What a content marketing strategy has to contain

A content strategy that works fits on one page and answers four questions. Everything else in the document is decoration, including the calendar that usually takes up most of it.

Who is this for, specifically

Not “small businesses”. A person, with a job title, a problem they can describe, and a reason to care this quarter.

If you cannot name the job title, the strategy has no audience and the writing will hedge to cover everybody. Hedged writing convinces nobody.

Write down the three questions this person asks out loud before they buy anything in your category. Those questions are the spine of the plan.

What do we know that they need

This is the question that separates a content programme with a reason to exist from one that restates what is already published elsewhere.

The answer comes from one of three places. Something you measured that others cannot. Something you learned by operating, which people who only write about the field have not. Or a subject where the existing explanations are genuinely bad, which is more common in technical fields than it sounds.

If none of those apply to a topic, do not write about it. You will produce the fourth-best version of a page that already exists.

What does a reader do next

Every piece needs a next step that is proportionate to where the reader is. A person reading a definition is not ready for a sales call. A person reading a comparison of two vendors might be.

Write the next step down per piece. A programme where everything ends in “book a demo” converts at the rate of the few pieces where a demo made sense.

How will we know it worked

Pick the measurement before you publish. Enquiries attributed to the page. Appearances in search for the target question. Citations in sales conversations. Sign-ups from a specific tool.

Pageviews are not a measurement of anything on their own. They are the denominator.

Set a review date, and honour it. A content programme with no review date runs for two years on momentum.

What to put in the plan after those four

A list of the first ten pieces, each with its question, its next step and its measurement. Who writes. Who reviews. What the publishing cadence is, stated as a minimum and not as a quota.

That is the whole document.

What to leave out

A twelve-month editorial calendar. You will not keep it, and the parts you keep will be the parts that were easy to write instead of the parts that mattered.

Personas with names and stock photographs. The job title and the three questions do the same work without the theatre.

A channel-by-channel distribution matrix written before a single piece exists. Distribution matters, and it is decided per piece by where that piece’s readers actually are.

The discipline that makes it work

Publish when there is something worth saying. Update the pieces that are working. Retire the ones that are not.

That last one is the hardest and the most valuable. An archive of two hundred weak posts makes the ten good ones harder to find, for readers and for search engines. Deleting or consolidating is real content work and nobody puts it in a strategy document.

We do it as part of search visibility, usually early, because it changes what the rest of the programme should be.