---

Audience personas 

Before starting a content marketing strategy, you must know who you’re creating content for.

Actually, it’s more than that.

You need to know:

• What your audience cares about (e.g., hosting a website in a safe environment)
• Problems they’re trying to solve (e.g., their current hosting solution is expensive)
• How they’d prefer to find information (e.g., in video content on a specific platform)
• What motivates them to take action (e.g., cost savings, performance guarantees, or social proof)

And that’s where audience personas come in.

Audience personas represent segments within your target audience(s). They are fictitious profiles based on your prospective buyers. 

Information within audience persona documents helps marketers understand customer needs, behaviors, goals, and challenges to refine messaging and content and improve campaign performance. 

Over 70% of B2B buyers prefer content that drills down into relevant or specific topic areas, according to a 2023 Content Preferences Survey by Demand Gen Report. 

Get specific with your audience targeting. Take what you’ve learned and translate it into a buyer persona document that includes, at minimum, your target customers’:

• Most likely job role(s)
• Top three challenges
• Preferred content formats
• Key buying decision factors
• Preferred information channels

Try this straightforward persona templates app that can get you up and running fast. With the app, you can create a buyer persona from three templates:

1. Default template: Basic template that you can use to build your buyer persona 
2. B2B template: Basic template that fits most B2B needs 
3. User persona template: The template that is useful when you want to focus solely on the people who are using/will be using your product or service

Below is an example of the B2B template. 

Simply fill in the fields, and the app will create an audience persona. The template is basic, but this will get you moving if you don’t have audience personas yet. Plus, once you start, you’ll likely be inspired to elaborate and build on the template.

Once you’ve completed the audience persona, share the final buyer personas with the rest of your marketing team so you’re all on the same page. Plan to revisit these regularly.

---

Pro tip: Less is more. Focus on the information that impacts your content decisions. Avoid irrelevant details that don’t help your content marketing strategy.

---

Don’t overlook decision-maker profiles, including those who might not engage with you directly but still influence outcomes. For example, the Head of Finance might have significant input into what the company invests in based on costs. Without their input, you might not secure financial investment. You want all decision-makers considered in your content strategy.

You can go into detail mapping your audience personas, but here’s what a basic one-page audience persona might look like.

Create a content marketing strategy in 9 steps

Your specific business must heavily guide your content marketing strategy. Of course, many elements of content strategy can be completed using common sense, just by knowing your customers’ needs.

But you’ll have the most effective strategy following this step-by-step guide.

Why?

Because we’ll show you how to gather marketing insights. The data will either validate your instincts or reveal new opportunities. Or both! Either way, with data in hand, you can refine content ideas with confidence.

Step 1: Choose your content pillars

Content pillars are core topics that you’ll cover in your content strategy. Think of them as broad topics. Each topic will have multiple pieces of content within it.

In the example below, the broad topic is “Content Marketing.” Within that topic, there are subtopics (such as “Case Study”) and individual content pieces (such as “Content Marketing Case Studies”).

You can create your content pillars from business objectives. For example, if your business wants to drive leads for a particular product or service, such as sustainable hosting services, that becomes a content pillar. 

As a guide, start with 1-3 core topics; they form the foundation of your content strategy. If you can do more, that’s great, but you have to remain realistic about how much content your team can create while keeping to a high standard. 

To help prioritize content pillars:

• Start with the most important products or services based on your business objectives. If there’s something you need to sell, content marketing around that topic makes sense.
• Consider the highest revenue-generating products or services. You might get a better ROI from your content efforts if you focus on products and services that bring more money into the business.
• Think about how well you can support a particular topic. For example, if you’re selling marketing services and have particularly strong case studies in email marketing, prioritize that as a content pillar because you’ll have a good chance of building trust, which leads to sales. 

Step 2: Start your keyword research

With the right approach, you can create content that appeals to your human buyers while also “appealing” to search engines, that is, getting indexed in relevant searches. You don’t have to choose one over the other.

The data provided by keyword research plays two helpful roles in content marketing strategy:

1. It reveals what you must cover to rank in search engines
2. It shows what your audience is looking for

Keyword research is a critical part of creating a content marketing strategy. If you’re going through the effort of creating content, you might as well get as many eyes on it as possible. This is where SEO and keyword research come in. If you know the keywords people are searching to find the content you’re creating, you can give yourself the best chance of appearing on page one of search results.

