Content Strategy: What is it, & How to Create One?

A content strategy is a roadmap to producing and distributing valuable content that attracts, engages, and converts your target audience. 

A well-crafted content strategy ensures every piece of content you create serves a purpose toward your broader goals. Let’s explore this in our content strategy guide.

What are the key components of a content strategy?

There are 7 key steps of a content strategy. I’ll outline them here before exploring them further below:

1. Understand your audience. Research and define your target audiences and create detailed buyer/audience personas.
2. Set clear goals. Establish those all-important SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, irrelevant, and time-bound). These goals need to align with your overarching business objectives.
3. Content audit and analysis. Evaluate all of your existing content via simple SWOT techniques. That means identifying your current content’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and potential threats.
4. Content planning and ideation. Brainstorm appropriate content ideas and start to develop a content calendar.
5. Content creation and optimisation. Produce high-quality content optimised for search engines.
6. Content distribution and promotion. Choose the right channels to distribute your content where it will most likely be seen, and back this up by promoting it effectively.
7. Content measurement and analysis. Track how your content is doing! Adjust your strategy accordingly. 

The above is what marketers might call a high-level overview of a content strategy. We’ll flesh out each step later. 

We think it’s also important to consider that you can apply content strategies across various areas, depending on the nature of your business. Consider how content strategies for the following may look different:

• Social media: Engaging your target audience through social media platforms like Facebook, X, TikTok, and Instagram.
• eCommerce: Optimising product descriptions and providing content that boosts the user experience and offers customer support.
• Blogs and websites: Providing valuable information in an intuitive way to attract organic traffic.
• Corporate communications: A strategy to ensure alignment in all messaging, both internal and external.
• Marketing and sales: Supporting marketing and sales departments with relevant content at every stage of the buyer’s journey. 
• Customer support: Offering helpful resources to improve customer satisfaction.

As an illustrative example, Salesforce employs diverse content strategies tailored to different aspects of its business while contributing to overall business objectives.

Salesforce shares updates, success stories, and interactive content via social media channels to engage with the community. You’ll find detailed product descriptions through our AppExchange. 

The Salesforce blogs are a fantastic place to find valuable information on industry trends.  If you’re in need of support, you can head to our help centres and community forums, where customers can access tutorials and FAQs and engage with support teams to improve customer satisfaction.

Each strategy is customised to the specific platform and audience needs. Yet, each remains cohesive under the company’s overall brand voice and business goals.

Bear that in mind as we progress through the standard content strategy steps.

How to create a content strategy?

Creating a content strategy involves a bunch of other content-related verbs: planning, developing, editing, managing, and distributing. Content in itself then contains a bunch of other nouns: blogs, social media posts, videos, ebooks, and other content types.

Through all your content marketing efforts, you’re attempting to achieve business goals. That’s the name of the game for your content strategy. Here’s how you can get started right away.

Step 1: Understand your audience

Everything in your content strategy will stem from thorough audience research and data collection. 

Begin by gathering data about your target audiences through surveys, interviews, and social media analytics. Utilise research tools to gain insights into their demographics, preferences, and pain points. For instance, you can use tools like SurveyMonkey to create and distribute surveys. Use Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to analyse audience behaviour on your website and social media platforms.

You can use Salesforce CRM to collect and analyse customer data, helping you understand customer interactions across various touchpoints with the help of various AI-driven tools.

Create detailed buyer personas

Your next step is to create detailed buyer personas that include information like age, job, interests, challenges, etc. Establishing these personas helps you customise your content to meet their needs. 

Many fun tools exist that can help you create buyer personas from your data. With Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Audience Studio, you can segment your audience effectively, making it easier to access the data you need to create detailed and accurate buyer personas.

Creating these personas isn’t a thankless task; the purpose is to really visualise and empathise with these potential customers. This enables you to identify their needs, preferences, and pain points. 

Only then can you create content that really provides solutions–the magic key to earning customer trust.

Step 2: Set clear goals

Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for your content strategy. Clear goals provide direction and a way to measure success.

You can implement Salesforce Goal Management features to set and track your content marketing goals within your CRM system. This makes it easy to track your KPIs, too (more on that later!)

Define your goals to support your broader business objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or improving customer retention. Here’s a couple of examples to demonstrate what we mean:

• Increase website organic traffic by 25% over the next 6 months by publishing SEO-optimised blog posts targeting high-value keywords.
• Boost social media engagement by 15% in the next quarter by implementing a new social media content strategy and posting schedule.
• Generate 200 new qualified leads in the next four months through gated content like ebooks and webinars promoted via email marketing.

Step 3: Conduct a content audit and analysis

To begin with, you need to know what you’re working with. It’s content audit time. The aim is to evaluate the performance of your existing content. Identify which pieces of content are performing well and which ones need improvement. 

