Content marketing is something you’re aware of as a marketer, but do you realize how effective it can be at all stages of the customer journey?

While many marketers create landing pages, blogs, or copy for social media posts,  great content marketing requires a strategic and multi-faceted approach (and most importantly it relies on you understanding who you’re talking to). 

In this blog, we’ll start by looking at what content marketing is and then explore ten steps to help you develop a successful plan.

Let’s get started!  1: Define Your Content Marketing Goals

Identifying clear objectives is the foundation of a successful content marketing plan. Start by setting specific content goals that align with your overall marketing strategy. 

Common goals might include:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Driving more traffic to your website
• Generating high-quality leads
• Boosting sales

Use the SMART criteria to ensure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For instance, instead of a vague aim like “increase traffic,” set a goal such as “increase website traffic by 25% within six months.” This provides clear direction and helps in tracking progress effectively.

In your digital planning, consider which metrics will measure success. 

Useful indicators include:

• Engagement rates
• Click-through rates
• Conversion rates

Regularly review these metrics to allow for adjustments, ensuring that your content creation efforts remain effective and aligned with business objectives. Ongoing assessment is key to refining your content marketing strategy and achieving sustained success.

1. Set objectives

The path here is to set objectives that look at all stages of the funnel. This will help you to understand the motivation at each stage and see what content is required to drive them to the next.

For each stage, set KPIs that are relevant and important to your business. Here’s an example of how you can map out your objectives: 

1. Grow brand reach and engagement 

Increase unprompted brand awareness from x to y

Increase reach and engagement on social media from x to y

2. Consideration

Grow non-blog organic traffic from x to y

Grow blog traffic from x to y

3. Conversion 

Increase organic sales from x to y

Increase data capture from the blog from x to y

4. Advocacy

Increase shares on social media from x to y 

Increase the number of backlinks to the website from x to y

Increase testimonials from customers from x to y

DMI Insider tip: Have one or two objectives under reach and engagement, consideration, conversion and advocacy. Keep it really simple to begin with, don’t overcomplicate it. 

2.  Identify keywords by establishing the problem your business solves

There’s no use in creating high-level content that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re selling or the values of your business. You can develop the most innovative, insightful, educational, or entertaining content on the market, but if the audience that this content draws to your website doesn’t have any interest in your product or service, then all of your hard work will have been for nothing.

So, begin by defining your business via the product or service that you sell. This will be the basis for the primary keyword(s) and phrases that you want to target and the main theme of your content. Including the right  keywords and phrases  in your content will help you rank highly in SERPs, ensuring that you’re found by the right people. You need to let your target audience know how they can benefit from your business, what value you can offer them, and why they should choose you over your competitors.

Aligning your content with the problems your business solves will give you a greater perspective of how customers see your brand and will ensure that the content you create is relevant, valuable, and easily found by those seeking solutions.

3 Know Your Company

Understanding your company is the foundational step in building an effective content marketing strategy. This involves a deep understanding of your company’s identity, values, mission, and the products or services it offers.

Here is how you Identify the Core Values and Mission:

• Begin by defining the fundamental principles and beliefs that guide your company. What does your organization stand for? What values shape its culture and decision-making processes?
• Clearly articulate your mission statement. This should succinctly express the purpose of your company—why it exists and the impact it seeks to make.

Understanding Products/Services:

• Conduct a thorough analysis of your products or services. What solutions do they provide, and how do they meet the needs of your target audience?
• Identify the unique selling points (USPs) that set your offerings apart from competitors. This could include features, quality, pricing, or any other factors that make your products/services distinctive.
• 4) Build with Content Pillars
• Building your content strategy around core themes and topics, known as content pillars, is also a crucial step in ensuring consistency and purpose in your content marketing efforts. Content pillars serve as the foundation upon which you construct your messaging, that aligns with your overall business objectives.
• Begin by identifying the core themes and topics that align with your brand and resonate with your audience. These should be broad, strategic concepts that cover the substance of your brand’s offerings and values.
• Once the core themes are identified, create a framework that outlines how these themes will be consistently integrated into your messaging across various content channels.
• This structured approach not only provides clarity for your content creators but also ensures that your messaging is aligned with your brand’s identity and resonates with your target audience.
• Free tool: Analyze your target audience, brand voice, content pillars and competitors

4.  Measure results

• Analysing your content performance is the best way to understand what type of content is connecting with your audience, which will inform your subsequent and future pieces. 
• By utilising tools such as Google Analytics, your social media analytics, and the analytics offered by your marketing platform or CRM software (if you use these), you can gain deep insights into the actions, motivations, pain points, and touchpoints of your audience. This data will offer you clear signals about what attracts your audience’s interest the most, making it easier for you to come up with new and intriguing content.
• Content metrics typically fall into these four categories:

5. Build with Content Pillars

• Begin by identifying the core themes andBuilding your content strategy around core themes and topics, known as content pillars, is also a crucial step in ensuring consistency and purpose in your content marketing efforts. Content pillars serve as the foundation upon which you construct your messaging, that aligns with your overall business objectives.
•  topics that align with your brand and resonate with your audience. These should be broad, strategic concepts that cover the substance of your brand’s offerings and values.
• Once the core themes are identified, create a framework that outlines how these themes will be consistently integrated into your messaging across various content channels.

This structured approach not only provides clarity for your content creators but also ensures that your messaging is aligned with your brand’s identity and resonates with your target audience.

Free tool: Analyze your target audience, brand voice, content pillars and competitors

6. Understand your customer’s pain points and your value proposition

To develop a marketing strategy that works, you must understand what your ideal consumer struggles with regularly. This awareness will align your product, place, price and promotion to solve their pain points and increase your chances of scalability. Once you’re confident in your value proposition, you’re ready to proceed.

7. Examples of Successful Content Marketing Campaigns

Several brands have successfully implemented content marketing strategies:

• HubSpot: Known for its extensive blog and resource library, HubSpot provides valuable content that attracts and retains customers​.
• Red Bull: Through its extreme sports videos and events, Red Bull engages its audience with thrilling and visually appealing content. This approach aligns with the brand’s energetic and adventurous image​.
• Spotify Wrapped: This annual campaign leverages user data to create personalized and shareable content showcasing individual listening habits. It drives massive social media engagement and brand visibility each year​.
• DuoLingo: Known for its humorous and relatable TikTok content, DuoLingo uses social listening and A/B testing to create engaging videos that resonate with a younger audience. Their approach has significantly boosted their follower count and engagement on the platform​.

Understanding these fundamentals helps you see the impact of a strategic approach. Next, we will discuss how to create a content marketing strategy from scratch.

8. Decide on the messaging, creatives and implementation plan

The final step in your marketing strategy is working on your messaging and creative formats. For example, if you plan to educate customers on product capabilities and spend a lot of time on YouTube, you might create a video campaign. The video messaging will resonate with your target audience in a relevant and meaningful way.

You can try direct marketing or PR activities to level up your strategy. Direct marketing is all about reaching your audience through personalized channels like email, direct mail, SMS or social media messages. It’s a great way to deliver tailored offers or info that encourages quick responses. PR, on the other hand, focuses on building a strong brand image through things like press releases, media outreach, events or partnerships. The goal here is to boost awareness and trust.

Create a simple content calendar, plan your budget for each channel and set clear goals like conversion rates, ROI, engagement, lead generation or sales growth. Once your plan is live, keep an eye on the results and adjust it monthly or quarterly based on what’s working and any market changes.

9. Brainstorm content ideas.

Use your content audit, personal research, and goals to make the best content decisions for your business.

A quick review of this information before brainstorming can help you keep these insights top-of-mind.

Next, it’s time to start brainstorming ideas for your next content project.

Here are some tools to get the juices flowing.

The Feedly RSS feed is a wonderful way to track trending topics in your industry and find content ideas at the same time.

You start by telling the software what topics you’re most interested in, and its AI tool will do the rest.

You won’t need to scour the internet to find new content ideas anymore. Instead, you can go through your curated list, compiled from news sites, newsletters, and social media.

10. Create an original voice for your content

Chances are that your products or the services you offer are not one of a kind and that there already is a lot of relevant content like yours, online. It is then important to make your content original, different and valuable by connecting to the authenticity of your brand and your brand voice and by sharing your unique knowledge, perspective and insights in your niche.

In conclusion

Developing a long-term content marketing strategy is a dynamic process that requires careful planning, audience understanding, and consistent optimisation. By following these seven steps—defining goals, understanding your audience, conducting a content audit, creating a content plan, optimising for SEO, promoting content, and analysing performance—you’ll be well-equipped to build a strategy that drives sustained success.

Whether you are just starting or refining an existing strategy, these steps offer a clear roadmap for how to develop a content marketing strategy that delivers meaningful results. By focusing on a well-rounded content marketing plan, you can ensure that your efforts are targeted, measurable, and scalable for the long term.

These insights will help you to tweak your content plan based on what’s working and what’s not. If certain types of content consistently perform well, consider producing more of it.