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Anyone who has learned about the fundamentals of content marketing knows the concept isn’t all that complicated – consistently provide something of relevant value to your target audience in the hope it will ultimately return the favor in kind.

Serving the needs of your audience with valuable, high-quality content in this way is an admirable goal for any company. But of course, all your efforts will amount to little if your hopes go unfulfilled – if your content doesn’t trigger the audience behaviors that help your company reach its business goals. And that, my friends, is where the complications start to set in.

To give your content marketing program the best chance of driving your desired results, every content marketing leader should be prepared to answer a few questions:

  • Who specifically should our content be most relevant to?
  • What benefits will this audience receive from consuming our content?
  • What desirable and distinctive content experience can we consistently deliver?

You’ll uncover the answers to these questions – and plenty of others – through the process of developing your content marketing strategy.

Before we get started

If you are new to content marketing – or to Content Marketing Institute – you may want to start your strategic journey by viewing our comprehensive Essentials of a Documented Content Marketing Strategy e-book, our Q&A guide on the topic, or our complete archive of strategy-related insights.

For anyone looking for a refresher on the essentials or some help filling a knowledge gap, read on for a handy tutorial – and helpful resources – on the subject.

Why you need a content marketing strategy

While your company should certainly have a content strategy – a strategic plan for all its content usage across the enterprise – content marketers benefit from having a strategic road map that focuses exclusively on using content to attract, acquire, and engage prospects and customers.

Why is it so critical to develop (and document) a separate strategy? For starters, consider that CMI’s annual Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends research has consistently found a content marketing strategy to be the one thing that separates successful content marketers from their less successful peers.

In fact, according to our latest B2B findings:

  • 62% of the most successful content marketers have a documented strategy vs. 16% of the least successful.
  • 72% of content marketers who increased their level of success over the past year credit their strategy as a major contributor.

Furthermore, once you have a documented content marketing strategy, its insights can make all your tactical decisions easier to plan and manage.

What’s in a content marketing strategy?

Your strategy should define your key business and customer needs, as well as how your content efforts address them. Though no two strategies are exactly alike, they all should detail a few essential components:

  • Your purpose and goals – why your content exists, what you want your audience to do once they’ve consumed your content, and the value you expect their actions to provide for your business
  • Your audience personas and buyer’s journey – defining characteristics of the one audience that will benefit most from your content, their current user state, and an estimate of how their needs and goals may evolve
  • Your differentiated editorial mission – your company’s unique perspectives and approach to creating content and how that distinguishes your content from your competitors

Since these are complex considerations, I’ll unpack each one in more detail.

Take a shortcut: If you’re strapped for time or resources but still want to put a more strategic content marketing framework in place for your organization, get a head start with this streamlined, one-page content marketing plan.

Setting your purpose and goals

As I mentioned in my last post, you’ll never reach your content marketing goals if you don’t know what you are looking to achieve. Since different types of content work better in pursuit of some goals than others, it’s important to clearly define success from your organization’s perspective first, so you don’t end up wasting time on efforts that don’t line up with what you want to accomplish.

Find your purpose

One of the simplest ways to home in on a unique and worthwhile purpose is to examine the key area where your business has been struggling the most. For example:

  • Brand awareness: Are you struggling to penetrate a new market, launch a…