Content Marketing Strategy is the true secret to success for content creators. This is true for bloggers, YouTube creators, podcasters, marketers, and everyone else in between.
I am excited because we will be diving DEEP into how to leverage content for your brand and business. I hope this inspires, intrigues you, excites you and helps you.
What is Content Marketing Strategy?
Let’s talk about content, marketing, and strategy one piece at a time.
Let’s break down the definition of marketing first.
We are going to cover a lot of ground. I would strongly recommend that you hit CTRL — D right now to bookmark this resource so that you can come back to it later. You can also download it as a PDF for free here:
Marketing Defined
There are lots of different historical opinions on this. In college, they say marketing is a combination of product, price, place, and promotion. That is great as a construct, but in the real world, it is much simpler.
Marketing is only two things…
Marketing is your message plus attention.
The message is what you are saying and putting out there.
It is the image you create. It is how you describe your product, the value you deliver for a price, and your positioning. All that is conveyed in your message.
Your message consists of all the things that make up your reputation. It is how you explain to people what it is that you are about and what you do.
Attention is a combination of promotion and distribution.
Where are you putting your products and services, and how are you making them available? How are people finding out about them? That is all part of your distribution and your promotion channels.
We try to over complicate it but it is still very simple.
What is your message and how will you get attention? That is marketing at its core.
Content Defined
Content is simply information plus experiences expressed to a given audience.
Let’s combine content + marketing.
It is about how you take the information that’s out there and provide it to your audience. Give your audience the information they need when they need it most.
Or create experiences for your audience to engage with. Express yourself as a brand to draw in your perfect customers. Let them hear, see, and feel what you have to offer. And most importantly, make them feel something!
Strategy Defined
Strategy is remarkably simple and by far my favorite topic.
It is your plan to reach your goals. And it’s your framework for making decisions.
Lots of people get started on their content journey without a plan. That is normal. But as you become clearer on your goals, it becomes critical to layout your plan for reaching them.
Your strategy includes the steps to take, the key milestones along the way, and the big priorities.
Content Marketing Strategy Defined
When we add this together, it looks something like this:
- Content — information plus experiences expressed to a given audience
- Marketing — your message plus attention
- Strategy — your plan to reach your goals
Add them together and see what you get!
Content Marketing Strategy is the plan to reach your goals with content that delivers your message and grabs attention.
That is it!
Now, beyond the definition, there is some nuance to this.
There are some stages, some steps, that will help you move along. But I want you to keep that definition in your head. When it gets complicated, make it simple. When you hear a thousand different approaches, boil it down.
Ask yourself this question; “What can you create that they are going to want to read, to listen to, or to watch.”
If your ideas are great, they will want to buy what you have. They will want to know more about what you are talking about.
Capture their attention. Express how you want to serve them. If you can do that, you will succeed.
The 4D Content Marketing Strategy
It is time to talk about implementation. Knowing the definitions is great, but the hardest part of any plan is implementation. I have created a four-stage system to help anyone understand how to build their strategy.
The four stages are Design, Development, Distribution, and Discovery.
Let’s describe them briefly, and then we’ll dive deeper.
- Design Stage — Creating the look, function, and flow of your content
- Development Stage — Building your unique content model
- Distribution Stage — Detailing your process for amplifying and sharing across channels
- Discovery Stage — Planning how to generate attention for your work
Content Design Stage
The first stage within your content marketing strategy is Design. When you start creating, your first goal is to find your voice.
You are finding the stories that highlight your talents, expertise, experiences, and values.
Now here is the hard part…
Your stories must align with what your audience wants to hear!
You must give them the things that they are looking for as well.
How do you get that attention? You merge those two things. And as you keep using your voice, you will find your voice.
Next comes strategy. How can you take the random content you are creating and make it strategic?
Success is not random, it is designed.
I have made it easy for you to design better content that you can easily repurpose. Download my free checklist for all the tips you need to create content the right way from the beginning.
Success does not happen at random. You must design it. You must plan it.
To design a successful content marketing strategy, you must get in there and figure out a few things.
- What is your masterplan for how all your content works together to reach your goal?
- What is your flow for each piece of content that will engage an audience and deliver value?
- How will you create moments of awesome that move people?
What’s Your Content Masterplan
You must figure out your master plan for how it is all going to work together. How will you reach your goals?
If you are not being thoughtful about what you create and how you create it, your content will be random.
If you do not know what the goals and roles are for each project, your content will be random.
Having a master plan is a critical starting point in the design stage.
What’s Your Content Flow
Early in the design stage, you are going to have to figure the right content flow for you. You must find a flow that’s going to engage your audience.