A major benefit of SEO?

When someone clicks on your content in a Google search, you can be certain that the content is what they were looking for. 

Keyword research can be accomplished in two core ways:

1. Using Google Search Console: This is an excellent tool for finding keywords that give you a good to great chance of ranking. It’s also free.
2. Using keyword research tools: There are a whole host of tools that provide data on keywords, including search volumes, difficulty, internet, and more

Let’s walk through using both of these options.

Using Google Search Console for keyword research

Google Search Console is a must-use in content strategy creation. This free software shows the queries (read: keywords) for which your website is already receiving impressions and clicks. Impressions are visibility within Google search, i.e., the times your website was shown to a Google searcher as a result, and clicks are—you guessed it—click-throughs from Google by users.

If you’re already getting clicks, there’s a high chance you’ll be able to significantly improve the number of click-throughs with an optimized content strategy. If you’re getting impressions for keywords, but not much click-through, it’s still a good sign that with a focused content strategy, you’ll be able to convert those views to clicks.

Think of the keywords you’re already getting impressions and clicks for as “low-hanging fruit” (content opportunities that are, relatively speaking, easy to achieve).

Let’s take a look at how to find some queries your site is ranking for. 

Go to Google Search Console > “Performance” > click “Search Results” > click “Queries.”

Below the graph, you’ll find the queries your site is being found for. Review the keywords and see if it makes sense to include them in your new content strategy. If they do, make a note of them. In the keyword map section below, we’ll show you how to use these keywords to form the content plan.

---

Pro tip: It can be helpful to think about impressions as a stand-in for search volume. For a particular query or search term, you can set the date range to a month and see how many impressions are being earned. The higher the number of impressions is, the higher your monthly search volume is. 

Impressions as search volume is most accurate if you’re ranked in position one of Google, because your site gets visibility every time the keyword is searched. This is because top spots get the most visibility. As you move further down Google’s search engine results page (SERP), or onto page two and beyond, impressions drop significantly. Therefore, you don’t get an accurate view of how many times queries are searched because you’re not being seen each time they’re searched.

---

How to choose keywords:

• Filter by clicks or impressions to find queries on your site that drive the most impressions and clicks. Those with high numbers of clicks and impressions will be, in theory, easier to rank for, because your website is already getting featured high enough in Google that people are finding and clicking your listing.
• Choose keywords that make sense. There’s really nothing wrong with relying on common sense when it comes to selecting keywords. You know your customers and what they need from you and what they might search for on Google.
• Think about search intent, which is what users are looking for when searching a keyword. Common types of search intent include “Commercial intent” (someone is ready to buy), “Transactional intent” (someone is ready to buy a particular product or service), “Informational intent” (someone wants to learn), or “Navigational intent” (someone is looking for a specific page like a specific social media account.)
  
  Search intent is determined by searching for the keyword on Google. If you search “organic soap,” for example, Google returns product pages. Google deems that people searching that keyword want to buy, so it prioritizes product pages. We elaborate on this significantly in the keyword map section.

Using keyword research tools for keyword research

Keyword research tools bring a lot of benefits to the research process. 

You can get additional data like:

• Search volume shows how many times a keyword is searched each month.
• Keyword intent shows the “intent” behind the search, for example, informational (the searcher is looking for answers to specific questions), commercial (the user is investigating brands or options), or transactional (the user is ready to convert). 
• Keyword difficulty estimates how easy or difficult it is to rank for a keyword.

There are a lot of keyword research tools, below we’ve used Semrush as it has the largest keyword database. If you want a free option, try Google’s Keyword Planner, or for a paid but cheaper alternative, Keywords Everywhere is great.

Here’s how to use the Keyword Magic Tool to find keywords.

Go to Semrush > click “SEO” in the left-hand menu> click “Keyword Magic Tool” > Enter a keyword > Press “Enter”

The tool will return related keywords, which can be utilized in your content marketing strategy. We’ll show you how to make use of these keywords in the keyword mapping section below. 

For now, the main focus is that you spend some time analyzing keywords and creating a shortlist that you’ll include in your content strategy.

Some extra tips:

• Start your research with a broad topic. You can refine the results or search for a niche topic later in your process. Starting broadly will give you a wide range of keywords to analyze and provide an opportunity for you to discover keyword opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. 
• Know that search volume isn’t wholly accurate, but good tools have large keyword databases, making them as accurate as possible.
• Think about intent as much as keyword volume. Keyword volume is great, but if you target only high search volumes, you likely won’t include transactional keywords. Fewer people are ready to convert, so search volumes for transactional keywords are generally lower. However, these keywords are still incredibly important because they bring traffic that is ready to purchase.
• You can filter the keywords by looking only at questions, which is good for creating FAQs or targeted and informative blog posts.

---

Pro tip: Export the data to a spreadsheet for easier analysis.

---

Step 3: Complete competitor analysis

Competitor analysis involves researching what competitors are doing with their content marketing strategy. 

It’s common for competitor analysis to be conducted first, but in this guide, it’s step three.

Why? 

Because competitors don’t know your business and your goals like you do.

While you might be able to learn a thing or two about what works in your industry. The goal is to use competitor insights to inform, not dictate, your strategy.

Throughout competitor analysis, use your business goals and audience personas to keep your content strategy and competitor analysis in check. Every time you come across something that looks good on a competitor site, ask yourself:

• Would this help us achieve our business goals?
• Do any of my audience personas need this?

When researching competitors, it’s common to:

• Review their site and important pages (e.g. money-generating pages).
• Read the blog and see the type of content they’re posting.
• Note the posting frequency: are they posting weekly, monthly, or something else?
• Look at what they’re sharing on social media.
• Review comments and engagements on social media. Is the audience enjoying it?

You can go as in-depth as you like on competitor analysis, and using competitor analysis tools like Semrush, Buzzsumo, or Similarweb helps deepen the analysis. 

Competitor analysis tools can show you:

• Competitor top pages: see which URLs drive the most organic traffic
• Organic keywords competitors rank for: establish if you also want to rank for those keywords
• Domain comparison showing which of all competitors has the best website 
• The intent tells you what the searcher is looking to accomplish (e.g., learn, consider options, compare, buy)
• Keyword gap analysis: analyze keywords that multiple competitors rank for that you don’t

Here’s how to perform a keyword gap analysis using a standard tool.

Log in to Semrush > “SEO” > “Keyword Gap.”

Type in your domain, followed by up to four competitor domains, and click “Compare”. 

The report looks like this:

At the bottom, keywords are grouped into categories:

• Shared: Keywords every domain ranks for
• Missing: Keywords you don’t rank for, but everyone else does
• Weak: Keywords your domain ranks lower than other competitors
• Strong: Keywords your domain has better rankings for compared to competitors
• Untapped: Keywords for which at least one competitor ranks, but you don’t
• All: Keywords that at least one competitor or your domain rank for

You can use these keywords to build out your content strategy. 

Here’s how to prioritize the keywords:

• Start with missing keywords because they are a strong indicator that the keywords listed will be beneficial to you, because all other competitors are ranking for them.
• Analyze untapped keywords. Take a look at the keywords more competitors rank for. The higher your competitors are ranking for that keyword, the more likely it is to be useful to you as well.
• Look at competitors with the most similar business models. What are they ranking for that you should rank for, too?

Remember, just because a competitor is ranking for something, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should. For example, it’s common for SEO strategies to change over time, perhaps a competitor used to chase high-traffic keywords with little intent. They might still rank now, but if clicks don’t lead to conversions, they’re not worth your investment. Think about your business and your audience at all times.

This competitor research should help you understand the marketing landscape generally, and the keyword gap analysis will identify keywords you want to rank for.

The next challenge?

Using keywords efficiently. Let’s create a keyword map.

Step 4: Create a keyword map and plan

The creation of a keyword map and plan is the moment when a content strategy comes to life. You’re getting into the nitty-gritty, and this is when the fun really starts. This stage forms the foundations of your strategy. 

Let’s clarify what we mean by “keyword map.”

---

A keyword map is a strategic content planning document that assigns specific keywords to individual pages on your website. It ensures each page targets a unique set of relevant search terms, helping to avoid keyword overlap (cannibalization) and improving your site’s chances of performing well in SERPs.

---

Creating a keyword map is best done manually.  Google Sheets is an excellent tool for planning your keyword map, and it offers easy collaboration, but any spreadsheet software will work; Excel or Numbers are suitable, too.

