How to plan an effective content marketing strategy

The way businesses conduct their content marketing is constantly evolving. More messaging is being shared, on more channels, over more hours of the day. Consumers are flooded by promotional content, so you have to cut through the noise and ensure your content is directly targeted to your audience through an effective content marketing strategy.

With 70% of marketers actively investing in content marketing, it’s critical you develop a good strategy to compete. Your content marketing has to be of interest to your audience and give them something they need to turn their head.

“Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” ~ Content Marketing Institute

Step 1: Define what good content marketing looks like for your organisation

Content marketing should be a fusion between brand purpose and what customers want. At the heart of it, your strategy should be your organisation’s ‘why’. Why are you doing what you are doing? Who you are you trying to help? How can you help your audience in a way your competitors can’t?

With content marketing, organisations can take centre stage as experts in their field, educate their audience and gain trust, and, in turn, raise brand awareness, increase sales, attract new customers and keep existing customers engaged after their purchase. Instead of simply promoting products or services, content marketing provides truly relevant and useful content to prospects and customers to support them with solving their business issues.

For example:

For a workplace technology client, “good” meant regular insights on hybrid working that national and trade press would quote.
For a facilities management provider, it meant practical guides that answered tender-stage questions and supported SEO.

Being clear on this picture of “good” makes later decisions (topics, formats, channels) far easier.

Step 2: Ask the three core questions: what, why, how

To devise an effective and fruitful content marketing strategy, you should ask yourself these three simple questions in this order:

What are you trying to do? E.g. Educate our audience about a specific topic
Why are you doing it? E.g. To address a particular pain point for customers
How are you going to do it? E.g. Produce a guide to combat these issues

All too often companies start with the ‘how’ and which means of communication they are going to use without looking at the granular detail of what and why they are doing it in the first place. It is these two things that will inform your ‘how’.

To achieve a robust content marketing strategy you should:

Document a clearly defined strategy and timeline that is linked to business objectives
Appoint a team responsible for executing your plan
Plan your themes in accordance with what your customers and prospects will need to help them solve their own issues
Consistently publish quality, topical content across a multitude of channels appropriate to your audience
Balance owned marketing with paid and earned media

If you’re still at the planning stage, our content marketing service page and this strategy guide work hand in hand: the service page shows what we deliver; this article helps you map out the plan.

Step 3: Map topics, formats and channels

Once you know your “what” and “why”, you can decide how to show up:

Topics: workplace change, ESG, office design, hybrid working, digital transformation, etc.
Formats: white papers, impact reports, blogs, videos, case studies, podcasts, infographics.
Channels: website, email, LinkedIn, sector press, webinars, events.

If you’re unsure how to structure individual articles, our guide on how to write quality content for SEO and user experience covers Google’s E-E-A-T principles and practical tips for creating helpful content.

Step 4: Communicate your content plan internally

So often organisations that don’t communicate what they are doing to their own workforce. This is counterproductive. Think about the size of your workforce and how many people could be advocates for your content marketing plan.

Brief your workforce on the plan. It can help keep employees invested and working towards the same goals. In some cases, it may be appropriate to share your full strategy with colleagues. In other cases, small targeted, bite-size summaries may suffice depending on how your strategy will impact them.

Step 5: Join the dots across PR, digital and social

No content marketing should ever be executed in isolation. The power behind it lies in a consistent, joined up strategy so you should have an appropriate team in place to deliver it.

Create a plan and ensure that everything you do connects. For example if you are creating a white paper, host it on your website with a series of SEO considered blogs to promote it, include timely promotion on social media channels as well as sharing it in customer and employee communications.

Join the dots and always think about the bigger picture.

Step 6: Keep your content strategy fresh and sustainable

Search and content best practice doesn’t stand still. Recent takeaways from brightonSEO 2024 included:

Evergreen content is more important than ever – and should be refreshed regularly
Helpful, original content tends to fare better through Google core updates
Structuring content clearly helps both users and AI-powered search tools