You need to know what is going to get you that attention and keep them around. And you want to hook them early so they want to hear more than the first three, four, five words of what you are sharing.
Your content must deliver value in some way. Once they hear it, they should be able to do something with it. They should feel like they got something out of it. That makes it useful for them.
You will have a flow for your shows, groups of shows in sequence, and entire seasons.
What Are Your Content Moments
You must create some kind of movement with your content. And usually, that can happen one moment at a time.
Yes, many “moments” will happen organically, but you can design those as well.
I would rather you be strategic than random. There will also be some nuggets of information that you share on accident. That is great! Call it icing on the cake.
My point is that should be purposeful in creating moments. Design something that you know will help someone, even if it’s just one person. Know ahead of time what the takeaway should be.
Do not be random!
Designing your plan upfront is the first step within your content marketing strategy.
Content Development Stage
The second step in the 4D Content Marketing Strategy is Development.
We will call this your content model.
This is how you create and develop all the different projects across your plan.
Your content model will include a mix of all kinds of creations. There are typically four kinds of content in your mix:
- Pillar Content
- Highlight Content
- Extrapolated Content
- Recycled Content
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We will go through these in a little more depth.
Pillar Content
Pillar content is the first thing you create in whatever format works best for you. It is the starting point from which you can repurpose and recreate.
Pillar content can be in audio form such as a podcast. It can be visual such as a YouTube video. It can be written such as an article or blog. And in some cases, it can be imagery if your brand is visually driven.
The format is up to you. The key is that it is the long-form piece of content that you can then create more from.
Highlight Content
Highlight content represents the most outstanding parts of your work. It usually takes clips or snippets from the pillar content.
The best highlights always stand out.
Look for the intriguing moments, the impactful moments, the engaging moments, or the expert moments. Take those moments and create more clips, features, and quotes.
Those are all highlight moments that you should be sharing with your audience.
Extrapolated Content
Extrapolating is when you take what you have built and go a step further.
It could be an “aha” moment. That moment that you want to reflect on and research further. You may have a chance to better explain what happened or provide a new point of view.
It could also be a new topic direction. Maybe you talked about something vaguely, and now you can be more thorough.
It could be feedback-driven. When your audience responds, highlight it, and use it to create something new.
Extrapolating is a great way to fill your notebook with fresh ideas.
Recycled Content
There is a huge ongoing opportunity to reshare things that you have shared before.
Do not post it once and forget it. Plan to post it again in three months and six months and so on.
Or create a mashup from similar content pieces. It can also be formatted as a “best of” series or some sort of list. There are lots of options here.
In the development stage, figure out what pieces of content to create. This allows you to build a model that you can recreate every week.
Build a model. Create your plan for all the different pieces of content that you will create. And define how they will all work together.
Content Distribution Stage
Once you have done the design work, you need to understand the media environment where your content will live. To thrive, you need to follow best practices.
Researching the platforms, uploading video and audio files, writing copy, creating graphics, and editing is all a lot of work. Especially if you want to do it well.
During the distribution stage, there are a few steps you can take to ensure you are set up for success:
- Follow platform guidelines
- Set up a repeatable project workflow
- Write out your strategic operating procedures
- Leverage the best tools and talent at your disposal
Content Platform Guidelines
First off, your platform guidelines are important.
Platform guidelines list out all the platforms that you want to distribute to and what works. Whether it is a podcast, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram, it needs to be formatted. And, beyond that, you need a strategy for each platform.
Realize that all the different pieces of content each have their guidelines. There are best practices for each of those media channels.
Many people are great creators but do not do enough to share their work. They may find a clip and repurpose that to three or four social channels. That is a great first step but it’s leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.
The point is… do not just repurpose.
Distribute to more places and follow the best practices of those channels.
Reposting is not enough to get noticed.
You must figure out what is the new text or the new copy that’s going to go in this post. And it must make sense for this channel.
You can ask yourself a few questions like:
- Why is this different than the other channels?
- How will this stand out?
- What gets noticed on this platform?
- Which hashtags are working best?
- What is the best call-to-action?
Your platform guidelines will help you be consistent and successful with every post.
Content Workflow
Figuring out how to take all that content, chop it up, recreate it, and share it everywhere, is a lot of work! You need a workflow to execute these steps.
Anyone can tell you to create something and then repurpose it 10 more times or a hundred more times.
But they will never actually tell you the process. They will not tell you the systems to build to take it from 1 to 100.
Here are some common workflow questions:
- How do you take a podcast and repurpose it into a blog, so the blog is effective?
- How do you take that and pull out the quotes and post them to your social media and create the graphics for that?
