to document your content strategy

Now you are ready to document your content strategy.

You think you understand what it means, but you have to put it down somewhere.

Okay, now you have a blank Google Doc with a blinking cursor. What now?

Which pieces should you include in your strategy document

What information must you include?

Why Does it Matter?

You can either have a basic understanding of your content strategy among your team or brand and then you are finally writing it down or you are creating a new strategy and documenting your progress as you go.

This guide will cover everything, including:

• Documenting your content strategy is important.
• Where to record your strategy.
• You should make sure that your document is easily shared across departments and roles.
• To guide your content marketing efforts to success, here are some things you should include in your Content Strategy document.

What is a Content Strategy Document? Why do you need it?

A content strategy is a plan that guides all your content marketing activities .

• Ideas and research.
• Content creation
• Publishing content.
• Promoting content and distribution.
• Monitoring and measuring your progress towards your content goals.
• Maintain your content.

This means that a content strategy document will be the written version of the plan.

Why is it necessary to write it down? Why not just get started creating content?

Content created without a plan will fail. Writing a plan will help you seamlessly integrate content into your brand. Instead of creating random content and hoping it will work, you’ll plan your content.

43% businesses don’t have a written content strategy, or they aren’t sure whether they have one. The most successful brands and marketers have a strategy.

Here are more reasons to document your content strategy

Your content marketing efforts will be random if you don’t have a solid plan. Most likely, you will create content based on assumptions and not data. As a result, your output and content quality will be inconsistent.

Marketing professionals who plan ahead are 3x more likely to report success than those that don’t.

What is the reason for this? You won’t be able to have or understand a strategy that guides your actions without one.

• The deep reason for your content marketing and what you ultimately want to achieve.
• These are the metrics that you need to track in order to achieve your goals.
• Understanding your audience’s needs and wants is key to your content.
• You can choose the content formats and types that are most effective for you.
• For maximum visibility and engagement with your audience, you should decide when and where to post.
• The workflows and processes for publishing, creating, and distributing content. Who is responsible for each step?
• There are many other things.

A finished content strategy can be a great asset to your business and marketing. However, it’s not what the point of creating one. (Wait, what?) It’s true.

The planning that you use to create your strategy is equally important. This requires planning, research, thought and ideation.

It’s worth all the effort that goes into strategizing. This will make your content marketing 1000x more effective!

Your content strategy document should be created where?

Content strategy documents can help you solve many of the problems and challenges that content marketing may face. It is important to think about where it will be documented.

These are the top content marketing problems that organizations have to deal with:

• Create content that appeals at different buyer stages (61%)
• Aligning content efforts across sales and marketing. (50%)
• Measurement consistency. (43%)
• Communication within teams and between silos. (41%)

A documented content strategy solves all of these problems. Strategizing answers the questions above (how can we create content that is relevant to different buyer journey stages?) How can we link content marketing and sales? Etc. ).

However, you must make sure to write it down. This is the key.

A centralized, written document is essential for all employees and teams in your company. It is important to establish a solid foundation for the strategy that can be shared, learnt, and then implemented again and again – quickly and easily.

This means that if your strategy is a vague verbal agreement between your teams, there’s a huge opportunity to make it more concrete and better.

It’s not enough to be talking about strategy if you are only “doing content market” and have never even considered it. content could offer you much more.

These are just a few of the many reasons to strategize. Make sure your strategy document is organized and easy to access.

Tips to create a content strategy document

• Your content strategy document should be shared in a format that is easily accessible, such as in a shared Google Doc. You can also upload it to Dropbox, Google Drive or another file-sharing site. Make sure everyone on your team has access to the strategy.
• Each major strategy element should be divided into sections. Your strategy should be easy to read and find specific information.
• Add additional information such as links to tools at different stages, account/password information and screenshots of tasks. Include links to templates and examples. Also include links to related documents (such as brand style guidelines) and any other information that will help your team execute the strategy.

Let’s face it, this will take a lot of effort. It won’t take you a day to develop a content strategy. It could take weeks, or even months to create a content strategy.

light years is the best way to measure the difference between having and not having a strategy. You must invest your time if you want to get real results with content.

Ten pillars to consider in your content strategy

Let’s get to the point. What do you need to document when creating your content strategy?

• Don’t include more information than you actually need. Do it if you are unsure.
• Do not let this seem like an endless task. To save time later, you’re doing this now.

All that being said, here are the questions and categories your content strategy should answer.