Here’s an example of what your keyword map might look like.

In this spreadsheet, you’ll see we’ve designated columns for:

• Priority: How quickly you want the content completed. Assign a number, with one being the most urgent.
• Status: Where the content is in the workflow (eg, “Topic Approved”, “Writing”, “Published”).
• Brief submitted: The date the SEO team submitted the brief for writing.
• Title: The title of the article.
• Focus keyword (with search volume): The primary or most important keyword the article is ranking for. This is the keyword you use in your URL, title tag, and headings.
• Supporting keywords (with search volume): A list of keywords that the page should also rank for.
• Writer: The person writing the content.
• Pillar: The broader content topic to which this piece of content belongs.
• Page type: This signifies whether it’s a blog, service, product page, or landing page. You can alter options based on the page templates your site uses.
• New, edit, or rewrite: This signifies whether the content is new, an edit (light edits to an existing piece), or a complete rewrite.
• Notes: These are useful in case there’s anything worth communicating between people who share this document. For example, “Upon upload, don’t forget to link to [a page]”

These fields are a great starting point. Your specific content plan may not require all of these fields, however, or you may have other fields that are important for your specific website or business. 

For example, you might add:

• Links to briefs
• Links to live content
• Who the content was created for (the audience persona)
• Stage of funnel (e.g., top, middle, or bottom)
• Which business objective the content meets

Within your keyword map, you connect content ideas with keywords.

Let’s say you’re creating a content marketing strategy for a brand that sells organic soap. You’ll likely discover the keyword “organic handmade soap,” which has 110 searches per month.

The keyword is suitable because:

• The target audience is conscientious and likes supporting small businesses
• The keyword organic handmade soap has a commercial intent, meaning searchers are looking to buy
• One of your business goals is to increase sales from inbound marketing by 20%

Now you need to know where to map the keyword to. This means deciding what you need to create for the best chance of ranking.

And how do you find that out?

It’s simple, Google it.

The keyword returns:

• Product and product collection pages
• Ads

So, if a keyword search returns products and collections, the keyword has the best chance of ranking on a product or a product collection page since this is what Google is listing. Therefore, you would “map” your keyword to a page that is a product or collection and use it there.

Referring back to the keyword map document, you’d fill out the following fields:

• Title: Organic Handmade Soap
• Focus keyword (with search volume): Organic handmade soap – 110 searches/month
• Pillar: Soap
• Page Type: Product

As a side note, Google ads might be a good idea for this particular keyword. Make note of findings like this for Step 7: Think about channels and content distribution.

This part of the process can be time-consuming, but the research and insights you gather at this stage will ultimately provide you with a content strategy that will serve you for months, maybe even years.

How many pieces of content you map in your spreadsheet will depend mainly on how many pieces of content you can create. 

Be careful not to map too many pieces because they might never get written, due to:

• Time, because you mapped more content pieces that can be physically written.
• Strategy iterations, because as you produce content and see results, you might pivot from where you started.

Step 5: Choose your content types strategically

Your keyword map provides an SEO-specific content plan. This means that the content you plan to use the map will have the best chance of ranking in search engines.

Ranking is great, but it isn’t the only thing great content can do for your site and business.

Let’s take the content plan a step further. Any mapped content, where useful, should be repurposed to get maximum output from your efforts. It should also serve other marketing channels, like email campaigns or social media posts.

Any keyword discovered can and should inspire content for all channels because keyword research is an insight into what your audience is looking for and at what part of the buyer journey they’re in when searching. 

Although keyword research primarily comes from search engine data, it would be shortsighted not to transfer findings to other marketing channels because your audience’s needs don’t change across channels. What someone searches on Google might also be helpful on another channel, like within your email. 

Email is a particularly strong example because if you have audience segments, you might know where people are in their buyer journey. In its simplest form, the buyer journey has three segments: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the conversion stage. If you know someone on your email list is in the consideration phase, you can send them content that will help them come to the conclusion that your product or service is right for them. You could email that segment a case study or a product comparison. 

Your content marketing strategy aims to bring people down the funnel to conversion. It’s about meeting people where they are. 

For example, a customer who follows your company on social media and has joined your email list is already emotionally invested in buying your products and/or services. They’re in the middle of the funnel—the consideration stage. You don’t need to push content about what you do and what your values are to them. They already like you. Instead, they need encouragement to buy. This might come through case studies, discounts, or demos.

