Mar 23, 2022 ·Content Creation ·4 min read
7 Questions To Help You Create Your Content Marketing Strategy
If you don’t already have a content marketing strategy, get one in place. A real strategy—not just jumbled ideas in a back drawer—keeps you on track: you set a goal, figure out how to reach it, and measure the results. Whatever your content marketing needs, you can draw up a strategy just by thinking through these seven questions:
1. What Do You Bring to the Table?
How are you different from the other ten companies offering the same goods or services? Your competition is more robust than ever, so how will you stand out? Find that one thing that makes you unique and make that your headliner. The shape and form of your content may change, but your message can remain the same; for example, “here is an e-book to help you plan your wedding and by the way, our customer service literally works 24/7 to make the planning stress free.”
2. Who is Doing What?
A clear breakdown of expectations and roles is key to a good content marketing strategy. Marketing can get messy and work can certainly overlap and cross borders (in fact, it should!) but everyone on your team should know what is their responsibility and what belongs to the person in the next cube. That means that Lucy may dabble in SEO when she’s creating her blog posts, but Tom is the SEO expert that needs to okay what she’s written before it goes live. Assigning clear tasks will keep your consistency high, which in turn will mean a clean, concise story that your audiences will want to hear.
3. Who is Your Audience?
This one is so important it might actually have to go to the top of your list of questions. You won’t get far without knowing who your audience is…very intimately. This information will drive the kind of content that you create, the frequency with which you distribute it, and the channels you will use to promote it. In short, it is the foundation of your content marketing strategy.
4. What’s Your Content Type?
No, that’s not a Buzzfeed quiz, it’s a serious consideration for your marketing strategy. Lucky for you, you already know who your audience is, so figuring out what they want to see should be just a matter of doing some research. Don’t stop at deciding that you would like all the contents; spend some time considering where your clients will spend most of their time. For example, if they are likely to need a lot of nurturing, you may offer more “front-end” content, such as How-To or List posts. On the other hand, if you offer a more niche product and you are likely to be a serious contender right from the beginning, more long-form content such as e-books, webinars, or free-trial offers may be more useful.
5. What Do You Need?
While this question may seem pretty basic, having the tools you need in place before you begin executing any kind of strategy will save you a lot of time and a lot of frustration. Remember when you figured out who your audience was and that helped you decide all that other content stuff—now you get to figure out what will actually create that content. In most cases you will need at least a few design tools and some kind of organizational tool.The specific platforms and tools you choose will depend on your team’s workflow and the content formats you’ve prioritized. These add up to a well-organized team that has the capacity to produce powerful content and distribute it well.
6. How Will You Amplify?
Okay, so you have your audience, you have your content plans and maybe you even have your content, but how do you make sure that it is seen and heard? Isn’t that the eternal dilemma? Incorporate this element into your brainstorming and you will spend a lot less time being shocked by how low your page ranks in a search. Some ideas to consider: do guest posting on well-ranked or well-known sites, try some A/B tests to make sure you are putting out the most engaging titles and headlines, keep adjusting your content as you receive passive and active feedback. The possibilities are actually endless, so get creative.
7. How Will You Measure Your Progress?
Again, setting this up before you start producing will be a life-saver. Makes sense, right? Knowing what results you are looking for will help direct your efforts and steer your audience in the right direction. For example, if you are writing posts, your success can probably be measured by the traffic your page receives as well as the number of subscribers you gain; if, on the other hand, you are looking to increase social media presence, you will be looking at the number of shares, likes, and followers that you get.
Here’s the part most content-strategy posts skip: these questions get you a plan, but the plan pays off only when your lead handling and the marketing-to-sales handoff actually work. More leads is easy. Profitable growth is the hard part—that’s the part we engineer.
Adroit designs the growth engine—marketing that fills the pipeline, revenue operations that wire it to margin, and AI that runs it at boutique cost. Marketing is the delivery layer; revenue operations is what makes it profitable.
The best place to start is a diagnosis. The Growth Assessment tells you exactly where you stand on your revenue operations and on AI adoption, and what to do first. It’s a paid, structured diagnostic that scopes the larger work—valuable even if you never hire us again.
Book an intro call and we’ll walk you through it.