The picture above could actually be a shot of my desk, just replace the perfectly arranged wildflowers with a day-old coffee cup, and definitely add more wires strewn about. As a freelance content marketer, I have a blank page and blinking cursor in my face with social media lurking in the background, a lot.

Content strategy is an overlooked art in many companies. In marketing departments, you typically see analysts, managers, and creators. But increasingly the role of the content strategist has become more crucial to consistent messaging across platforms, regardless of your business’ size.

Larger corporations have bought into the idea of a content strategist because they’re churning a lot of content that needs to be consistent with their mission, vision, and brand. It’s the content strategist’s role to keep a company’s content engaging, relevant, and converting. After all, marketing’s number one job is to recruit and retain customers.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing put simply, is marketing that recruits and retains target customers through a company’s pictures and words. Content marketers often do these three things to recruit and retain customers:

• Research. Market research ensures all content stays relevant and on-trend with current target communities.
• Create. Content marketers work to both create beautiful, engaging content with pictures and words and to create value for the customers.
• Collaborate. Content marketers partner with lead generation teams to ensure content is actionable.

From my experience, many clients don’t quite understand content marketing. And if you don’t really understand its use, it’s probably fair to say that you probably won’t prioritize its importance. I’d like to break that stigma.

People often think content marketing is just posting to social media. Or just writing a blog. A lot of time, leaders who hire outside marketing support don’t understand the need for a company blog. So let’s dive into what content marketing is and isn’t.

A content marketing strategy is not:

• An editorial calendar of what to post and when
• A list of blog topics
• Your company’s newsletter
• Your presence on social media and how often you post

A content strategy is:

• A guide to your company’s core offer and how you communicate it
• A roadmap of what content is created, and the value it brings to your customers
• Data-focused with metrics to analyze content performance

A content marketing strategy should be data-informed, creates value for your community, and has actionable steps to convert people to customers. Here’s how to build it.

1. Conduct Market Research

Whether you have hundreds of employees or you’re a solopreneur, market research is an important first step in identifying and understanding the communities you aim to serve and solve problems for. At the end of the day, all successful companies solve problems for their customers.

All companies have a core offer that aims to solve a problem someone has in the world. Whether you’re an event planner looking for a venue or a busy mom looking for fast grocery delivery, every company solves a problem for someone.

Conducting marketing research helps you understand your people and the problems you’re solving for them. If you’re a copywriter who works with various marketing agencies and large clients, then you’ll define exactly who your target customers are and identify the problems you help them solve.

If you’re a smaller business or freelancer building your brand, here are some ways you can conduct your own market research:

Reach out to similar companies that have similar customer bases, but not identical. Ask them what has worked and what hasn’t with their content, and why they think so.

Gather insight from your current customer base through surveys.

Use tools like Moz Local to help identify competitor site and keyword performance

2. Create Your Roadmap

When I start building a content strategy, I always start with the company’s core offer. This guides all the words I write, graphics I design, and places I post. Understanding a core offer often helps to understand the bigger picture, but it also helps understand what doesn’t fit in. So for example, if you’re a prenatal yoga company trying to reach millennial moms, you probably won’t be spending all your marketing dollars on Reddit.

When creating a content strategy roadmap, I answer these questions:

1. What is your unique value?

Your core offer could be something simple. If you’re an Italian restaurant then your core offer will likely be Italian food. This isn’t particularly unique, as there are a lot of Italian restaurants in the world.

But your Italian restaurant is unique. Identify why it’s unique and what makes it the choice when looking for Italian dining in your area. This is your unique value. This is the first step in building out a robust content strategy.

2. How do you communicate that value?

I recently wrote an article on how to create an authentic marketing strategy. In it, I map out how to communicate your unique value to customers. I often start with identifying which of these three communications styles is most fitting for a brand.

1. Emotional Communication: Think Pampers and Godiva
2. Logical Communication: Think Google and NPR
3. Authoritative Communication: Think Apple and Tesla

Which of the three types of communication style best fit your brand? You can have a little bit of all of them, but which suits you most? Map out how these types of communication fit into your style. So for example, if you want to position yourself as a thought-leader in an industry then you’ll have to plan an authoritative communication style in some of your content.

3. What tools will you use to convert customers?

In this step, we move from philosophical to actionable. For my strategy roadmaps, this is where my content calendar and inbound lead generation techniques live.

This is the part of the strategy where I identify exactly what tools I’ll use to communicate the values of the company. So, in my content calendar, I’ll decide which social platforms I’ll use and what content to create for each. I’ll also map out content hierarchies here.

What are content hierarchies?

Because I love context… if you’re an IT company that services a lot of different clients, then some ideas of hierarchal structure could be these pillar categories:

1. Technical support and education
2. Tech product information and news
3. Thought-leadership in emerging tech trends

Then essentially, as you build your content, everything that’s written or designed funnels up to one of these categories. This is how I build all of my content strategies. It allows content to stay consistent across platforms and across mediums.

3. Measure Your Successes and Failures

I’m not going to lie. When I started out, I rarely measured my content to see how it was performing. I’d stare at Google Analytics and all the line graphs and tabs and just feel so defeated. I never knew where to begin when it came to measuring all the stuff I was creating.

I realized later on in my career that marketing is not a science. Often, clients and businesses leaders want the answers to questions like:

• How much return will these marketing dollars give me?
• How much will we grow in X amount of time?
• How much revenue will this Google Ad campaign bring in?

The honest answer, that a lot of marketing folks don’t like to tell you, is they really don’t know. Sure, we can get a better idea of how things will convert and when they will with good data, but at the end of the day, forecasts are just predictions, not hard truths.

When I learned that, I learned to breathe a little. I don’t like to work with clients that don’t understand metrics — especially at the beginning — are about trial and error, analyzing and acting on learnings. It’s not about having all the answers at the starting gate. Anyone who says otherwise is probably faking it.

That said, it’s up to you which metrics you think are most important for measuring. If you’re an e-commerce site, you’ll want to know how many times people abandon their cart and analyze why. Fixing that will take trial and error through measuring data. But say you’re a nonprofit, then you probably won’t be so focused on lead-generation activities.

Here are some baseline metrics I use when reporting content performance.

• Keywords — which words people use to search for your business
• Conversion pages — which website pages deliver the most leads
• Backlink performance — which sites link to your website or products
• Referrals — which marketing strategies are driving the most leads (email, social, affiliate, etc)

There are a lot of different ways to measure your content. You can create tracking links and do A/B tests to see which content performs better. The same for email marketing and social metrics.

Conclusion

I remember when I was fairly new to the marketing industry, I never really believed in myself. I never thought that I’d be actually able to help companies grow through content. I stayed at the coordinator level for a long time.

Having confidence in myself and being OK with failure are the two main things I learned as I grew in my career.

The most important part is to just start somewhere. A lot of blog articles like this feel overwhelming, I know because I’ve read a lot of them. But the truth is, start where you’re most comfortable. If you’re truly authentic, your customers will know.