This is when you’ll need to dive into performance metrics. Examine page views, bounce rates, time on page, and conversion rates to determine how your content is performing. 

For example, experts suggest a good bounce rate should lie between 40 and 60% for most websites. How do you compare? And what are ‘good’ rates to aim for with the other metrics? For these marketing insights, the 2024 Salesforce State of Marketing Report is a great place to start. 

Identifying areas for improvement is a little trickier as it may take some lateral thinking. Where are your content gaps? There may be some easily identifiable underperforming content formats and channels, like a blog. You may be missing topics your competitors are covering. It may be that there are untapped channels that offer potential.

Brainstorm your content gaps with your team. Use insights from Einstein AI to identify opportunities. Einstein AI can provide predictive analytics to suggest content topics that resonate with your audience.

Step 4: Content planning and ideation

Based on your audit and analysis, you should be in a good position to create editorial calendars and start scheduling the production and publication of your content. 

A content/editorial calendar is crucial because it ensures consistency in your output while helping you plan ahead for things like seasonal events, product launches, or specific marketing campaigns. 

Once more, there are various tools available to help you plan and manage your content schedule. 

Hootsuite and Sproutsocial are popular tools specifically aimed at managing social media posting schedules. 

Project management tools like Asana and Trello offer collaboration options among team members to manage the different steps of the content journey. For smaller operations, a well-organised Google Sheet can even suffice. 

To populate your calendar, you’ll need to generate content ideas. You might have some insights from your content auditing process. Generate other ideas based on your audience’s interests and industry trends, carrying out keyword research to ensure your content ideas align with what people are searching for. 

Of course, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud can help at this stage, too. It empowers businesses in the content planning and ideation phase by unifying customer data and analytics (from the CRM) into actionable insights for you and your team.

With its trusted AI capabilities, you can quickly analyse customer behaviours and preferences to generate personalised content ideas and offers across every touchpoint.

Step 5: Content creation and optimisation

Stop hesitating. Get to it and start creating content. Produce content that’s grounded in offering valuable, relevant information to your audience. Ensure it aligns with your brand voice, and always include an opportunity for further engagement with strong CTAs.

Stick to these principles, and you shouldn’t go far wrong. 

Based on the keyword research from the last step, you need to optimise content for search engines. Incorporate relevant keywords, optimise meta descriptions, and ensure your site has a good technical SEO footing. 

Google has several ranking factors; your content needs to perform well against them to have a chance of appearing higher in search results and gaining online visibility. 

Step 6: Content distribution and promotion

You need to meet your audience wherever they are present. So, choosing the right channels for your content distribution is critical.

You have a lot of options: social media platforms, your blog, your email newsletter, your website. You’ll likely take a hybrid approach, publishing a new blog on your website and then promoting via social media or your monthly newsletter, or both. 

This level of distribution takes significant planning.

You can use Salesforce’s Journey Orchestration feature to distribute personalised content across multiple channels, ensuring your content reaches the right audience at the right time.

Within this space, influencer marketing and partnerships are becoming increasingly popular due to the potential for broad reach. The influencer industry is expected to grow to approximately $24 Billion by the end of 2024, and the trend seems to be going in only one direction. 

Consider collaborating with influencers or partners to tap into new audiences if you believe there is crossover with your audience. 

Step 7: Content measurement and analysis

Content strategies are iterative processes. That means you constantly need to measure the success of your content and tweak your strategy accordingly. 

This is where you need to be confident in your measurement tools and analysis so you get a clear picture of how your content is performing. 

Thankfully, keeping track of KPIs such as website traffic, engagement metrics, conversion rates, and ROI has never been easier with the help of AI tools.

Implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Analytics Builder to track and analyse your KPIs. This tool provides comprehensive reporting and dashboards to help you measure content performance. 

With AI-driven Einstein marketing insights, you’ll benefit from advanced data analysis. This tool uncovers hidden sights and predicts future trends for you, saving you from a manual deep dive into data to see what’s working and what’s not. 

Use these insights to make informed decisions about what to do next with your content. 

Set up regular reports and alerts within Salesforce to stay informed about your content performance. Use these insights to refine your content’s marketing strategy over time.

And that’s our whistle-stop tour of the content strategy process. Of course, each step warrants further exploration to go into detail, but the steps outlined above serve as a decent overview to get you started on your journey.

Content governance and operations

Content governance is all about establishing guidelines and processes to ensure consistency and compliance. This means creating style guides. It means adhering to approval workflows. It means aligning with content management best practices.

One of the things you’ll need to set up is clearly defined roles and responsibilities within your content team. 

