Outline Your Content Strategy by Asking the Right Questions

Creating a goal-oriented content strategy enables you to direct your efforts towards effective results. As you establish the most important goals to reach with your content, you can monitor how much closer you are getting to those goals.

Blindly hunting for leads based on a content strategy that only considers volume with no plan is going to feel scattered, without any clear direction to follow.

Outlining Your Strategy

The initial step in a content marketing strategy is defining an outline. Outlining the purpose of the content and how it will reflect the company’s vision and goals. Devising an outline will make it much easier to move on to creating goals for the strategy.

The outline should start with a series of questions. The more specific the questions and your answers, the clearer it will be for you how to plan your strategy.

The Purpose of Content

Any content you create needs to have a specific purpose or else it’s just some text on a webpage. When you set out to create your content strategy ask:

• What’s the marketing goal?
• What’s the goal of the content?
• What are you promoting with this type of content?

Content Type

Once your marketing and content goals are clearly defined, you go on to identify what type of content you need to create. By having this pre-defined will enable for each piece of content to be related to each other, building on top of existing content. Important questions to answer at this stage are:

• What does your audience look like?
• What is your audience looking for?
• Where does your audience consume content?
• How are your competitors promoting themselves?
• What content do you have to work with already?

Content Conversion

Now that most of the effort went into creating the purpose, identifying the target audience, it’s also important to ask how this piece of content will convert clicks to sales. Ask:

What kind of content works best for you?

• How much time and effort can you or your team put into this strategy?
• Do you have an editorial calendar?
• What are your content promotion plans?

This is a generic framework that you can use whenever you need build or alter a content marketing strategy. The clearer are your answers to these questions, the more aligned you are going to be with your strategy. The outline is the foundation of your content marketing strategy and should never be omitted from any strategic planning.