12 Steps to Create a Solid Content Strategy

Are you struggling to create a content strategy that moves the needle?

You’re not alone. Many founders and marketers want to leverage content to raise awareness and capture leads but simply don’t know where to start.

Without a solid plan directing your efforts, it’s far too easy to waste time and resources creating content that flops.

But content, when executed correctly, has unmatched potential as a growth lever. Just look at mega-brands like Zapier, Hubspot who owe their success largely to content marketing.

In this guide, learn how to:

• Create compelling and educational content designed for conversion
• Map content seamlessly to your buyer’s journey
• Analyze performance to double down on what works
• Promote content effectively to drive real business results

In this post, we are providing a 11-step process to develop an air-tight content strategy tailored to your startup’s specific goals and audience.

1. Define Your Objectives

What are your broader business goals?

Do you aim to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive sales, or establish yourself as an industry thought leader?

Having clear, well-defined objectives will provide a foundation for your content strategy and guide your content creation decisions.

For this, you can set SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This ensures they are clear, actionable, and trackable.

2. Know Your Audience and Buyer Personas

Identify your target audiences and develop detailed buyer personas that outline their pain points, motivations, objections, and journey to becoming a customer. This ensures your content will resonate and convert.

Conduct thorough audience research to understand your ideal customer. This includes demographics like age, location, and income, as well as psychographics like interests, values, and pain points

Create detailed profiles of your ideal customers, including their challenges, goals, media consumption habits, and preferred communication channels. These personas will serve as guiding lights in tailoring your content to resonate with your specific audience.

3. Conduct a Content Audit

If you already have some content in place, you should do this. If you have integrated Google Analytics with your website, things will be easier here.

Analyze your website, blog, and social media platforms to understand what content you already have. Categorize it by format (e.g., blog posts, videos, infographics), topic, and performance metrics.

Use the audit to discover areas where your content might be lacking or outdated. This helps you identify topics you need to cover and potential opportunities for improvement.

4. Get Content Ideas

Leverage keyword research to find high-volume, low-competition terms and questions your audiences are asking as they move through the buyer’s journey. Optimizing your content for these keywords will help boost visibility and search engine rankings.

Use keyword research tools like Semrush, Ahrefs and Ubersuggest to identify relevant keywords and search terms your target audience uses online. This helps you optimize your content for search engines and improve its discoverability.

Aim for a balance to gain search engine visibility while targeting specific niche interests within your audience. You can also use social media tools like BuzzSumo and Marketing Forums to get trending content ideas.

5. Choose Your Content Type

Consider various content formats based on your audience’s preferences and your goals. Some of the options include:

• Blog posts and articles
• Infographics and visual content
• Videos and podcasts
• eBooks and whitepapers
• Social media posts and stories
• Case studies and testimonials
• Webinars and live events

Start with a few key formats and see what resonates with your audience. You can always adjust your content mix based on performance data.

6. Build a Content Calendar

Plot out the diverse pieces of content you’ll create on a content calendar that supports audience needs across each stage of their journey. This includes a healthy mix of blog posts, visual assets, tools, and more mapped to stages from awareness to retention.

Create a content calendar that maps out your content topics, formats, publishing dates, and assigned creators. This ensures consistency and helps you stay organized.

Include evergreen content that remains relevant for a long time, as well as timely content that capitalizes on current trends and events. This caters to your audience’s diverse interests.

7. Develop a Content Creation Process

Establish clear guidelines for your content style, voice, and tone. This helps maintain consistency and brand alignment across all your content pieces.

Determine how you’ll create your content. Will you write it yourself, outsource it, or use a combination of both? This depends on your budget, available resources, and content creation expertise.

Shift from a sales pitch to creating truly useful content like “how-to” posts, listicles, templates, and guides that add value by educating at each stage. Valuable content builds authority and converts visitors over the long run.

8. Optimize Your Content for SEO

Utilize your keyword research to optimize your content titles, headings, meta descriptions, and throughout the body text, but avoid keyword stuffing.

Ensure your content is well-structured, easy to read, and visually appealing. Use clear headings, subheadings, and bullet points to break up text and improve readability.

Encourage other websites to link back to your content, which can improve your website’s authority and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

9. Promote Your Content

Here are some conventional ways in which you can promote your content

1. Social media promotion. Share your content on relevant social media platforms and engage with your audience in the comments section.
2. Email marketing. Include your content in email newsletters to your subscriber base.
3. Influencer outreach. Collaborate with influencers in your industry to promote your content to their audience.
4. Paid advertising. Consider pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or social media advertising to reach a wider audience and drive targeted traffic to your content.

Repurpose it into snippets, quotes or graphics for additional mileage. The best content in the world won’t drive results without a solid promotional plan.

10. Analyze Performance

Pay close attention to what content resonates most through conversion tracking and analytics. Double down on content pillars and clusters performing well. Then optimize or eliminate areas missing the mark to make decisions backed by data.

Use website analytics tools like Google Analytics to monitor key metrics such as:

• Website traffic. Track the number of visitors your content attracts.
• Engagement. Analyze metrics like bounce rate, average session duration, and page views to understand how engaged your audience is with your content.
• Lead generation. Track the number of leads generated through your content, such as email sign-ups or contact form submissions.
• Conversions. Monitor how your content contributes to your overall business goals, such as online sales or event registrations.

Use your analytics data to understand what’s working well and what’s not. This helps you refine your content strategy, adjust your content mix, and optimize your content for better performance.

11. Stay Consistent and Monitor the Competition

Consistency and frequency are vital, as 63% of consumers expect regular, fresh content from brands they follow. Set and stick to a sustainable cadence for publishing new, SEO-optimized blogs, videos, and visuals so your pipeline stays topped up.

Keep yourself informed about the latest trends in your industry and content marketing best practices. This includes staying updated on search engine algorithms, audience preferences, and emerging content formats.

Keep tabs on competitors through Google Alerts and tools like Buzzsumo that uncover their top-performing content. Let this intelligence influence your own ideation and creation process so you can continually one-up the completion.

As you learn and grow, be prepared to adjust your content strategy to meet evolving needs and stay ahead of the curve.

12. Refresh and Repurpose

Give new life to old yet evergreen content through updates, expansions, guest contributions, and repurposing it into new formats like videos, podcasts, and webinars. This provides value-packed content without always starting from scratch.

Conclusion

Developing a content strategy is not a one-time thing. You need to revise the strategy as per your changing goals and expanding targeting audience. Track the performance and see what works and what doesn’t work for your target audience. It’s also important to refresh and repurpose since refreshing keeps the content new and repurposing helps us to generate new content ideas with ease. For more ideas and content writing tools, check out our website and blog.