The 4 Pillars Required to Launch a Content Marketing Strategy

Most content marketing programs are reactive. A company wants to market itself or has an announcement. An agency, freelancer, or in-house team starts creating blog posts. Somewhere between three months and years later, someone asks, “What is all this content doing for us? Is it having an impact on our business? Is it reaching our customers? Was this all for nothing?”

If you’re thinking about launching a content marketing strategy from scratch or transforming your haphazard approach to content into a more strategic one, you’ll need to think through four principles: who your customers are, where the intersection lies between your expertise and your customers’ needs, how you can reach them, and why you’re creating content in the first place. 

Here’s how to think through those topics to develop a content marketing strategy.

Who are your customers?

Many businesses create content without thoroughly considering who their customers are. To create an effective content marketing program, you need to do the foundational work of determining what sorts of companies you’re targeting, whom you’re targeting within those companies, why they’d be looking for a company like yours, and how you can address their pain points.

This may seem obvious, but in my experience working with dozens of tech companies on content marketing, it is anything but. Most companies do not want to set aside a month to think through these strategic questions; they also hesitate to put their marketing team and especially their agencies in direct contact with their customers. Cutting these corners, while completely understandable for companies eager to make an impact, will diminish your chances of developing a content marketing program that actually resonates with your customers. 

Where’s the intersection between your expertise and customer concerns?

As part of the customer research process, you’ll develop a sharper understanding of your customers’ concerns. What you discover may surprise you. For example, as a content marketing agency owner, I used to assume that all my customers’ top concern was our impact on revenue or pipeline. But some of our customers don’t care about that. They have their own strategy and just want us to increase their marketing team’s bandwidth while creating high-quality content that will delight instead of rankling their C-suite. To best understand what it is your customers truly care about and use that intelligence to inform your content, you should ask. 

Once you’ve pinned down customer concerns, you need to consider where your expertise intersects with those needs. For example, if you’re a media buying platform and your customers are advertisers who care about brand safety, you’ll want to establish brand safety-informed media buying as a core theme of your content. Other platforms may focus on ad buying efficiency, measurement, targeting, or a combination of those topics. I recommend developing three to four editorial buckets, or topic areas, to guide content creation. 

In addition to developing editorial buckets, you’ll want to develop key messages to guide the tone and arguments of your content. If your customers care about brand safety, what’s your thesis on the state of it? How are you better prepared than your competitors to solve the problem for your customers? Creating buckets and messages at the beginning of an engagement will ensure cohesion and efficacy as you create content down the road.

How will you reach your customers with content marketing?

Many companies create content for their blogs and then leave it there, hoping that by distributing a link on social platforms once or twice their content will connect with prospects and generate qualified leads. Unfortunately, in a crowded online environment, this is highly unlikely. Rather, to make an impact with content, you need to identify where your customers spend time and develop multiple ongoing methods to reach them. 

For example, consider a company with virtually no blog traffic. Even if the company has an SEO strategy, they can’t expect to generate immediate leads by creating blog content. The company might be better off creating a white paper and distributing it via a paid combination of email, paid ads, and outbound sales. At the same time, the company can begin creating blog content at a steady cadence based on the white paper to build organic site traffic gradually. This way, the content marketing strategy has an immediate impact and drives long-term gains. 

To figure out the optimal distribution strategy, though, you’ll need to determine what assets you have (e.g. an email list or existing social following or blog readership), what your objectives are, and the talent at your disposal to create effective content. Taking stock of your resources positions you to make the most immediate impact while also pursuing long-term results.

Why are you investing in content marketing?

The fourth pillar of a nascent content marketing strategy is your why: the objectives for investing in content. Do you want to generate pipeline? Do you want to enter a new market or speak to a new customer segment? Do you want to grow your executives’ profiles? Reach investors? Attract talent? These are all worthy content marketing goals, and the hierarchy of priorities will determine the order of operations for your content marketing program.

The big takeaway here, though, is that you need to ask these questions, and to answer them, you need to devote time and money to creating a content marketing strategy. So many companies, especially early-stage startups, want to jump into content marketing, perceiving laying a strategic foundation as an unnecessary expense. Again, this is perfectly understandable; you’re on a budget, and you want to start speaking to your customers tomorrow. But creating without a strategy is likely to land you in a position where you’re unsure why you spent money on creating content in the first place.

By figuring out what your content goals are and how you’ll meet them, you’ll save yourself time and money down the road and ensure your content marketing investment generates the maximum possible return on investment. Strategize; then implement. You’ll be happy you took the time to do things right.