Building an Effective Content Strategy Framework

Effective content marketing is a critical strategy that offers your users the information they need as they move through the sales funnel, from research to decision. Your blog posts, white papers, social media posts, infographics, and videos, attract potential users, keep them engaged, and move them along their path to purchase. Plus, providing search engines a regular cadence of high-quality, relevant content will help you increase organic traffic.

This is the 5-element framework our digital strategists and copywriters use to create effective content marketing strategies.

1. Create Audience Personas

Identifying the audience you want to target with your content will help tell the story of your brand. You can identify your target audience in multiple ways, including surveying existing customers, researching industry trends, and watching who your competitors are targeting. Everyone involved in brand messaging should have a clear idea of who your audience is and what you’d like to communicate to them.

If you haven't already, you should perform a content audit of your existing content and match each piece of content by buyer persona, customer journey stage (awareness, consideration, decision), and format.

2. Position Your Brand and Story

Clearly defining brand and product positioning will provide a consistent experience for your audience across all of your content marketing channels. Our digital marketers ask the following questions to shape the main elements of your brand story and determine how to best position yourself in the market:

Who are your existing and potential customers, and what are their goals?
Who are your top competitors, and how do they market their brands?
What is your brand’s unique value?
What problems does your product help to solve?

Remember, your brand story is a summary of your company’s mission, purpose, and values and can help you determine the direction of your content marketing strategy.

3. Create your Mission Statement and Value Proposition

Levering your unique background and identity can be extraordinarily beneficial when it comes to your content marketing strategy. Establishing your value proposition will help differentiate you and allow you to compete more effectively. To do so, our strategist and copywriters will help you answer the following questions: What unique value does your content provide to your audience? How do you stand out from other content creators? Why should users follow your content channels?

Don’t forget your content marketing mission statement when developing your overall content marketing strategy. Summarize why you are creating content and who can benefit from it, including your target audience and your users’ goals and how your content will help them achieve those goals.

4. Develop your Business Case and Content Marketing Goals

A successful content strategy provides value to your audience and drives your business forward. Identifying and incorporating business goals into your content marketing strategy will help determine the results you want and how to achieve them, bringing you closer to attaining those goals.

Developing a business case that spells out how your content marketing strategy will help the company reach overall business goals will help stakeholders better understand the benefits, costs, and value of implementing a content marketing strategy.

5. Create an Action Plan

Add a list of your yearly marketing campaigns and projects to your content marketing plan. Each campaign and project should correlate to the content goals you’ve set for your business. This will help you determine your content strategy, including high-level content ideas and campaigns, content formats, and content channels.

You’ll want to consider how you’ll build a content calendar, how you will organize your content ideas, how often you will publish content, and how flexible your content calendar is. 

Finally, analyzing top performing content and your targeted audience will help decide on the most optimal types of content and channels for your content marketing strategy.