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Content marketing is a type of marketing that involves creating and sharing valuable content with your audience. 

It’s one of the most effective ways to grow your business—when done well.

And if you want to be successful, you need a solid content marketing strategy.

In this guide, we’ll teach you how to create one. But first, let’s start with the basics.

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a plan for creating and sharing content that appeals to your target audience. And helps you achieve your business goals.

You might assume that creating a content marketing strategy is complex. But that doesn’t have to be the case. It just needs the right elements.

At a high level, it should at least include the following information:

• Specific goals (i.e., what exactly you want to achieve with your content)
• Audience insights (i.e., who your content is for)
• Content types (i.e., what kinds of content you’ll create)
• Promotion plan (i.e., how you’ll distribute your content)

For example, let’s say you’re making a content marketing strategy for a website in the health and fitness niche.

Your goal might be to get a certain percentage increase in relevant traffic from search engines. The audience could be young individuals who want to lose weight and/or stay fit. The content types may include blog posts and videos relating to workout plans and diet.

And to promote this content, you might distribute it via your email newsletter, your social media channels, and your website—to draw visitors through SEO (i.e., ranking in search engines).

Why Have a Content Marketing Strategy?

Without a guiding strategy, content marketing efforts can feel haphazard. But a well-defined strategy has several benefits:

• It aligns your content with business goals. So you don’t waste resources creating something that has no value for your company.
• It helps you get stakeholder support. You can communicate the value of your content marketing efforts to management and senior leadership. And get their buy-in.
• It streamlines your content creation and distribution process. You can plan, publish, and promote your content more efficiently and effectively.
• It enables you to analyze and optimize your results over time. You can measure and track your content performance so you can adjust your strategy as needed to achieve your goals.

And make sure it’s documented. Because our State of Content Marketing report shows there’s a correlation between success and having a documented content marketing strategy.