Once you know the channels you’ll use within your content plan, you can work on repurposing effectively.

Step 6: Think about repurposing

Start repurposing content by choosing engaging content types that are easily created from what already exists. 

For example, if you’ve written a 3,000-word article, you can easily repurpose this content as a social media post, an email, a video, and so much more. In reverse, you might have a marketing team that creates long-form videos, webinars, and interviews. Conversely, you can repurpose these assets into articles.

Videos, webinars, and interviews lend themselves well to content repurposing for articles. AI tools can transcribe entire interviews and pull key points and quotes that you can use within articles.

These are some of the most common formats to consider for your content marketing strategy—each serving a different purpose:

• Blog posts, articles, and long-form guides
• Ebooks
• Podcasts
• Case studies
• White papers
• Videos
• Infographics
• Webinars
• Video

Step 7: Think about channels and content distribution 

Think about channels and content types together.

You will choose channels based on where your audience personas are. If your audience uses LinkedIn, there’s no point creating a TikTok about your new service. If video is your most engaged-with channel, then it makes sense to do more of it.

Common channels for content distribution include:

• Email marketing 
• Social media
• Paid advertising
• Influencers
• PR
• Webinars
• SEO and blogging
• Guest posting on other websites
• Content aggregators

It’s important to think about content channels (where you’re marketing) alongside content types (the marketing asset you’re using) because you need to plan to repurpose content in a way that works for the channel. 

For example, remember the 3,000-word article example from above? While it’s great as a website asset, it’s not as great in other channels as it is. You can’t copy and paste the whole thing into a LinkedIn post (a channel where you’re marketing) because it won’t fit due to character limitations. It’ll have to be tweaked to fit LinkedIn’s content specifications. Also, you’ll want a supporting image, which is likely to require different dimensions for LinkedIn than it did for your website. 

If you plan specifically for the channels you’re using beforehand, you can create an efficient process. For example, if you know an article is being repurposed on LinkedIn, you can ask the writer of the 3,000-word article to also create the LinkedIn post at the same time. 

The social media team will have a stack of LinkedIn posts done for them, and it’ll be faster for the article author to write the LinkedIn posts immediately after the article is completed.

Talk about efficiency!

Step 8: Define the workflow for content execution

Having a content plan ready is an amazing achievement, but if it never gets actioned? Well, that won’t do anything for your business.

To make certain your content plan becomes a content reality, you’ll need to create a workflow with due dates and accountability tracking.

Specifically, include:

• The content type being created
• Who’s doing it
• The deadline for each stage of the content production process
• Promotion channels

Your workflow needs to be achievable and specific to all the stages within your business.

Here’s an excerpt of what the workflow for creating content for Search Engine Land looks like.

Get specific in your workflow. 

Why?

It will help keep the project moving if all tasks are assigned to individuals. It creates accountability and accountability creates results.

Specific tasks like “creating visuals,” “visuals review,” “visuals edit,” and “visuals done” are far superior to one broad task like “create visuals.” With broad tasks comes ambiguity, which can lead to misunderstandings or missed tasks because of a lack of accountability. 

Once you’re rolling with a workflow, it’s time to organize everything into a content calendar. 

Step 9: Create a content calendar

Setting up (and actually using) a content calendar will yield the best results for long-term content planning. 

A content calendar is an effective way to work because you can also use it to work backwards. 

For example, if one of your topic pillars was “flower bouquets,” Mother’s Day would be a significant holiday. You know when Mother’s Day is, and you need to be prepared if selling flower bouquets on Mother’s Day is a goal.

Work backwards from the campaign launch day and think about every step and how long it will take.

For example, if Mother’s Day is on Sunday, May 11, you might launch your marketing campaign four weeks earlier. You need all content assets completed before the campaign starts, including email flows set up and scheduled. If content creation takes eight weeks, then content creation needs to start mid-March, and research needs to start even earlier.

Using a content calendar means everyone can see what they need to do by when and the impact if they don’t do it. If a team understands the impact of their task, it encourages task completion.

An additional benefit of a content calendar is that you can review your plan and see if it is reasonable and achievable. With the plan laid out monthly or yearly, you can see who’s available for the work, what else the team has on its plate, and whether or not individuals have the time to deliver the plan.