1. Goals: Why do you create content?

Answer with What are your content marketing goals? How do they relate to your larger marketing and branding goals? What do you want your content to accomplish ?

Don’t be vague when setting goals. Make sure you are specific about what you want to happen with your content investment.

Don’t say “grow brand awareness” as a goal. That’s too lofty and hard to measure. You can achieve that with content. But how do you define brand awareness? What does this mean specifically for your business?

Be more specific. Say instead, “grow brand awareness through increasing social media following by 15% in 3 month and earning top ranking in Google for relevant keywords within 6 months to one year.”

2. Audience: For whom are you creating content?

Answer with Who are you planning to target with your content?

How do they look? What are their interests? What are their hobbies and interests? Which are their biggest problems that your brand solves with your products/services and expertise? They are looking for information online in places they don’t know. They congregate online in places like these.

Take the time to analyze and research each section of your content strategy as you go. Then, record your findings in the strategy.

audience research, for example, will require several weeks of study. This includes social listening, conducting surveys, setting up interviews, and sitting down with potential prospects.

If you have an established audience, go back to the data and verify that it is still correct.

3. Platform where will you publish content?

Answer with Your main content platform.

Do you plan to create a blog for your website? Will you share content via social media? Are you going to start a YouTube channel. Plan according to your goals and available resources.

To drive more traffic to your site, you can create an SEO blog.

4. Content: What topics and formats will your content be covered?

Answer with The main topics you will be focusing on for content. These topics should relate to your products and the needs of your audience. Next, select the content format you can produce consistently and your audience wants the most.

Videos , blog articles , webinars and podcasts are all options. You may need to diversify your options to include more than one type.

It’s a good idea to make content templates for the formats that you are interested in. These templates can be reused by anyone who creates or writes content. This helps to maintain consistency.

5. Team: Who will create and manage your content? Who will publish, promote, manage, and maintain your content.

Answer with Who, whether a team, agency or freelancer, will be responsible to create your content from the seed of ideas through to the final pieces?

You can break down each task if you have several people working on content. Who is writing the content? Who is editing it? Who posts and publishes it? Who promotes it?

This section is for a small team. It will help you brainstorm ways to streamline your content tasks and make it easier. You might consider adding editing and optimization tools to your team. For various content tasks, you can create a schedule or timetable.

6. Schedule: When and how often will content be posted, and on what channels?

Answer with A rough schedule of content, including the number of blog posts that you will publish to your main channels each week or month.

Consistency, consistency, consistency. You can establish and maintain a posting schedule by planning. You should be flexible as things can and will go wrong, but you should plan for a regular schedule of posts that will help build your brand online.

7. Promotion: How can you promote and distribute content

Answer with This is a rough plan to promote your main content via social media and email.

What are the best ways to make people find your content? How can you bring in new audiences?

Your promotion plan should be based on your resources. This is one of the most cost-effective and easy ways to promote your content via social media. If you are more experienced and have an established audience (email subscribers), leverage this list to promote your content to the people most likely to be interested in it.

Don’t forget organic searches. This is a low-cost, highly targeted way to improve your content’s visibility and bring in leads.

8. Tools: What tools are you going to need for every step of content-marketing?

Answer with The tools your team or you need to plan, create, publish, promote, and maintain content.

A content management system (like WordPress), an analytics tool, a keyword research tool and an editing tool are all necessary at a basic level.

Include information about the tools in your tech stack. This section can also be used to track your monthly subscriptions.

It is also helpful to go back to previous sections and list the tools that you will use for each. You could also include links to Grammarly, Canva or Google Drive accounts for content creation.

9. Tracking progress: How do you measure content metrics and key performance indicators? How do you measure the results?

Answer with Map your content goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)

This is essentially attaching your goals to measurable metrics. One way to measure vague goals like brand awareness is by measuring brand mentions and likes on social media.

Describe how you will track and measure your goals. What metrics are you going to focus on? And what tools will you use to keep them updated over time.

10. Budget: How much do you budget for content marketing?

Answer with How much you plan to spend on your content marketing activities. Your costs will be calculated in terms of people and tools.

Document your content strategy.

A content strategy has many moving parts. They connect to all the moving parts of your content strategy and help guide them strategically toward success.

There are mountains of potential content waiting for you if you don’t have a strategy in place.

This also means that if content marketing is not producing the results you desire, there is still hope.

Sit down, strategize and then document to create better content that will grow your brand.

Search Engine Land first published the post How do you document your content strategy.