- Who is doing what?
- Are you using a freelancer?
- Can you leverage a tool?
- Do you have resources to tap into?
- Are you doing it yourself?
- What are you doing first, second, third?
How do you build the system for that?
It is easy to talk about repurposing but having an action plan is a different story.
All of that is part of your workflow. If you do not have that mapped out, you’ll never actually get the work done.
Rules, Tools, and Pools
There is another step of the content distribution stage that I like to call Rules, Tools, and Pools.
- Rules — outline your steps for production
- Tools — determine what resources to use in your process
- Pools — find pools of talent to support you
Within distribution, it is important to have your rules. You want to outline your steps for production. List out every single step in your process in order.
Every creator has access to tools that will save them time and headaches.
What are all the tools that you vetted? What are the tools that you use all the time? How do you use those tools in your process?
And then pools, which stands for pools of talent.
How are you going to find the people? What part of your process are they going to oversee? Who is responsible for what? How are you checking all the work that is happening?
This is a critical growth stage that takes a lot of time and effort to perfect. But when you have the right pieces in place, it makes all the difference.
Content Discovery Stage
Discovery is how you get people to find your content.
Growing an audience takes time and know-how. And this is the step that often gets neglected. You did all this work to create it and to repurpose it and redistribute it in a hundred different ways.
But the big question is…
How are people going to find your content?
The easiest way to breakdown the discovery stage is to look at three categories of opportunity. Those categories are:
- Owned Media Channels
- Paid Media Channels
- Earned Media Channels
This is classic terminology within the marketing space.
Owned Media Channels
Owned Media Channels are the things that you create and control yourself.
Do you have your own channels that you manage?
Those are the lowest hanging fruit, but they are also the lowest reach when starting. They are your channels. But if you have not developed them, they have the least amount of people on them.
What are you going to do on your own channels to share your information and stay relevant?
And then how are you going to get that to go the furthest it can.
You need a plan.
Ask yourself, How do I …
- Get found in search engines?
- Get shown to more people?
- Use word of mouth?
- Leverage groups?
- Go to events and share my information?
All these owned opportunities are within your power. They do not require anyone else to do work for you.
The channels that you own, your email list, and your network are all there for you to tap into.
Paid Media Channels
Paid Media Channels include all the things that cost you money to promote your stuff.
There are so many questions to answer when you have a budget to apply to your content marketing plan.
- Where are you going to promote it?
- When are you going to promote it?
- How much are you going to promote it?
- Where are you going to put that?
- Will you run Facebook ads?
- Should you try Google display network ad?
- What about search engine paid ads?
- Are you paying for influencers to share your stuff?
- What are you doing to promote your content?
You should have a plan.
Before any of that, figure out if you have a budget for what you are sharing? If you do not, cut this step from your list.
But you should think about it.
How much further can your content go if you invested in it?
If you do not know the answer, it might be worth investigating.
Earned Media Channels
Earned Media Channels is getting others to share or feature your content.
This could be in that PR space. Where are you going to go to get featured? Are you sharing your work to other platforms that might distribute you?
It could be your own personal brand building. Are you getting out there as a personal brand? Can you be a guest on more shows? Are you writing for other people’s blogs? How can you be featured on more podcasts? Are you joining Facebook lives and YouTube shows?
You need a plan to spread your message so that people find you.
Another angle is to get people to want to share your content.
If it is great, people will want to take it and push it out to their tribes.
You can identify each opportunity in your industry and try to chase down the ones in front of you. Give yourself as many chances as possible to be discovered.
Review
What are we trying to accomplish?
We are building a plan to reach our goals with content that delivers our message and grabs attention. That is a content marketing strategy. Those are the steps involved. It is easier said than done. But I hope it is starting to draw a picture in your mind of what you need to do.
Take all this work you are putting into creating content and shift it towards making it go further. Be a little more strategic about what you are building. Put thought into what you build, how you develop it, how you distribute it, how you promote it.
I know there is an 80/20 rule and see a lot of people spend 80% of their time on the creation part of the content. And 20% is spent on getting attention for that content. That is fine at the very beginning.
When you want to scale, you must flip the effort around.
Spend 80% of the time figuring out how to get the most out of what you create. So how do you get the most out of your content? How do you make your effort and your energy and your content work harder for you?
You build a content marketing strategy and you take these steps to move your content through this process. So that it can have the most impact for you. It can help you deliver your message, grab attention, and meet your goals, whatever they may be.
That is my approach to content marketing strategy. If you would like to refer back to this approach, download the free PDF version and save it for later.
If you are looking to launch a podcast or to grow your podcast with content marketing, I’d love to help!
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