While thinking ahead, consider how to plan your corresponding promotion strategy and work this into your content calendar.

Advanced tips for creating the best content marketing strategy

Work in pillars and topics

The first step of this content marketing strategy guide was creating content pillars. Content pillars are core topics that you’ll cover in your content strategy. Setting pillars keeps you focused because you create content in harmony across marketing.

Focus on creating high-quality content around one or two core topic areas first. For each, build a strong foundation using your best content assets, like in-depth guides, explainer videos, case studies, or webinars. Once those pillars are established and performing, move on to the next topics.

The risk with covering more topics at once?

You end up doing everything, but achieving nothing.

Marketing takes time, and your audience needs more than a flippantly written blog on your website, followed by an irrelevant post on your social media. Instead, rely on your content calendar to keep marketing teams working holistically so that your audiences get the targeted user experience and the depth of content they deserve and that they need to become loyal customers.

Survey your existing customers

The web is a treasure trove of insights about your potential customers. 

But you’re doing your content operation a disservice if you don’t push up your sleeves and do some original research with existing customers. 

You can survey your customers in any way that feels right. You’ll likely have customers you talk to more frequently and have built relationships with over time. Perhaps these customers can form part of small focus groups that you can host in person, if that option is available, or in Slack groups if not. Alternatively, you can call your most engaged customers or send email surveys to gather data about what your customers want from you.

Here are some subjects to ask about as you research your audience:

• Their challenges and pain points
• Preferred content formats
• Topics they’re interested in learning more about
• Topics customers were interested in before they became customers

Interview past prospects 

While doing original research, it can also be impactful to reach out to leads who engaged with your content but didn’t become customers. 

Ideally, you’d speak to your past prospects directly to properly connect. You can make getting feedback from prospects a part of your sales process, particularly when sales teams have built a good relationship with prospects or where your product or service narrowly missed out on the deal.

Specifically, your outreach should focus on determining:

• Why they didn’t choose your product or service
• What content they found helpful throughout their buying journey
• What content was missing

Failing this, try reading reviews about your company or product. It’s never a good feeling when you receive a negative review. However, analyzing reviews helps determine what your prospects or customers don’t like about your product or service. Or, perhaps, just don’t understand. You can use this qualitative data to inspire content pieces that educate prospects on the benefits of your product. Or you might even be able to change the way something functions for the better.

Focus on quality, not quantity 

In this age of AI, it can be tempting to run wild and turn out a lot of content fast. But, mindlessly creating content, especially AI content, is rarely the approach that leads to great content. 

Be cautious and use AI thoughtfully and mindfully as a tool. In the majority of use cases, AI needs a heavy edit and a human approach.

Poor content can lead to readers distrusting a brand, and audiences still value trust. According to a report from Edelman, 67% of consumers are more inclined to stay loyal to trusted brands and also believe that trust is more important than price. 59% of people are willing to try new products from trusted brands regardless of cost.

Quality and building trust are what matter. 

What does it say about your product or service if you’re happy settling for poor quality content to get more completed? It won’t make your audience feel understood or engender trust in your business

Take your time, focus on what matters, and position yourself as the best, most thoughtful company in the industry, and you might just attract that segment of people who stay loyal and buy more.

Track your results

Wondering if your strategy is actually making a difference?

You’re not alone. 

A 2023 Contently report shows that for 10% of teams, the biggest challenge in creating great content is a lack of tools to measure their content marketing’s impact.

A good place to start is by setting up analytics tracking on your website. 

Basic content tracking metrics using GA4

Google Analytics is a popular option, but alternatives such as Matomo or Fathom Analytics are also available. 

Start with the basics by tracking metrics like page views, active engagement time, engaged sessions, and bounce rate.

To find these metrics, go to Google Analytics > “Engagement” > Click “Pages and screens: Page path and screen class”

This is a customizable report. If you can’t see columns with your desired data, click the pencil in the top right to add them. 

You can take your analysis a step further by reviewing your top-performing pages in terms of engagement and revenue to understand what’s working with your audience. When you have that insight, you can create content that replicates it. An easy win. 

Engagement tracking metrics using GA4’s “Landing Page” report

The “Landing Page Report” in Google Analytics is a great report for tracking engagement from content. It shows where people landed and how they engaged within that session. A session is a continuous period during which a user is on your site. A session ends after thirty minutes of inactivity. 

