Blog

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a plan for creating and sharing content that will appeal to your target audience and help you achieve your business goals.

Creating a content marketing strategy can seem complicated. But it doesn’t have to be. All you need are the right ingredients.

Broadly speaking, it should contain at least the following information:

Specific goals (i.e. what exactly do you want to achieve with your content)

Audience insights (i.e. who is the content aimed at)

Content type (Promotion plan (i.e. how will you distribute the content)

Let’s say you’re developing a content marketing strategy for a health and fitness website.

Your goal might be to get a certain percentage of more relevant traffic from search engines. Your target group is young people who want to lose weight and get healthy. Content types might include blog posts and videos on workout plans and nutrition.

You can then promote this content by distributing it through email newsletters, social media channels, and your website, attracting visitors through SEO (i.e. ranking in search engines).

Why Have a Content Marketing Strategy?

Without a guiding strategy, your content marketing efforts can seem haphazard. However, a clearly defined strategy has several benefits:

It aligns your content with your company’s goals. This way, you don’t waste resources creating something that doesn’t add value to the business.

It helps you gain stakeholder support. It helps you communicate the value of your content marketing efforts to your executive team and senior management. And get their buy-in.

Streamline the process of content creation and distribution. You can plan, publish, and promote content more efficiently and effectively.

Analyze and optimize results over time. You can measure and track the performance of your content so you can adjust your strategy as needed to reach your goals.

And make sure it’s documented, because our “State of Content Marketing” report shows that there’s a correlation between success and a documented content marketing strategy.

8 steps to a successful content marketing strategy

1. Set a Goal

The first step in developing a content marketing strategy is to define your goals.

What do you want to achieve with your content?

Your goals will drive your entire strategy, so make sure it’s clear from the start.

Possible goals include:

Establish yourself as a thought leader in your field.

Increase search engine traffic by 50% next year.

Achieve 30% year-over-year sales growth.

Increase customer retention by up to 20 days.

 44 Get 1,000 new backlinks (links from other sites pointing to your pages) within the next 6 months.

Continuing with our previous content strategy example, let’s say your goal is to increase search engine traffic by 50%.

2. Understand your audience

Once you’ve defined your content goals, the next important step is to understand your target audience.

You can create the most amazing content in the world, but if it doesn’t reach the right people, it may be virtually worthless.

To know your target audience, you need to answer questions like:

Who are they? Go beyond basic demographics to learn about their deeper beliefs, values, fears and hopes.

What are their biggest pain points, challenges and issues related to your product/service?

Where do they spend their time online? And what are the sources of information they trust most?

What type of content will grab their attention and move them to action?

Don’t rely on assumptions and hypotheticals here; you need actual data from surveys, interviews, and other audience research methods.

3. Select a content type

The next step is to choose the content type you want to focus on.

There are many content types to choose from:

Blog posts

Videos

Podcasts

Ebooks

Infographics

How do you know which content is best?

Your goals and insights about your audience should influence your choice.

We’ll use the same example as before and focus on blog posts and videos because that aligns with our goal of increasing traffic from search engines.

Furthermore, audience research has revealed a preference for these two content formats: Our target audience enjoys watching video content on YouTube and reading blog posts from online publications.

4. Find topic ideas

Next, find a specific topic you want to create content for.

If you want to focus on your blog posts, you need to choose a topic that is in high demand, otherwise you won’t get any organic (free) traffic to your website, which is one of the main goals of this strategy.

To find topics, use Semrush’s Keyword Magic tool.

Open the tool, type in a general term related to your area of ​​expertise, and click

. Then go to the “Questions” tab.

The tool will show you topic ideas in the form of questions.

It will show you detailed information about each keyword, for example, how popular the topic is (search volume) and how difficult it is to rank for it in Google (keyword difficulty).

We will discuss later how you can use this information to choose the best topics. But let’s take a quick look at how you can find YouTube video topic ideas that can drive views, engagement, and ultimately website traffic.

