How to Create a Content Strategy That Will Grow Your Business

A content strategy is a plan for how you will create, publish, and manage your content.

It includes your overall goals for your content, who will create it, what kind of content you will make, and when and where you will publish it. A content strategy ensures that all of your content is created with a purpose in mind. It helps you be consistent with your messaging and branding and keeps you from wasting time and resources on creating content that doesn’t serve a purpose. Creating a content strategy doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming.  

Follow these six steps to creating a content strategy that will help you to grow your business:  

Step One: Define Your Goals  

What do you want the content you publish to achieve? For example, do you want to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or generate new leads? First, be detailed about the goals of your content, including narrowing down the purpose of one particular piece of content. Then, you want an overall strategy to help you achieve those goals.  

Step Two: Know Your Audience  

Who do you want to reach with your content? Creating personas for your ideal customers will help you understand their needs and how they like to consume content. Then, with this information in mind, you can create content that appeals to them and speaks to their specific pain points.  

Step Three: Create Valuable Content    

Your content should be interesting and informative, and it should offer value to your audience. Ask yourself if your content is something that people would actually want to read or watch. Would it help them to solve a problem? Is it entertaining? If not, ditch it and start over.  

Step Four: Promote Your Content    

Once you’ve created great content, don’t let it languish on your website or blog. Instead, share your content on social media, email it to your list, and get creative with other promotion strategies. The more who see it, the more likely your content marketing will achieve your goals.  

Step Five: Analyze and Adjust   

After you’ve published your content, take some time to analyze how well it performed. Look at things like website traffic, social media engagement, and conversion rates. You can make adjustments moving forward based on your findings.  

Step Six: Rinse and Repeat   

The best way to keep your content strategy effective is to create new, fresh content constantly. This doesn’t mean you have to publish a new blog post every day, but you should have a regular publishing schedule that you stick to. By continually putting out new content, you’ll keep people coming back for more and eventually achieve your goals.  

In my next article, I'll share with you how to brainstorm topics when you feel stuck.

Christine Rothdeutsch is Small Business Productivity Strategist, Trainer, and Master Implementer. She specializes in profitable productivity for service-based solopreneurs and has been helping clients since 2011 simplify and systematize their business operations to build Thriving Businesses!