Access it by going to GA4 > Click “Reports” in the left-hand menu > “Engagement” > “Landing Page”

This report shows:

• The page someone landed on.
• The revenue made within that same session, meaning they clicked on your site and purchased. 
• The number of key events completed within the same session. Key events are the most important actions a user can take on your website. You can set these up in your GA4 account. For example, a key event could be completing a contact form or downloading a whitepaper.

Bolster tracking with heatmapping

Seeing how real humans interact with your content can add some color to more basic data points offered by your analytics program.

You can add a layer of data and analysis using a heatmapping and user session recording tool like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity. 

You can add these tools to your website with a line of code, and you can do it without a developer in many cases, too. 

Here’s how to set up Clarity, and here’s how to set up HotJar.

Both of these tools provide insights like:

• Where your website visitors clicked
• How visitors navigate the site in real time by using session recordings
• How far visitors scrolled

For content, scroll depth is a fascinating insight. A piece of content with a “deep scroll” (meaning the reader scrolled all the way or mostly through the article) is a sign of a piece of content that’s engaging.

The image below shows a Microsoft Clarity click map. With click maps, you can see where people clicked the most (the red) versus where they clicked the least (green or yellow). You can use these insights to test CTAs. For example, if CTAs in the sidebar are clicked the most, then it makes sense to put your most important CTAs there.

Track keywords

You can keep tabs on your SEO success via keyword rankings with a tool like Semrush’s Position Tracking. Use it to get insights about how the keywords you mapped to specific content perform. 

The tool allows you to add specific keywords to the position tracker and records where your website is in search engine results pages.

As your content strategy is executed, your goal is for keyword positions to increase. The position tracker allows you to analyze keyword position and performance. If you see keyword positions increasing, things are going well. If the keyword positions drop, it might be a sign that you need to revisit your content strategy. 

Think about attribution

Attribution is where things get murky. 

There may be multiple touchpoints that occur between the awareness stage and finally becoming a customer.

Knowing this, you’ll want to set content marketing key performance indicators (KPIs). A KPI is a measurable metric used to evaluate the success of your content efforts. KPIs help stakeholders understand how your content marketing strategy performs according to the buyer’s journey stage for which the individual assets were created. 

Common KPIs include 

• Website traffic
• Engagement rates
• Scroll depth
• Conversions

Of course, not every piece of content is designed to convert, but these pieces are still critical to the content strategy and deserve attribution for the role they play.

For example, an article titled “How to Wrap a Flower Bouquet” wasn’t created for conversion. At least not directly. You likely won’t see key events or revenue generated from users landing on this page.

The keyword how to wrap a flower bouquet has 1,300 searches per month and is informational intent. The searcher is looking to learn something. Safe to say: the searcher is interested in flowers. With a guide like this, you get an opportunity to put your brand in front of the right audience. The KPIs for this article might be 

• Grow website traffic through content published on the blog
• Build an audience of people who love flowers for ad targeting

Ads can target people interested in flowers or who read a particular blog, then market to them with the right messaging. The person who read an article on wrapping a flower bouquet might be interested in buying a flower subscription, for example.

Ads are highly attributable, and if ads convert, they get attribution. Ads deserve attribution for sealing the deal, but with a content marketing strategy and KPIs set out, you can credit other channels that assisted the conversion. The article “How to wrap a flower bouquet” was created as part of the SEO strategy and utilizing the SMART goals. The KPI was building an audience so ads could market to them later in pursuit of creating revenue. 

If SEO teams and ads teams are aligned, information can be shared. For example, ad teams can inform the SEO team of the percentage of conversions made from the audience SEO built, and SEO takes its acknowledgment and role in attribution. Ads wouldn’t have had the audience to convert if SEO hadn’t built it through.

Step up your content marketing strategy

As you’ve probably gathered by now, creating a content marketing strategy is no small feat, but the more effort you put into the preparation, the more it will pay off over time.

Of course, there’s always more to learn about content. Check out this article on executing a buyer journey-based content strategy, which is all about the buyer’s journey through content. It’s the natural next step to honing a successful content strategy, and it covers the buyer’s journey funnel in even greater detail than this beginning guide.