Your content strategy template: visualize your plan
What exactly is a content strategy? Some picture a spreadsheet full of content ideas that support a goal. This spreadsheet might include columns like content idea, related persona, and SEO keywords.
Other marketers will list funnel stages and related blog ideas. Some might draw out their hub and spoke strategy or topic pillars with supporting content.
At the end of the day, there’s no such thing as a proper format for a content strategy. Yet executives will ask for one without explaining the format they seek.
You might also like: How to create a modern SEO content strategy.
What will this template help you achieve?
By following this template, you can create a visually appealing persona-based content strategy. The PDF and spreadsheet formats below are shareable, simple, and easy to read.
Better still, it’s an organized way to walk through your strategy. Instead of staring at a blank spreadsheet and spinning your wheels, you’ll work through a structured series of decisions that build upon each other.
The details included are:
Business goals
Timeline
Content formats
Personas
Summary of overarching strategy
Persona pain points to address
Core topic ideas related to each pain point
Publishing schedule
Download your free template (spreadsheet version)
Download your free template (PDF version)
Ready to get started? Next, you’ll see an example that’s loosely based on Content Land’s goals.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to filling out each section of this template.
Content Strategy Part 1: Business goals and primary information
A true content strategy is not standalone - it supports strategic business goals and targets predefined personas. It is helpful to reference these elements on your strategy to remind everyone of the “why.”
When choosing content formats, consider resources available and past performance of these mediums.
Content Strategy Part 2: Overarching strategy
In short, a strategy should answer who you’re targeting, what you want them to do, and why. Summarize these points in a concise statement. This overarching message is the groundwork for tactics that follow.
Content Strategy Part 3: Pain Points
Choose a method to group your content into themes. You could categorize with thought leadership topics, SEO focus areas, priority product lines, or pain points.
Consider grouping content by pain points (as this example demonstrates) to ensure everything you produce ties into persona messaging.
Resources to help you define pain points:
Content Strategy Part 4: Core topic ideas
Come up with some loose ideas that are related to pain points. What pieces of information could be helpful and address core issues? Where can you build thought leadership and provide value?
Content Strategy Part 5: Content plan
Now it’s time to choose the volume of content formats. If you don’t have designers available to help create infographics, you might lean more towards blog posts and landing pages. Maybe you need to create some downloadable guides for lead nurture, and you can only create a few.
Remember that each of these pieces are still tied to a core topic idea that is tied to a pain point (or the content grouping of your choosing).
Content Strategy Part 6: Publishing schedule
Now, choose the cadence that you’ll publish this content. Leave a few weeks to start drafting at the beginning of the quarter and a few weeks at the end of the quarter to plan for the next.
The exact cadence and schedule doesn’t have to be strategic - the point is that you can breeze through the work when the plan is pre-set.
Next steps for content production
Now that your content strategy is in place, it’s time to get to work! This would be a good time to solidify the titles of each piece, tie in your keywords, and begin outlining. Look for ways to repurpose core topic ideas across all three formats.
If you need more ideas for content topics and planning, you might like:
Ready to give it a try?
There are many ways to produce a content strategy and visualize the information. Would you prefer to work in a different order? Maybe tie in SEO and keywords at the beginning? Or maybe part of your strategy is to boost infographics, so the content type is already set.
Use this worksheet as a guideline and make adjustments as needed. The point is to break down the steps in a logical order and provide a visual you can share with teams.
Thanks for reading! You might also like…
More from the blog:
