A content strategy is, at its most basic, an outline that answers the “why” and “how” of your brand’s content. In a sea of possibilities, it serves as your North Star guiding your content priorities and tactics, and helps to navigate the path toward your business goals. Its importance cannot be overstated; however, the crafting of it is not glamorous nor does it provide the high-visibility, immediate gratification of hitting “publish” on a new piece of content and sharing it on social media. But its value to your brand (and your sanity) is astronomically greater. To get you started, here is our step-by-step guide to creating a strong content marketing strategy.
1. Define your mission statement
The most important step in developing a content strategy that will set you up for success is to arrive at a clear understanding of why you want to create content. What business results does your content help you get? What value does your content provide to the reader or viewer? Some examples of answers may be: “Help readers discover X solution to X problem.” “Help customers be successful with my product.” “Start conversations about X important topics to connect with people who have similar experiences.” “Inspire people to take action around an important cause.” Write your answers out, and consider how they work together. Do they overlap? Are they at odds? Which ones take priority? How do they align with or support your brand overall? Now you’ve got the ingredients to begin crafting your content’s mission statement.
Your mission statement will be the cornerstone of your content strategy, and it should follow a loose structure that outlines who your content is helping, how, and for what benefit (to them).
Consider Adobe Express' own content mission as an example:
Start from this template with Adobe Express subscription.
Note that your content’s mission statement should support and relate to your brand’s mission, which we covered in “What’s in a Brand? A Step-by-Step Guide to Defining a Winning Online Identity,” but is more specific to how the articles, videos, and images you’ll create support your brand.
Play around with your mission statement to arrive at a similar structure. Refine it. Make sure it inspires you. Commit it to memory. Create an acronym. Put it on a vision board or on your refrigerator… Whatever helps you feel like you know this mission inside and out.
2. Set goals for your content marketing
Not to be confused with a mission statement, your content goals are items that can and should be measured. A goal is usually a percentage increase on a metric related to your brand or business. “Increase subscriptions x%.” “Increase the number of people finding my brand through organic search by X%.” “Increase my clout in an industry.” These goals will help inform how you design your content hub, what content formats to embrace (video, long-form articles, slideshows, memes or infographics), which distribution channels to lean into (email, Facebook, Instagram), what sort of analytics or automated scheduling tools might be useful for you, and what sort of paid promotions are worthwhile for you. This step should be evaluated with a clear view of your existing budget and resources, and a vision of how you would like to see those areas grow.
3. Decide on broad content themes
Define no more than three areas or topics that you plan to explore through your content. These content topics should be broad enough that you’ll never run out of things to say, angles to explore, or people interested, but specific enough that you find the right audience interested in you and your brand. These areas should be related to your brand in a tangential way and get to the deeper, emotional heart of your organization or point of view. This is where understanding your brand’s mission and visual aesthetic is paramount. Take for example the areas these three companies explore with content:
- Adobe Express is all about tools that help you stand out with content so we cover visual communication, social media, and creative expression.
- Chubbies, a retailer specializing in shorts, creates content about the weekend: how to enjoy it, what to do, where to go, and what to wear. Everyone loves weekends so this gives them endless opportunities to reach existing and new customers.
- Fashion and lifestyle brand Man Repeller is a media juggernaut today, but it didn’t start that way. It started with one recent grad chronicling “fashion trends women love and men hate” in an effort to land herself reporting jobs in mainstream media. Founder Leandra Medine’s laser-focused point of view set her apart from other style blogs of the time and helped her create a name for herself as a writer. Today, the site hosts many voices and the topics are much broader, but that’s because the brand has evolved with its readership.
The takeaway: Give yourself a domain. Don’t try to cover everything. And if you’re a one-man or one-woman show, don’t be afraid to explore something hyper-niche and let it evolve from there. Feeling inspired by your content themes? Good! But don’t jump ahead to churning out content— the following steps will help ensure you don’t waste any effort.
