Content strategy
KON-tent STRAT-eh-jee
The plan for creating, publishing, and governing content that achieves specific business goals for a defined audience.
Content strategy is the plan that connects your content to your business goals. It answers five questions: Who is the audience? What do they need to know? Where will we publish? How will we measure success? And why should they trust us over everyone else?
Without a content strategy, content marketing is just publishing. Teams create content reactively, topic selection is random, and results are unpredictable. With a strategy, every piece of content serves a purpose: attract a specific audience, educate them on a specific topic, and move them toward a specific action.
A good content strategy is simple. It fits on one page. It names the audience (ICP), the topics (3-5 content pillars), the channels (blog, newsletter, social), the cadence (one post per week), and the metrics (organic traffic, email signups, MQLs). Everything else is execution.
Examples
A startup creates its first content strategy.
Audience: DevOps engineers at mid-market SaaS companies. Pillars: observability, incident response, SRE best practices. Channels: blog and LinkedIn. Cadence: one blog post per week, three LinkedIn posts per week. Metrics: organic traffic and demo requests from blog.
A content team audits their strategy quarterly.
Q1 results show the 'observability' pillar drives 60% of organic traffic but the 'incident response' pillar generates the most demo requests. Q2 strategy shifts to produce more incident response content to drive pipeline.
A company aligns content strategy with product launches.
A new monitoring feature launches in Q3. The content strategy includes a pillar page on the topic, four supporting blog posts, a webinar, and a technical tutorial. All published in the six weeks around the launch.
In practice
Frequently asked questions
How is content strategy different from content marketing?
Content strategy is the plan. Content marketing is the execution. Strategy defines what you will create, for whom, and why. Marketing is the actual creation, publication, and promotion of the content. Strategy comes first.
Who owns content strategy in a company?
Typically a content lead, head of marketing, or head of content. In smaller companies, the CEO or marketing generalist owns it. The key is that someone is accountable for the strategic direction, not just the output.
Related terms
A core topic area that forms the foundation of a content strategy, with multiple related pieces branching from it.
A schedule that plans what content will be published, when, and on which channels.
A systematic review of all existing content to evaluate what to keep, update, consolidate, or remove.
The process of promoting and sharing content across channels to reach your target audience after publication.
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