To find these topics, use our Keyword Analysis App for YouTube.

Open the tool, type a general term related to your niche in the search bar, and click

. This feature will give you a clear view of what successful content in your niche looks like.

Understanding this can help you create similar (or even better) content.

5. Prioritize high potential topics

You probably have hundreds of topic ideas at your disposal right now. But which ones should you pursue first?

Let your goal guide your choice. Continuing with the previous example, our goal is to get more traffic from search engines.

Therefore, we should prioritize topics that have a reasonable number of monthly searches.

The Keyword Magic tool organizes topics according to this criteria by default.

But make sure the topics you choose match your ranking potential, i.e. they shouldn’t be too hard to rank for.

Look at the KD% column to see how hard it is to rank for each topic in Google. The higher this percentage, the tougher the competition.

Apply the same logic when choosing topics for your YouTube videos. Our “YouTube Keyword Analysis” app will give you key indicators to help you make the right decision.

6. Create a content calendar

Now that you’ve prioritized your topics, it’s time to put everything on a content calendar.

A content calendar is a document that helps you plan, coordinate, and implement your content strategy. It records all the details of your upcoming content, such as:

Topic and title

Owne

Content type

Status (written, recorded, edited, etc.)

Deadline

Maintaining such a calendar will help you ensure consistency in publishing content, and keep you on track with your goals.

And don’t forget to define roles and responsibilities for your team members. So everyone knows what needs to be done and when.

You can create a content calendar using something as simple as a Google Spreadsheet. If you want something more sophisticated, you can also use a tool like Trello, Asana, or Basecamp.

7. Promote your content

Your content strategy should include a clear plan for distributing and amplifying your content to reach your target audience.

Here are some content promotion strategies:

Email marketing: Use your email list to inform your subscribers about new content and encourage them to engage with it.

Social media: Use social media platforms to share your content with your followers and encourage engagement.

Paid advertising: If you have the budget, you can also use Google Ads and meta advertising solutions to increase the visibility of your content and reach more people.

Content syndication: Share your content on third-party sites (such as Medium) to reach new audiences.

Public relations (PR): Use PR tactics to get your content featured in media and publications that your audience trusts.

Influencer marketing: Partner with influencers (famous bloggers and social media personalities) to share your content.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimize your content to rank highly in search results.

Not every strategy makes sense for every business, and the advertising channels you prioritize should align with your goals, audience preferences (i.e., where your audience actively consumes content), and budget.

For example, our audience research found that the core audience for health and fitness websites frequently use YouTube and other social media platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram. They also read blog posts from online publications.

So social media, paid advertising, SEO, influencer marketing and PR should be your primary focus when distributing your content.

8. Monitor your performance

A good content marketing strategy doesn’t end with creating and promoting your content. It’s also important to continually measure the impact of your strategy.

How to know if your content is achieving your goals — and if you need to make changes to improve performance.

The specific metrics you track will depend on your goals.

For example, you can measure traffic performance using Google Analytics. This is the most commonly used tool to track traffic data.

For YouTube, you can use YouTube Analytics to determine how your videos are performing.

To track your Google rankings for each of your major keywords, use the location tracking tool.

Open the tool, enter your domain name, and click

. In the Targeting section, configure your tracking settings by selecting search engines, devices, locations, and languages.

Next, click

. Simply enter the keywords you want to monitor into the text box and click “Add Keywords to Campaign” to add them to your campaign.

Next, select “Start Tracking” to begin the tracking process.

Regularly review your performance data to determine what’s working well and what needs improvement. Then make adjustments based on your findings.

Start developing your content marketing strategy

Now you know how to create and implement a content strategy.

Now put these steps into practice. Then start building your own strategy.

Throughout the process, Semrush tools and data will help you execute your strategy effectively.

Try it for free. Then see what difference they can make to your content marketing results.