• Who is going to establish the editorial guidelines for writing? 
• Who is going to do what in terms of content creation, editing/reviewing, and publication? 
• Are you going to have split roles covering social content vs. blog writing?

Of course, your answers also depend on the scale of your team and the scope of your business.

What’s critical is to have clarity as to who does what as part of your content production.  

Getting this right, including guidelines, defined roles, and established procedures, helps you go some way toward guaranteeing your content:

• Has a consistent brand voice.
• Meets quality standards.
• Gets delivered on time.

Emerging content marketing trends

AI content and artificial intelligence tools are transforming content creation and distribution, enabling personalisation and efficiency in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago.

71% of marketers expect generative AI to free up time to let them focus more on strategic work, and 80% want AI to reduce time spent on repetitive, data-driven tasks.

AI offers more than simply time-saving capabilities. 

AI gives content strategists new powers to deliver highly personalised content. This stems from the ability to analyse vast amounts of data to understand customers better. This enables key upgrades to content strategies:

1. Dynamic content: Tailoring website content, emails, and ads in real-time based on user interactions.
2. Improved customer segmentation: Identifying even more niche audience segments for targeted marketing efforts, such as specific buyer personas.
3. Personalised recommendations: Suggesting products or content that align with a user’s past behaviour and interests. 
4. Content design: Organising content on a page that improves user experience. This could be things like tabbed content — tabs on a page that help users navigate to sections more easily — or adding accordions, such as drop-down boxes that contain more information. AI can be used to analyse and create better page experiences and identify if a particular page section should be an accordion or if tabbed content would be better. 
5. Competitor content analysis: AI’s like ChatGTP and Gemini can be used to determine the strengths and weaknesses of competitors’ content that rank for a particular keyword. Then, the data can be used to identify content areas for improvement. It can also assist with analysing search intent for a particular keyword, too. Like this:

But this isn’t the only way AI is changing content strategies. There’s also the ability to automate elements of the content creation process with AI. AI can generate content for blogs, social media posts, or product descriptions, saving time for content creators. 

The rise of voice search and conversational marketing is also changing content strategies. Consider the impact of AI assistants like Siri and Alexa or AI agents. 

We said earlier that marketers always need to meet their audience where they are at. According to Tech Report, 90% of users think voice search is easier and faster than traditional search. This reflects a shift, particularly among younger users, to voice search. This means adapting content to be easily discoverable through voice queries, which often differ from text searches. 

Of course, zooming out: The rise of chatbots in general is another feature to consider. If you haven’t already, weigh up whether adding an AI-driven virtual assistant to your site is a good idea. 

You can use them to engage with customers, answer queries, and guide them through the buyer journey. As such, we can now add AI chatbots within our broader content strategy, since so many customers get their information through this channel.

Addressing common content strategy challenges

Let’s take a moment just to address some common challenges you’ll likely encounter.

• Limited resources: If you face tight budgets or limited staff or time, you need to make tough decisions and prioritise content tactics that offer the highest ROI. Perhaps you can repurpose some existing content instead of looking to rewrite everything. 
• Lack of alignment: Getting everybody on the same page is a big deal that helps everything go a little smoother. Before you start anything, within the setting goals phase, ensure your content goals and objectives are aligned with your business goals. To do this, you’ll need to encourage collaboration between your marketing team, sales team, and any other relevant stakeholders.
• Inconsistent quality: Maintain content success by establishing content governance practices and providing training for content creators or freelance contributors. 

Real-world example from India: Swiggy

Swiggy is one of India’s leading food delivery service companies. It has developed a content strategy that leverages social media platforms to engage its target audience through humorous, relatable content. This has built a connection with its customers.

Examples:

• Swiggy’s “Swiggy Tweet To Order” campaign on Twitter allowed users to place orders simply by tweeting emojis of the food they wanted. This innovation did not aim to change the way we order food. Instead, it was a fun way to increase user engagement with the brand on the platform.

• Swiggy’s “#WhatsInAName” Instagram campaign encouraged users to share stories behind their saved contact names for food delivery agents. This campaign generated thousands of responses, creating a sense of community and enhancing brand loyalty.

Swiggy recognises that its primary audience consists of young, tech-savvy individuals who appreciate humour and interactivity. Tailoring content that aligns with these preferences enhances user engagement. They understand these channels are where their audience is most active, so it makes sense to drive engagement there over anywhere else. 

And through user-generated content, they build a community around their brand, further enhancing customer retention.

Summing up

Creating an effective content strategy is essential for achieving your business objectives. By understanding your audience, setting clear goals, and leveraging the right tools, you can produce successful content that resonates with your target audiences.Explore how Salesforce Marketing Cloud can empower your marketing efforts with cutting-edge solutions designed to connect you with your customers like never before.