Content Strategy: What Is It & Why You Need One

Imagine steering a ship through a storm. There are only two possibilities: either capsize under the strong currents or navigate tactfully to weather the high winds and reach your destination. 

At a time when the marketing world is noisier than ever, content marketing can feel a lot like steering a ship in a storm. Your content has to ride out this storm to capture your buyers’ attention and create a meaningful impact. 

Without an airtight strategy, you’re setting sail to go under. 

A content strategy is an actionable roadmap guiding businesses to create, distribute, and manage different types of content. It puts together the jigsaw puzzle of your content campaigns to create a cohesive brand experience across channels. 

In this article, we’ll explain what a content strategy is, and give seven key reasons why you need a strong strategy to create and market your content.

Content Strategy Explained: What Is It?

A content strategy is a high-level overview of a company's content plans covering the goals, formats, delivery, distribution, and management of every content piece. Think of it as the north star for your content team—it creates a shared understanding for your team to make the right decisions, prioritize tasks effectively, and stay on track with your overall plans. 

A digital content strategy streamlines your publishing efforts by linking all the pieces you want to publish. A coherent content strategy creates incremental benefits, helping you ladder up to your overall organizational goals using the content you publish.

A successful content strategy begins with a thorough understanding of your organization's objectives, your target audience's needs, and the competitive landscape. This research-driven foundation allows you to identify the types of content that will effectively address the needs of your audience, align with your brand's values, and differentiate you from competitors.

One key aspect of content strategy is the development of a content plan, which outlines the topics, formats, and channels through which your content will be distributed. This plan should be built upon a content calendar that ensures consistency and timely delivery, while also incorporating opportunities for flexibility and adaptation as needs and trends change.

Another crucial element of content strategy is content planning or governance. This involves the establishment of guidelines and processes for creating, editing, approving, and archiving content to maintain its quality, relevance, and accuracy. Governance also includes the allocation of resources, roles, and responsibilities to ensure the efficient management of content throughout its lifecycle.

7 Reasons Why You Need a Content Strategy in 2023

Building a good content strategy from scratch can seem like too much work. You need to invest ample time, expertise, and resources to produce a result-driven action plan. So, the bigger question is: do you even need a content strategy? 

The short answer is yes. 

A content strategy is more than just a nice-to-have to compete and stand out in an oversaturated marketing world. Here's how Semrush emphasizes its importance:

We've curated this list of seven reasons why you should create a content strategy.

1. Increased Engagement and Traffic

Engagement and traffic are at the core of every marketing campaign. You want to enhance your visibility among your target audience and deliver a memorable experience that cuts through the noise. 

How do you maximize engagement and traffic? By targeting your content to your buyers’ specific pain points and expectations. 

Your content strategy will clarify your prospective customers’ questions and concerns. When you create value-packed content to solve these problems and optimize it for search, you can earn more traffic and engage readers by fulfilling their search intent. 

Adrienne Barnes, a growth strategist for B2B SaaS companies, believes audience research is the first step for creating a high-ROI content strategy.  

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Case in point: Scribe

Scribe presents a great example of how a good content strategy can maximize traffic and engagement for your business. The SaaS brand increased its monthly organic visitors from 3400 to over 100k in a year by:

• Targeting high-intent keywords
• Following a strong publishing velocity
• Optimizing content for higher rankings

‍Pro tip: Wondering how you can build a foolproof system to create and scale your content strategy from zero to 100k? Work with a fractional team to supplement your in-house bandwidth and create scope for scalability.

2. Generate and Qualify Better Leads 

Fact: Your content can bring more marketing-qualified leads and directly impact your sales numbers. Gartner's research proves that companies can achieve a 12% higher sales acceptance rate by prioritizing content pieces correlated with previous sales. 

But how exactly does your content strategy help with lead generation? Here’s how:

• Define your ideal customer profile (ICP) to reach the right people and directly speak to their problems 
• Use buyer intent data to guide the keyword research process and go for keywords with higher purchase intent
• Identify the best channels and formats for your ICPs to build more content touchpoints across the buyer journey
• Create content assets across the sales funnel to gradually nudge prospects toward purchase decisions

Case in point: Typeform

Typeform earns $3 million annually from SEO with 30,000 non-branded organic signups—thanks to its product-led content strategy. The company achieved these numbers with a few unique tactics, such as:

• Creating a template library targeted for the most important customer use cases, ranking for thousands of bottom-of-the-funnel keywords
• Adding more weight to a select few high-converting keywords by linking them across (almost) every page and content asset

3. Build Trust with Your Audience 

If you think content marketing is only about publishing a few blogs every month and posting on social media, think again. One of the biggest reasons to design a targeted content marketing strategy is to establish a rapport with your audience and win their trust. 

Trust is the currency for modern buyers—46% of consumers will likely pay more to buy from brands they trust. 

Here’s how your content strategy can build a trustworthy relationship with your buyers:

• Prioritize solution-driven content over the hard sell to meet your prospects’ search intent and solve their problems 
• Establish your expertise as an authentic and valuable business with social proof and collaborations with key opinion leaders
• Demonstrate your brand values and improve your positioning by highlighting your purpose that resonates with your prospects  
• Meet your audience where they are by publishing content across different channels in multiple formats to maximize interactions

Mike Jones, an entrepreneur and brand strategist, explains the value of content strategy for building trust with your audience:

Case in point: Mailchimp

Mailchimp built a customer base of over 13 million users with a people-first content strategy. Their content focused on inspiring and educating customers, winning their trust. From their style guide to every other content piece, the brand focused on:

• Answering buyers’ questions and tackling their challenges
• Showcasing a relatable and likable brand personality on all platforms
• Leaning on storytelling to share compelling product-related narratives 

4. Improve Brand Visibility and Awareness by Leveraging SEO

SEO is a critical part of a good content strategy. You can earn that precious real estate on SERPs by proving your expertise to search engines. George Chasiotis, the founder of MINUTTIA, puts it this way:

“It all starts with Google (or search engines) understanding that you’re capable of talking on a subject, you know what you’re talking about, and thus, it can trust you to give you visibility in the search results.”

A solid content strategy will help you build that trust among search engines by establishing your topical authority. 

Your strategy analyzes your ICP to define the main topics/subjects you should target for creating brand affinity. The next step is identifying the business value of these topics—how relevant are they to what you’re selling? 

Once you've narrowed down the most promising topics to target, you can start producing search-focused content. Work on a comprehensive SEO game plan to gradually increase rankings and improve your visibility across search engines. 

5. Generate More Conversions and Improve ROI

Your content strategy isn’t limited to bringing traffic and leads. It drives ROI in many other ways—primarily conversions and customer loyalty. 

A conversion-focused content strategy prioritizes selling over everything else. But that doesn’t mean spamming prospects with promotional emails. It’s more about narrowing your focus to your marketing funnel and creating laser-focused content that nudges prospects down the funnel. 

Brittany Berger, a content specialist, explains how a conversion-focused strategy is minimalist in scope:

To prepare your content strategy for conversions, you need to:

• Create varied buyer personas and deeply understand their behavior to accurately map their journey to conversion
• Produce compelling narratives around your key value propositions, differentiators, and more to convince more prospects
• Test and optimize calls to action for every content format to increase click-through rate and other leading metrics

Your first growth hire can design this conversion-driven strategy to leverage content for demand generation, product marketing, and spot-on messaging. 

Case in point: Intercom

Intercom spiraled its growth to $49 million in three years among the massive competition by Zendesk, HelpDesk, Groove, and more. A part of Intercom's success can be attributed to its conversion-focused content strategy, leveraging tactics like:

• Producing evergreen content targeted to specific personas and jobs to be done to bring more leads into the funnel
• Distributing thought leadership content to earn backlinks, referral traffic, audience trust, and, ultimately, conversions
• Masterfully distributing content to scale your reach and make the most of a single piece of content 

6. Set Yourself Apart From Your Competitors 

Another massive reason you need a content strategy is to differentiate your brand from the competition. If you don't want to add to the noise overwhelming your buyers, focus on creating a standout content strategy. 

Here’s how Tory Gray and Tyler Tafelsky from The Gray Dot Company perform competitor analysis to guide their strategy:

More importantly, when your target customers have too many choices, cultivating relationships with them is the most effective way to stand out. 

While there’s no magic formula for building healthy customer relationships, a digital content strategy can take you closer to the goal. It helps you:

• Humanize your brand to share stories of your origin, reiterate your mission, celebrate your successes, and acknowledge your failures
• Resonate with your audience by spotlighting your brand values, stories, and initiatives that matter to them 
• Build customer advocacy by producing more user-generated and customer-focused content 

7. Earn More Backlinks to Improve Site Rankings

Backlinks are one of the trickiest pieces of the content and SEO puzzle. With many moving parts to backlinking, you need a robust content marketing strategy to build strong links that eventually improve your domain authority (DA). 

Instead of leaving backlinks as an afterthought, include them as a part of your content strategy from day one. This will allow you to proactively plan for collaborating and earning links from high-DA websites. 

Adriana Stein, the CEO & Founder of AS Marketing, shares a great tip for building backlinks through thought leadership content:

Case in point: monday.com 

monday.com is an excellent example of getting backlinks through a solid content strategy. The project management platform competes against big names like Asana and Trello to gain so many links by focusing its strategy on:

• A well-mapped internal linking structure
• A high publish volume and quick velocity
• Distributing aggressively across channels and formats

Mastering Your Content Strategy: Move the Needle for Your Business with Content

Think of a content strategy as the starting point for your content marketing campaigns. It gives you the direction and resources to steer your ship through the turbulent territory. 

Remember: building your content strategy isn't a one-and-done process. It's a continuous practice that adapts to your customers' expectations and behavior. Our team at Divisional can design and consistently optimize your content strategy with the expertise of a designated Head of Growth. 

Tap into content marketing the right way to accelerate your growth. Find a growth partner for your business.

FAQs

What is a content strategy?

A content strategy is a plan for creating, publishing, and distributing content in different formats and on multiple channels to accomplish your marketing goals. 

How to create a content strategy?

Follow these steps to create a content strategy:

• Perform audience and market research
• Define your goals and metrics for content
• Determine the formats and channels to target
• Create workflows to produce and distribute content

What is the purpose of a content strategy?

A content strategy aims to streamline your content marketing efforts and align every campaign with your goals. It brings all stakeholders on the same page and creates an actionable roadmap to move forward with your content.